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Ashlei needed strong medication for days when she got home and a doctor explained what had happened

A woman’s holiday turned into a nightmare when sunburn made her face so swollen her own mum didn’t recognise her. Ashlei Bianchi said she looked like ET two days into her trip to the Dominican Republic.

The 23-year-old had spent the afternoon soaking up the Punta Cana sun while relaxing with her family around the pool. But by evening she noticed her forehead and head had swollen.

Despite using suncream, Ashlei thought she had just suffered a mild reaction to the sun. The children’s hospital assistant says she wiped her face with an aloe vera gel and carried on with her trip.

But Ashlei woke up on the final morning of the holiday to find one of her eyes had swollen shut. By the end of the four-day trip, Ashlei’s face had become so puffy that even her own mum, Michelle Bianchi, 52, didn’t recognise her over FaceTime.

Other family members also joked that she looked like alien ET. On the way to the airport, Ashlei feared her drastically changed appearance meant she wouldn’t be able to get through customs.

“I did use sunscreen, but I still got a little red, which was going to happen either way since I’m not used to the sun down there, and we were in the pool all day,” she said. “I FaceTimed my mum, and she said I didn’t even look like myself, then the family I went with said I looked like ET.

“My face started getting worse, and that’s when the swelling on and under my eyes happened. It was definitely a mixture of just laying out and being by the resort all day. One of the pools barely had any shade, so I was more exposed to the rays.

“I had to go on my flight and go through customs looking not like myself, and I was scared I wasn’t going to be able to get back home. I’m so thankful I made it through. I wore my sunglasses the whole trip home, even when it was dark out, because I was so embarrassed.”

Desperate to find relief, Ashlei stopped at a pharmacy at the Dominican airport and bought anti-inflammatory medication. She also reached out to her doctor, who prescribed her an oral steroid – but she couldn’t start treatment until she got home on March 25.

Once home, it took four days of steroids for her face to finally return to normal. Ashlei said: “It wasn’t painful, just more uncomfortable. It hurt when I had to close my eyes all the way.

“When I went to the pharmacy, the lady working had wide eyes and went, ‘Oh my.’ I wore my sunglasses on both my flights and throughout the airport even when it was dark.”

Ashlei says she later learned she had suffered from sun poisoning. She said: “My doctor wasn’t sure if it was sun poisoning, but I work at a hospital and asked a rheumatologist.

“She said it was sun poisoning, so that’s what I have been telling people it is.”

Now fully recovered, Ashlei is sharing her story as a warning about the dangers of sun exposure – even with sunscreen. She said: “I would say the dangers of sun exposure are real. I’m lucky my sun poisoning affected my face and not anything else.

“I had no symptoms besides swelling. It’s very important to use your sunscreen and wear hats. I think that’s where I went wrong. I really should have had something besides sunscreen protecting my face.

“But all in all, the sun is no joke, especially in the Caribbean where it’s much more potent.”

Eleven minutes into the June 27 presidential debate, CNN anchor Dana Bash slipped a note to her colleague Jake Tapper after President Biden gave a rambling, incoherent answer.

“He just lost the election,” she wrote.

The event at the network’s Atlanta studios — recounted in Tapper’s and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” — turned out to be the most consequential presidential debate in history.

Negative reaction to Biden’s alarmingly disastrous performance led him to abandon his campaign three weeks later and Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place on the 2024 Democratic ticket. The election against President Trump was less than four months away.

Biden’s mental and physical decline had long been the subject of speculation at that point. The unraveling of the then-81-year-old incumbent president in front of an audience of 51 million TV viewers made his diminished capacity undeniable.

“It was just the painful realization that the White House had been lying to everyone, including likely, in many ways, to themselves,” Tapper said in a recent Zoom conversation from his home in Washington, D.C. “As bad as it was on TV, it was worse in person.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the first 2024 presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27.

(Austin Steele / CNN)

The debate meltdown and its aftermath prompted Tapper to join forces with Thompson for an investigative deep dive into Biden’s deteriorating condition and how family and staff protected him from scrutiny until it was no longer possible to hide.

“Original Sin” is rife with examples of Biden forgetting the names of friends and associates he’s known for years, most notably actor George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser. At the same event, former President Obama led a dazed-looking Biden offstage.

Tapper and Thompson give a detailed account of Biden’s October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated whether the former president was in illegal possession of classified material.

Biden frequently wandered off topic during his testimony and failed to recall dates of key moments of his life, such as the year his son Beau died. Hur declined to prosecute Biden, calling him a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” in his report. Hur was hammered by Democratic critics who called him cruel and ageist.

There were private discussions among aides about Biden using a wheelchair if he were elected to a second term. The staff went through machinations to minimize the appearance of Biden’s physical challenges, even enlisting director Steven Spielberg to coach Biden for his 2024 State of the Union address.

Tapper and Thompson tie the stories together in a way that reads like a horror movie script — you know what’s coming and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“We were just lied to over and over again,” Tapper said.

Their book has already generated a national debate about whether the White House deceived the public about the president’s condition and how Biden’s late exit from the race undermined the Democratic Party’s chances of stopping a second term for President Trump.

The discussion intensified after Sunday’s announcement that Biden was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

The immediate response of right-wing commentators to the book’s revelations has been “we told you so,” along with accusations that the mainstream media was complicit in a White House cover-up of the president’s health issues.

Tapper anticipated the reaction. He said 99% of what is reported in the book was discovered after the election.

“If I learned about any of these stories in 2022, 2023 or 2024, I would have reported them in a second,” he said. “But I don’t have subpoena power.”

Tapper believes conservatives were proven correct in their harsh and at times tactless assessments of Biden’s condition, which clearly worsened in 2023 after his son Hunter faced the possibility of a prison sentence when a plea deal on tax and gun charges fell apart.

“They were right and that should be acknowledged,” Tapper said. “At the same time, saying that the president’s brain has turned to applesauce is not journalism. It’s punditry.”

Although there is plenty of footage showing Biden’s memory lapses and senior moments, Tapper noted there were few deeply reported stories on the extent of the president’s condition. Biden was surrounded by family members and longtime loyalists who were effective at deflecting and dismissing the inquiries as partisan attacks.

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy was persistent in raising the issue of Biden’s health in the White House briefing room and former Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was persistent in shutting him down, suggesting he was spreading disinformation.

“They weren’t only lying to journalists, they were lying to everybody,” Tapper said. “People would do reporting and all the great Democratic sources that you could rely on for candor would say, ‘No, we’re told that he’s fine.’ And I think that they all either believed it or had no other facts.”

Along with Thompson’s work for Axios, the most detailed report on Biden’s frailty and memory lapses came in June 2024 from Wall Street Journal reporters Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linskey. The highly respected Washington journalists were roundly criticized by progressive commentators for depending on unnamed sources in the report, titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” CNN’s own Reliable Sources newsletter dismissed the piece, saying, “The Wall Street Journal owes its readers — and the public — better.”

Tapper said Hughes and Linskey “should be heralded as heroes” and agreed that the Washington press corps failed to aggressively pursue the Biden health story. But it didn’t help that loyalty to Biden kept potential whistleblowers in line.

“I do primarily think that the people who were lying, or the people who knew the truth but were fearful, are the ones that could’ve prevented this disaster much more so than those of us in the news media,” Tapper said. “We’re only as good as our sources.”

Tapper and Thompson rely largely on unnamed sources in “Original Sin.” Among the 200 people they talked to are Democratic Party insiders and four cabinet secretaries. While many Democrats are still reluctant to go on the record about what they knew about Biden and when they knew it, the floodgate of anecdotes opened after the election.

“I have never experienced the ability to get behind the scenes in so many different rooms as for these recountings as I was for this book,” Tapper said. “I felt like people needed to get this off their chest. It was almost like they were unburdening themselves.”

Many of the sources expressed regret that they did not speak up sooner. Tapper said he and his co-author maintained a high bar for what they used.

“If there was stuff that we were not 100% sure about, we didn’t put it in the book,” he said. “There are stories, really good ones, that had one source and we said, ‘It’s not good enough.’”

In its only response to the book thus far, the Biden camp has asserted that the former president’s condition did not impair his ability to execute his duties in the White House.

“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president.”

Tapper and Thompson say in the book that they found no instances where Biden was unable to discharge his duties as president. They write that even most of his critics interviewed for the book “attest to his ability to make sound decisions, if on his own schedule.”

Tapper believes that the effort of family and his longtime staff members to hide Biden’s condition deprived the Democratic Party of the chance to determine if its chances were better with another candidate, who would have benefited from more time to mount a campaign against Trump.

“President Biden knows what he was going through,” Tapper said. “Jill Biden knows what he’s going through. They hid this. It’s still amazing to me that they were actually arguing that he could do this job for four more years.

“I’m proud of the book that Alex and I wrote,” Tapper added. “I’m proud of the reporting. But I’d rather that this hadn’t happened.”

Asked if the Biden’s actions amounted to a medical Watergate, Tapper said it did “in the fact that there was a horrible cover-up of something that wasn’t technically a crime, but you could argue morally it was.”

SHE was “really upset” when she thought she’d stained her brand new blender.

Then Hannah remembered a spray she’d bought, and thought there was no harm in giving it a try.

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And when she sprayed the orange-coloured blender bottle with the Fairy buy, she was stunned to watch the stain literally disappear.

“I actually couldn’t believe my eyes,” Hannah said in a video on her TikTok page.

“I can literally see the stain dissolving!

“Are you seeing this?”

She added that she’d tried to wash up the bottle “six times” before coming to the conclusion that it would be “stained forever” after she’d used it for turmeric.

As one last ditch attempt, she decided to try Fairy’s new Skip the Soak spray, which she’d picked up for just £1 thanks to a Tesco Clubcard voucher.

“In all honesty, I just forgot that I had it,” she said.

“Then thought I’d just give it a try seeing as nothing else was working.”

She then showed the spray in action, before rinsing the foam off to reveal a completely clear and clean bottle.

“If you’ve ever had anything come out the dishwasher and it comes out a bit orangey… I’ve never been able to get those kind of stains out before,” Hannah continued.

She also said that, as the name suggests, the spray can be used in place of leaving something to soak to get it clean.

“It says you can use it on surfaces as well,” Hannah said.

“Someone even said you can use it on clothes if you’ve got a stain in clothes.

“I think it’s quite new.

“Wanted to share because I feel like this is such a huge hack!

“I can’t believe it.”

“What is this witchcraft?” Hannah wrote over the top of her video, adding in the caption: “I can’t believe I’ve had this just sitting in my cupboard for weeks!”

And the comments section was almost immediately filled with other chuffed users raving about the budget buy.

“It got bacon grease off my daughters dancing leotard, it’s SO good,” one wrote.

“No, that is incredible!! Saw the ad for it but didn’t think it’d be that good!!” another added.

“It makes cleaning the air fryer so much easier too,” a third commented.

“Can’t wait to try this on the tupperwares that never look clean,” someone else wrote.

As another joked: “You know you’re old when you send this to your mum asking for one on your birthday!”

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Amid all of Casandra Ventura’s troubling testimony this week about life with Sean “Diddy” Combs and his “freak-off” fetish, don’t be troubled thinking about what might have happened between Combs and Justin Bieber, who was launched into the mogul’s circle when he was a teen.

Despite persistent speculation as footage of the two together has surfaced, Team Bieber said Thursday that nothing happened. Move along, nothing to see here.

The speculation comes at a time when Bieber has been worrying fans with photos showing him smoking — a shot posted Thursday had the self-declared former substance abuser sitting with a bong quite obviously in his lap — and “It’s a cult” rumors about the church he has been attending, Churchome in Beverly Hills. (Churchome pastor Judah Smith denies those rumors, by the way.) Bieber’s decision in recent years to sell his catalog for $200 million is said to have been motivated by the pop star allegedly finding himself completely broke despite generating many millions for himself and others while touring.

The new dad’s marriage is rumored to be in trouble as well, though on Friday the Biebs tagged wife Hailey in an Instagram story showing a male lion lovingly caressing a female lion with its nose and teeth.

Combs, of course, is on trial on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and more. This week in court has seen dramatic testimony from Combs’ former girlfriend Cassie.

But back to Bieber, who was discovered by Scooter Braun in 2008 and quickly signed to a label run by Braun and Usher. Usher was a Combs protégé who was sent by record executive and producer L.A. Reid to live with the mogul in the ’90s and maybe learn a few things. The “Yeah” singer was 15 when he moved to New York. Combs became Usher’s legal guardian.

Reid wrote in his 2016 tell-all memoir “Sing to Me,” via Rolling Stone, “‘Will you take this kid and teach him your swagger?’ I said. ‘Can you just give him some of your flavor?’ And so I sent Usher to New York for what I called the ‘Puffy Flavor Camp.’”

He added, “I was turning him over to the wildest party guy in the country at an age when I still needed to get his mother’s permission, but he went to New York for almost a year. I didn’t know whether I was being irresponsible or having an epiphany.”

Usher would tell Howard Stern in 2016 that he “got a chance to see some things” while living with Combs.

“I went there to see the lifestyle, and I saw it. I don’t know if I could indulge and understand what I was even looking at,” he said on Stern’s show. “I had curiosity of my own. I just didn’t understand it. It was pretty wild. It was crazy.”

Usher said he was mostly focused on making music at the time, no matter what “curious” things might have gone on around him.

So when Bieber and Usher connected, could a Combs meet be far behind?

Sean “Diddy” Combs, from left, Justin Bieber and Rick Ross at a Ciroc vodka party in Atlanta in early 2014, when Bieber was 19.

(Prince Williams / FilmMagic via Getty Images)

Combs and the “Baby” singer made news with an interview on Jimmy Kimmel’s show after the “Justin Bieber’s 48 Hrs with Diddy” video was posted on YouTube in November 2009.

In the video, Combs showed Bieber a silver Lamborghini and told him, “The keys is yours, you know, when you hit 16.” That was after Bieber pitched driving it right away with Combs in the passenger seat, because he had his permit. After staring at the kid for a moment, Combs simply said, “No.” Then he promised him the mansion when he turned 18. Combs didn’t have legal guardianship of Bieber like he did with Usher, he said, but they would be together for the next 48 hours.

“He knows better than to talk about the things that he’s done with big brother Puff on national television,” Combs said later in the Kimmel interview, adding, “Everything ain’t for everybody.” That was after he described Bieber as “a little brother” and “one of the greatest kids you could ever know” who could always call up and ask him for industry advice.

The two would continue to cross paths, including at parties for Combs’ vodka Ciroc, a brand the embattled mogul cut ties with in January 2024.

Bieber’s camp released a statement Thursday asserting that nothing untoward ever happened between the two.

“Although Justin is not among Sean Combs’ victims, there are individuals who were genuinely harmed by him,” a spokesperson for Bieber told TMZ. “Shifting focus away from this reality detracts from the justice these victims rightfully deserve.”

The Times was unable to reach a Bieber representative Friday.

After deadly attacks between Pakistan and India, a ceasefire was suddenly declared. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar rejects claims that Washington imposed the truce, insisting Pakistan acted independently. He addresses India’s accusations and Pakistan’s military influence. As two rivals teetered on the edge of war, Ishaq Dar explains Pakistan’s strategy, its position on Kashmir, and whether this ceasefire might not last.

PETER Sullivan is in line for a £1million compensation payout after spending 38 years in jail for a murder he didn’t commit.

The then 29-year-old was branded ‘Beast of Birkenhead’ after being wrongly convicted of killing 21-year-old Diane Sindall in 1986.

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Yesterday, Mr Sullivan, 68, saw his conviction quashed following a review at the Court of Appeal.

It also means a new murder investigation has been launched to find Diane’s killer.

Mr Sullivan, who held his hand to his mouth and appeared tearful as the decision was handed down, said he was “not angry” and would “begin repairing what I made from the driftwood that is my life”.

In a statement released through his solicitor, Sarah Myatt, moments after the verdict, he said: “As God is my witness, it is said the truth shall set you free. It is unfortunate that it does not give a timescale.”

The victim of Britain’s longest miscarriage of justice left prison a free man last night.

Compensation from the Ministry of Justice is capped at £1million, which Mr Sullivan is now in line for.

The MoJ said: “Peter Sullivan suffered a grave miscarriage of justice, and our thoughts are with him and the family of Diane Sindall.

“We will carefully consider this judgment, looking at how this could have happened and making sure both Mr Sullivan and Diane’s family get the answers they deserve.”

Mr Sullivan’s release comes after new tests ordered by the Criminal Cases Review Commission revealed his DNA was not present on samples preserved at the time.

On the night of her murder, Diane had just left her shift as a part-time barmaid at a pub in Bebington when her small blue van ran out of petrol.

She was making her way to a garage when she was beaten to death and sexually assaulted in a “frenzied” attack.

Her body was discovered partially clothed on August 2 in an alleyway.

Diane’s belongings were later found close to where a small fire had been started – with a man seen running from the scene.

Mr Sullivan was said to have spent the day of the murder drinking heavily.

Following his arrest in September 1986, he was quizzed 22 times and denied legal advice in the first seven interviews – despite requesting it.

Mr Sullivan later “confessed to the murder” in an unrecorded interview a day after his arrest.

He then made a formal confession but the court was told this was “inconsistent with the facts established by the investigation”.

It also went against his earlier interviews, with Mr Sullivan retracting the admission later that day.

Since his conviction, questions have been raised about whether he had proper legal representation during his interviews.

Evidence related to bite marks on Diane’s body has also been called into question.

At the time of the case, DNA technology was not available and subsequent requests for new tests were refused.

Mr Sullivan first went to the CCRC for help in 2008 but they did not refer the sentence to the Court of Appeal.

He then launched his own appeal bid in 2019, which judges dismissed after ruling the bite mark evidence was not central to the prosecution at trial.

In 2021, Mr Sullivan went back to the CCRC and raised concerns over police interviews, the bite mark evidence and the murder weapon.

The independent body revealed Mr Sullivan’s DNA was not present on samples preserved at the time.

This led Merseyside Police to confirm they were “carrying out an extensive investigation in a bid to identify who the new DNA profile belongs to”.

The force revealed they had no matches on the police database but were contacting people previously identified in the original probe to request new samples.

The Crown Prosecution Service yesterday told the Court of Appeal the new evidence was enough to cast “sufficient” doubt on the conviction.

It also agreed the fresh clue was “reliable” and that the CPS “does not seek to argue that this evidence is not capable of undermining the safety of Mr Sullivan’s conviction”.

Duncan Atkinson KC, for the CPS, said: “The respondent considers that there is no credible basis on which the appeal can be opposed, solely by reference to the DNA evidence.

“On the contrary, the DNA evidence provides a clear and uncontroverted basis to suggest that another person was responsible for both the sexual assault and the murder.

“As such, it positively undermines the circumstantial case against Mr Sullivan as identified at the time both of his trial and his 2021 appeal.”

The judge said: “Strong though the circumstantial evidence undoubtedly seemed at the trial, it is now necessary to take into account the new scientific evidence pointing to someone else – the unknown man.

“If the new evidence had been available in 1986, the evidence as a whole would have been regarded as insufficient.

“In the light of that evidence it is impossible to regard the appellant’s conviction as safe.”

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