Lady Gaga’s fans were stunned Friday night by reports that the pop icon and her fiancé, Michael Polansky, had quietly welcomed their first child.

While few details about the baby are known, it was confirmed that the 40-year-old singer is a new mother when she was spotted cradling a newborn baby in photos obtained by Page Six. 

Still, signs in the months leading up to the news suggested that Gaga’s family plans may have already been underway.

The Grammy-winning star has largely stayed offstage in recent months and kept a notably low public profile, apart from occasional chance encounters with fans.

Gaga, whose full name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, had also made no secret of her hopes to become a mother following her April 2024 engagement to Polansky.

Here is a closer look at the clues that appeared to point to the private arrival of Lady Gaga and Michael Polansky’s baby.

Gaga’s most recent concert run, The Mayhem Ball, lasted more than a year, beginning with her Coachella debut on April 11, 2025, and concluding at Madison Square Garden in New York City on April 13 this year.

Since taking the final bow on that tour, however, the singer-songwriter has remained away from the stage, fueling speculation that her attention had shifted to more personal priorities.

Live performances have long been central to Gaga’s career. Alongside her major tours, she maintained a hugely profitable Las Vegas residency that launched in 2018 and ran intermittently through 2024, even as she stepped away at times for touring commitments.

But the end of The Mayhem Ball tour marked an unusual period of silence for Gaga.

She also signaled that something had changed with her persona life when she made a mysterious withdrawal from public life.

Gaga hasn’t just eschewed high-profile red-carpet events in recent months, but she has only been glimpsed a handful of times in public.

One of her last red-carpet events was on April 20 of this year, when she slipped into an elegant little black dress at the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2 at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.

It was nearly a month before Gaga made what would be her final public appearance to date on May 14, when she made a splash at the premiere of Apple Music Live: Mayhem Requiem.

The event, which was held at The Grove in Los Angeles, marked the debut of a concert documentary recorded at a performance on January 14, 2026, at LA’s Wiltern Theatre. 

Gaga seemed to signal a personal change when she ditched her now-standard blond hair in favor of long raven tresses.

At the conclusion of the premiere, Gaga retreated for months to come.

One source told the Daily Mail that even her friends had been left out of the loop about her disappearance.

‘No one has seen her or heard from her in over a month,’ the insider said. ‘Everyone in her circle thinks she eloped with Michael and is on her honeymoon now, trying to make a baby.’ 

However, sources revealed to the Daily Mail earlier this month that the singer and her fiancé have been lying low in Northern California’s Marin County, where Gaga bought a $10 million home.

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‘There are tons of Lady Gaga sightings all over Marin, and everyone loves her; she has become a local,’ one resident told the Daily Mail.

Most of those sightings don’t appear to have become public, except for one run-in in the area with a delighted fan in August who posted a beaming selfie of herself and Gaga to Instagram.

In addition to her withdrawal from the performances and public life, Gaga has largely stepped away from social media in recent months.

Following a barrage of posts publicizing her Mayhem Ball Tour concert film in May, she went radio silent except for just three Instagram posts.

One post on August 21 publicized Gaga’s beauty venture, the skin-health research firm Outer Bio, while her next post on August 25 featured a ghostly, washed-out Polaroid-style photo of Gaga in a white top and long blond hair reaching down to her midriff.

She didn’t bother to share any kind of message with the photo, and her last public post arrived on September 3, when she shared a commentary-free makeup tutorial video showing a close-up angle of her applying concealer, contour and lip liner.

Absent from Gaga’s social media accounts was any kind of behind-the-scenes look at her personal life or her creative efforts, which had previously been a staple of her accounts.

But the most obvious signs pointing toward Gaga’s surprise baby were her multiple comments since she and Polansky got engaged about how much she wanted to start a family.

During an appearance in October 2025 on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she said motherhood would be her ‘next starring role.’

‘I would like to do many things, yeah, all of these things,’ she said after Colbert asked if she wanted to continue acting in films or performing on Broadway. ‘But, what I really want is to be a mom. That’s my next starring role, I hope.’ 

While speaking to the New York Times in March 2025, Gaga said she was ‘excited to be a mom,’ even though she ‘used to have a lot of apprehension about it.’

‘I’m also kind of at war with myself sometimes as I get ready to, hopefully, become a mom soon,’ she added. ‘Like, today is wonderful, but the whole day has revolved around me. There’s an incredible amount of narcissism in this.’

Gaga’s plans for becoming a mother may not end with just one child.

‘She has only one sister, Natali, and always wanted more siblings. So she wants her children to have many siblings so they can all lean on each other,’ a source told the Daily Mail.

So far, there’s no word on when Gaga and Polansky plan to tie the knot, but in March of this year she indicated that they planned to wed ‘soon.’ 

During an appearance on Bruno Mars’s Romantic Radio TikTok Live, the Poker Face singer said via a recorded message: ‘Me and my fiancé have been traveling all year, but we’re getting married soon. We were hoping you could choose a special song for us.’ 

In her earlier interview with Stephen Colbert, Gaga couldn’t help but sing her fiancé’s praises.

‘He’s my best friend in the whole world,’ she said of Polansky, adding that he ’empowered me as a woman in music with a beautiful partner that has my back every day.’

‘He just blew me away from the minute that I met him,’ Gaga continued. ‘He always, I think, really saw me and I think I always really saw him.’

Back in October of 2024, the occasional actress told Jimmy Kimmel that she and Polansky were considering an elopement involving ‘just going to a courthouse, just the two of us, and ordering Chinese food.’

Harry Styles paid tribute to New York City’s “incredible resilience” during his Friday night concert, as the city observed the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The singer recognized that attending a concert on such a painful anniversary could be “incredibly difficult” for many in the audience.

“I want us to take a moment to think about the incredible resilience of this city,” Styles, 32, told the crowd, according to a video posted on X. “I want us to take a second to think about the events that not only shaped this city but [also] shaped the century that we live in.”

Styles also honored the New Yorkers and first responders who died on Sept. 11, along with people around the world who lost their lives in the aftermath of the attacks.

He said there were not “really any words [he] could say” to capture the scale of the tragedy. Styles added that he “remember[s] it so well,” even though he was only 7 when it occurred.

“I remember walking home from school and my world becoming completely different,” he said. “There aren’t really words to describe something like that, but there’s a song that I’ve always loved by a legendary New Yorker, Bill Evans, called ‘Peace Piece.’”

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“It’s always been an incredibly important song for me. It’s brought me a lot of peace, and I listen to it in moments of reflection.”

Styles asked concertgoers to put away their phones and close their eyes while his bandmate, Yaffra, played a piano rendition of “Peace Piece.”

The tribute took place on the eighth night of Styles’ 30-show Madison Square Garden residency, announced in January as part of his “Together, Together” tour.

Earlier in the week, Styles faced criticism over artwork printed on physical tickets for Wednesday’s concert. The image appeared to show a yellow car carrying the singer as it flew above the Empire State Building.

The imagery appeared just two days before the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, prompting some social media users to call the choice “a little bold” and “f–king insane.”

“bro, that’s wild,” one social media user wrote, with another chiming in, “literally, who approved this? 😭”

Styles has made headlines throughout the residency, from a cheeky comment about ex Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce to a surprise tribute to Dolly Parton on opening night, just one day after the country music legend died.

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A Tennessee construction worker says he came close to death, encountered Jesus and now recalls in detail what he believes Christ looked like.

Mike McKinsey was working as a superintendent in 2004 when a ruptured appendix left him critically ill. The severe infection required emergency surgery and nearly cost him his life.

As doctors operated and his condition remained critical, McKinsey said Jesus entered the operating room in physical form, took his hand and brought him to a hill overlooking what he understood to be heaven.

McKinsey said his vision differed from many traditional Christian portrayals of Jesus. He remembered him as having darker skin, green or blue-green eyes, and wavy brown hair that reached his shoulders.

He also recalled Jesus having a short beard and wearing a white robe as he entered the hospital room. McKinsey said Christ extended his hand and told him: ‘I want to answer your prayer.’

Speaking to the BearFruitWithChrist podcast, McKinsey said: ‘I would say it was just love, and the only way I’ve ever described it is when his eyes looked in mine, he looked into my soul. As soon as our eyes met, he knew me. He was the brother I never had, the perfect father. It was all love.’

McKinsey said the experience extended beyond the brief near-death experience, or NDE, he reported during surgery. While recovering in hospital, he developed pneumonia and claimed Jesus appeared again, speaking with him for three hours.

The former construction worker, who later became an author, said he was given a heavenly calling to share Jesus’s teachings on Earth.

‘I feel this holy presence enter the room, and it was like the NDE started all over again. I just could tell he pulled up a chair and he sat down at the end of my bed and I just knew he was there but I couldn’t see him,’ McKinsey revealed. 

‘He says, “I had to get you flat on your back away from all the distractions so you could hear me… I’m calling you out to do more for my kingdom… Millions are going to hear about our story.”‘

In multiple interviews, McKinsey has stated that he believed the presence of Jesus sat by his bedside as nurses came to check on him during his bout with pneumonia – a spirit only he was able to feel.

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He compared the experience to a friend sitting with a sick friend, talking and consoling him, but also giving McKinsey a mission to spread the message of Christianity.

McKinsey claimed that he pushed back when the spirit of Jesus told him to become a Christian messenger, saying that ‘I’m not Billy Graham. I can’t do that.’ 

‘He did chuckle when I said I’m not Billy Graham. I’ve never heard him laugh, but that was probably the closest that I’ve come to that. But yeah, he’s a friend,’ he explained on the Peaceful Presence Podcast on July 23.

McKinsey added that his experience should not be considered uncommon, believing that the crucifixion of Jesus – the biblical act where he died for the sins of humanity – gave people the ‘authority’ to speak directly with God.

‘We have direct access to the throne. I think of him as a friend now,’ said McKinsey, who is now a published author who shares his insights from the near-death experience and conversation with Jesus.

The author also claimed Jesus had warned him that those who spread the word of God would also face growing ‘attacks from the enemy.’

McKinsey explained that he believed this warning meant the devil would stir up more trouble in a Christian believer’s life, creating more doubts, harsh criticism, fear and personal setbacks that try to shut them down.

After spending 12 days in the hospital recovering from the surgery and pneumonia, McKinsey said those ‘attacks’ from Satan began to impact his life, even before he began writing about his NDE.

‘I lost my parents within a couple of years after the NDE, and I lost both of them within six months of each other, and I just knew,’ he revealed.

‘I could feel God’s presence and Jesus holding me up, the Holy Spirit holding me up, and I just kept thinking, “wow, this is one of those attacks.”‘

However, McKinsey said his experience with Jesus pushed him to not view these tragedies as a personal attack against him specifically.

He came to see hard losses as part of a fallen world that hurts many people at once, not as Satan singling him out for spreading the message of Jesus, and he tried to keep his focus on God holding him through it. 

A Florida woman was set on fire in a shocking attack at a St. Petersburg gas station after a stranger allegedly ignited the fuel nozzle while she was pumping gas into her SUV, police said.

The 41-year-old victim was fueling her Volvo at a Mobil station on 40th Avenue North on Thursday night when Eleanor Crawford, 41, approached and asked to use her phone, according to police.

After the woman handed over the phone, Crawford allegedly asked her for money. When the victim declined, police said Crawford took out a lighter and ignited the gas nozzle. Flames quickly erupted around the victim and her vehicle.

Witness Scotty Gamling saw the attack unfold and rushed to help, getting the burning woman into his truck before calling 911.

He described the scene as “a fireball.”

In a troubling twist, Gamling had called police about Crawford before the gas-station attack. He said he saw her involved in a disturbance across the street, where what appeared to be an altercation broke out. Officers were reportedly already responding when the attack at the pumps occurred, Fox13 Tampa Bay reported.

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Police arrested Crawford nearby about 20 minutes later.

Investigators said the women were strangers with no known relationship before their encounter at the gas station.

According to police, Crawford has an extensive criminal history that includes drug- and alcohol-related charges.

“I don’t know if alcohol and drugs were involved, but indicative of her history, there might’ve been something that diminished capacity there,” Assistant Police Chief Mike Kovacsev said in a press statement. “Why would she even do something like this?”

The victim suffered second-degree burns on her arms and back and was rushed to Tampa General Hospital. She is expected to survive.

“It’s kind of a unique case because you don’t see anything like this, especially something that results in such horrific burns,” Kovacsev said. “Luckily they were able to get her stabilized, and she’s going to make it.”

Crawford now faces attempted felony murder and arson charges and the investigation continues.