Spice Girls singer Mel B was forced to come clean over rumours she was replaced by a lookalike on Masked Singer Australia this year.

The pop star, 48, appeared on the Kyle and Jackie O Show on Monday morning to shut down the claims after host Kyle Sandilands couldn’t believe how good she looked on the show.

Mel B, whose real name is Melanie Janine Brown, joined the radio hosts over Zoom from her hometown, Leeds in the UK.

However Kyle revealed he’d recently spotted the pop star in person while she was filming in Sydney.  

‘You were down at Rose Bay and I saw you,’ began Kyle. ‘And my missus went, “That looks like Mel B!” And I went, “No, that’s too young to be Mel B,” and now look at you,’ he recalled.

‘Even last year on the Masked Singer I said, “That’s not Mel. That’s a body double.”‘

Mel denied she had not personally starred in the show and claimed her youthful appearance was all thanks to her lifestyle overhaul.

‘You’ve got to look after yourself. I mean, I do saunas and ice baths every day. And I meditate,’ she explained.

‘I’m doing the whole lifestyle change.’

Mel’s former co-star Jackie admitted she was sad the interview couldn’t take place in person.

‘I was hoping you’d be here because I want to see you…’ Jackie told Mel. ‘How was your time in Australia filming Masked Singer?’

It appeared Mel B didn’t want to talk about the Channel 10 game show

‘Oh, it was so lovely – I tried to get a hold of you… So we could have dinner and stuff,’ Mel said, seemingly side-stepping the question. 

Masked Singer premiered on Channel 10 on Monday night, with the first mystery celebrity being unmasked as Brian Austin Green from iconic ’90s series, Beverly Hills, 90210.

After taking off his mask, the 50-year-old actor left judges Mel B, Abbie Chatfield, Dave Hughes and Chrissie Swan stunned, with none of them able to guess his identity.

The fifth season of The Masked Singer Australia has been generating a whirlwind of excitement online.

Across social media platforms, chatter abounds that Jackie ‘O’ Henderson, who has been a panellist on previous seasons, is concealed beneath one of the extravagant Tim Chappel-designed costumes.

In addition to this speculation, there are whispers that Mischa Barton, the iconic star of The O.C, may be among the 10 celebrities gracing the show.

Fans of the show have been flooding promotional videos on Instagram with their own guesses. 

Amber Riley, renowned for her role in Glee, stands out as the top choice following the snippet of Snow Fox delivering a soul-stirring rendition of Avicii’s Addicted.

‘It’s Amber Riley, it has to be!’ wrote one comment on Instagram, while another claimed it was ‘Jess Mauboy for sure’. 

Despite the creepy costume, many fans believe the Grim Reaper’s identity is that of Darren Hayes, former frontman of Savage Garden.

Meanwhile, many fans are split over the Bad Avocado and Space Fairy, with some believing Tones and I is one or the other.

Panellist Mel B declares in the promos that she’s convinced her former bandmate Emma Bunton is concealed beneath the Bluebottle costume, while social media pundits were skeptical of Scary’s bias.

‘I’d be rich if I was paid $100 for every time Mel predicts a Spice Girl,’ wrote one commenter. 

The Masked Singer continues Monday at 7.30pm on Channel 10 

Tesla owners have filed a lawsuit against the Elon Musk-owned company, claiming a their vehicles’ car batteries with ill-conceived automatic software updates.

In some instances, the suit alleges, plaintiffs were compelled to buy brand new batteries, at a cost of up to $15,000, to replace those bricked the ‘bad software.’

The Tesla owners claim these software updates came ‘without warning’ and cut their cars’ driving range by at least 20 percent. 

And a few of the owners spent between $500 and $750 to undo the offending update, according to the suit.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs stated that the class action applies to the company’s Model S and Model X vehicles and that other Tesla owners, based on the public response to this class action, appear to be affected as well.

‘We have had a lot of interest,’ Steve Berman, an attorney representing the Tesla owners, told the Dailymail.com.

‘We brought a not to unsimilar case v. Tesla and were successful,’ Berman says.

‘When car owners purchase their vehicles,’ the lawsuit reads, ‘they reasonably expect that unforeseen events — like weather, accidents, or flat tires — may impact the performance of their vehicles and lead to costly repairs.’ 

‘But no reasonable consumer would expect that the car manufacturer itself, through an automated system, would deliberately and significantly interfere with the car’s performance,’ the suit claims, ‘through software updates that reduce the operating capacity of the vehicles.’

That said, however, previous suits against Tesla have accused the automaker of similarly ham-fisted software patches, as the new complaint makes plain.

One such case, filed on August 7, 2019, claimed that Tesla defrauded its customers by ‘placing an artificial, software induced limitation on the total number of usable kilo-watt hours (‘kWh’)’ thereby undermining customers’ ability to ‘charge the battery cells up to the natural and normal amount of approximately 4.2 volts.’  

Attorneys for Tesla moved to settle that 2019 case almost immediately, ultimately offering to compensate each qualifying party to the suit $625 apiece.

During that case, Tesla’s outside counsel Sean P. Gates admitted via court declaration that ‘Data from Tesla shows that 1,743 2012-2016 Model S vehicles in the United States were subject to a 10 percent voltage limitation caused by a May 2019 software update.’

The issue, Gates said, was reportedly corrected in future software updates over the course of the next ten months. 

Controversy has trailed the software updates implemented on Tesla vehicles in recent months, both at home and abroad.

Last week, a recall of 1.1 million Tesla vehicles in China — nearly one full quarter of all Teslas on the road to date — was vowed to be corrected with a remote software update fixing trouble with each car’s ‘regenerative braking system.’

Critics with consumer safety groups have said that this energy-saving, automated braking system has led to accidents by conflicting with the driver’s own input via the traditional foot pedals.

But Musk has downplayed the gravity of software update issues in recent months. In February, the billionaire criticized the United States National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) for describing any Tesla issue that could be fixed via a software update as a ‘recall,’ regardless of the circumstances.

‘The word ‘recall’ for an over-the-air software update is anachronistic and just flat wrong!’ Musk announced via Twitter. 

The NHTSA website specifies that the agency issues a recall whenever its regulators or the car’s manufacturer determines that ‘a vehicle, equipment, car seat, or tire creates an unreasonable safety risk or fails to meet minimum safety standards.’ 

The agency sys that it only requires manufacturers to fully repurchase vehicles from owners in ‘rare cases.’ 

Steve Berman, one of the attorneys representing the Tesla owners in the new class action, described the recall debate as ‘an interesting question,’ but ultimately a semantic issue with no ‘legal significance.’

‘A consumer doesn’t care how its characterized but rather cares what the impact on the car might be,’ Berman told the Dailymail.com via email. 

‘Here the impact is to adversely effect the most important selling point for an electric vehicle, THE BATTERY!’

Sen. Ron Johnson accused Antony Blinken of telling a ‘boldface lie’ to Congress about his communications with Hunter Biden after it his emails with the first son were revealed. 

The Wisconsin Republican revealed that Blinken, when he was still working for the Biden campaign in December 2020, had come in to sit for a transcribed interview with his team. He was then aiming for the secretary of State job, a Senate-confirmed position.  

‘Now, because of more information that’s come out, we know that he lied boldface to Congress about never emailing Hunter Biden,’ Johnson told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. 

‘My guess is he told a bunch of other lies that hopefully we’ll be able to bring him and his wife back in, tell them to preserve their records. You cannot trust Joe Biden. You cannot trust Hunter Biden.’ 

Asked if he believed Blinken lied under oath, Johnson said: ‘Yes, he did.’ 

‘He said he did not email Hunter Biden, and now we have those emails. We also know that his wife, using her private email address when she was a[n] employee of the State Department, was basically a conduit between her husband and Hunter Biden as well,’ Johnson continued. 

The Wisconsin Republican said Blinken needs to be subpoenaed, but without Democrat support he would not have the authority to do so. 

‘If he wants to proclaim his innocence, I doubt he’ll do that, but he must and she must preserve their records, their personal emails. When you get to the bottom of this, we need to show how corrupt these individuals are.’ 

The Functional Government Initiative, a government watchdog group, obtained a trove of emails from Blinken during his time in the Obama administration showing Blinken and Hunter Biden writing to each other and setting up personal meetings through his private AOL account during his time as deputy secretary of state. 

Emails obtained by Fox News showed that Blinken met with Hunter Biden at the State Department in 2015 while Hunter was on the board of Burisma. 

Emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show Blinken and his wife Evan Ryan have long had contact with the first son. On multiple occasions, Hunter forwarded communications about setting up meetings with Blinken to fellow board members of Burisma.  

Meanwhile, Mike Morell last week told the House Judiciary Committee that he was asked by Blinken – who at the time was a senior member of the Biden campaign – to help discredit the laptop reporting.

Morell was a former acting CIA director, serving for two months in 2011 and four months from 2012 to 2013. He retired from the CIA in September 2013. 

He coordinated a letter from former intelligence chiefs claiming that Hunter Biden‘s laptop was Russian disinformation because he wanted to help Joe Biden‘s presidential campaign.

The Judiciary Committee, led by Jim Jordan, is currently investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop, as well as the Biden family businesses.

Morell ‘recently’ conducted a transcribed interview with Jordan’s team and was asked about the Biden campaign’s response to the laptop.

The laptop, which had been left in a Delaware repair store, was touted by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, as providing evidence of supposed corruption among the Biden family.

The Biden campaign said the efforts to publicize the contents of the laptop bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The laptop included explicit photos of the troubled Hunter Biden naked, with prostitutes, and taking drugs, as well as multiple emails and texts between the 53-year-old and his father.

Morell said that he was asked by Blinken to rally former intelligence chiefs to agree that the laptop looked like a smear campaign.

He carried out ‘a little bit of my own research,’ and then reached out to retired CIA senior operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos for assistance in compiling the letter.

The letter was ultimately signed by 51 former intelligence officials, including himself and four other former CIA directors, including John Brennan and Leon Panetta.

The letter was published by Politico five days after The New York Post first reported on the contents of the laptop.

The headline for Politico’s story, on October 19, 2020, was: ‘Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.’

The letter alleged that The New York Post story ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ 

Several media outlets, including DailyMail.com, have since confirmed the contents of the laptop and that it belonged to Hunter Biden. 

Joe Biden used the letter during the October 22 debate against Donald Trump, saying he thought the reporting around his son’s abandoned computer was the work of Russia.

Morell was thanked for his work in coordinating the letter, with Steve Ricchetti, chairman of the Biden campaign, telephoning him after the debate to say thank you.

He was then said to be in consideration for the role of CIA director – a job that ultimately went to William Burns.

Morell, who has been a consultant, strategist, lecturer and author since his resignation almost a decade ago, said he was never formally in talks for the role.

On Thursday, Jordan and Michael Turner, the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote to Blinken requesting his communications with Morell around the laptop.

They issued a statement accusing Morell and the other intel chiefs of ‘concerted effort to minimize and suppress’ information harmful to the Biden campaign. 

‘Based on Morell’s testimony, it is apparent that the Biden campaign played an active role in the origins of the public statement, which had the effect of helping to suppress the Hunter Biden story and preventing American citizens from making a fully informed decision during the 2020 presidential election,’ they wrote. 

‘Although the statement’s signatories have an unquestioned right to free speech and free association—which we do not dispute—their reference to their national security credentials lent weight to the story and suggested access to specialized information unavailable to other Americans. 

‘This concerted effort to minimize and suppress public dissemination of the serious allegations about the Biden family was a grave disservice to all American citizens’ informed participation in our democracy.’