Critics celebrate Céline Dion's'high-stakes' comeback show in Paris Iconic Canadian pop singer Céline Dion has kicked off her long-awaited comeback show in Paris on Saturday, after a six-year hiatus due to health issues. The 58-year-old superstar was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called stiff person syndrome in 2022, which forced her to pull back from touring. Dion, one of the best-selling musical artists of all time, has not performed a full show since a 2020 concert in New Jersey - the last before the Covid pandemic cut her tour short. In 2024, she performed just one song at the Paris Olympics closing ceremony. Saturday marked the first of Dion's 26-show residency at the Paris La Défense Arena, Europe's largest covered concert arena.

Orthonormalized updates accelerate training, improve stability, and enable robust hyperparameter transfer, but existing methods like Muon rely on dense matrix operations that clash with sharded weights in large-scale LLM training, causing high compute and communication cost. We introduce Dion (Distributed Orthonormalization), a scalable and efficient update rule that replaces Newton-Schulz iteration with amortized power iteration on a momentum buffer, avoiding full-matrix reconstruction and integrating cleanly with weight sharding. The rank-fraction parameter with error feedback enables low-rank updates that balance quality with significant cost savings. On language models from 160M to 3B parameters, Dion retains the benefits of orthonormalized updates, while markedly reducing wall-clock time at scale, making it a practical optimizer for next-generation foundation models. Code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/dion/

The Covid-19 pandemic all but halted Hollywood. Production on most movies and television shows (except for a handful of animated programs) became too risky, and ceased. It's only in the last few weeks that organizations like SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America have begun publishing guidelines for how cast and crew members might safely return to work. In this lull, however, studios are still cobbling together their stockpiled footage and releasing tantalizing trailers for upcoming projects. Even if you've never read the Asimov novels, which were first published in the 1950s, every science fiction fan has felt their influence, especially in genre classics like Star Wars.