NANTERRE, France (AP) — She hit the high F, held it, then blew out a breath and turned to look back at the band — a quick, disbelieving glance toward her musical director. Some 30,000 people read it before they had finished screaming: Celine Dion did it.
It was “All By Myself,” the song the Quebec superstar’s voice has been measured against since 1996, saved for the encore of her first full concert in more than six years — her first since stiff person syndrome, a rare, progressive neurological disease, attacked her muscles, including those of the throat.
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Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion reacts during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her 'Celine Dion Paris 2026' residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Few doubted she could still sing. What nobody knew was whether she could get through a whole show, and then get up and do it again two nights later.
Dion gave the crowd three words: “Je vais bien.” (“I’m doing fine.”)
“When she hit that note, I grabbed my friend’s arm. I’d been holding my breath without realizing. Then I started crying. ‘She’s back. She’s really back,‘” said Élodie Marchand, 42, a primary schoolteacher from Nantes.
Dion, 58, had not played a full concert since March 8, 2020. She was diagnosed in 2022 with stiff person syndrome. She canceled a world tour, then what was left of it, and went quiet. On Saturday night, 25 songs in 2 hours and 15 minutes at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, was the first night of the engagement meant to prove she can work again.
The sold-out run is punishing: 16 shows in five weeks, 10 more booked for May 2027, 26 nights in all before tens of thousands of people each time.
The last time France saw her sing, it lasted four minutes. At the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2024, Dion sang from the Eiffel Tower — one song, one night — and the world called it a resurrection. Saturday she had to do it 25 times, then get up and do it again Wednesday.
Stiff person syndrome affects one or two people in a million. It stiffens muscles and sets off spasms violent enough to break bones, triggered by loud noise, by touch, by emotional stress. An arena holding 30,000 people is all three at once. Singing with it, Dion told NBC in 2024, felt like being strangled.
“Touring can be very difficult even when you’re 100%,” she said in a statement in 2023, canceling the last of her dates.
She cried before she finished the first song. In a Dior gown and a Boucheron necklace, she pressed her hands together in prayer, then missed her cue in “On ne change pas,” on the line about the skinny little girl from Charlemagne, Quebec.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she said. The crowd answered by chanting the riff from “Seven Nation Army.”
She said she had learned to live with the fragility and made it her reason to keep going. Then she sang for another two hours.
The voice has lost some of its top; it is not the instrument that sold 250 million albums. Every big note is now a decision she makes in front of 30,000 people.
She took most of them. She sang “My Heart Will Go On” and “The Power of Love,” then Catalani’s “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” — Maria Callas’ signature aria — in pink feathers while fake snow fell. Her disease attacks the larynx. She went for it anyway.
Willo Perron’s set put her among gray megaliths, a pop Stonehenge. An 18-voice gospel choir came on in robes.
Michelle Obama watched from the seats. Outside, fans wore sashes reading “Celine Dion 2026,” like beauty pageant winners, and T-shirts from the LVMH house that shares her first name.
“My daughter kept saying, ‘Mum, we can’t go all the way to Paris for Celine,’” said Isabelle Gagnon, 52, a teacher from Montreal. “Tonight my daughter was singing beside me, and I thought: you see? This is why we came.”
“In Montreal, you grow up knowing those songs whether you mean to or not,” said Antoine Beaulieu, 31, a graphic designer. “I used to pretend I was too cool for Celine. Tonight I knew every word, so clearly that was a lie.”
Camille Morel, 38, a pharmacist from Lyon, put her phone away. “I wanted to actually be there,” she said. “My voice is completely gone. I’m supposed to be working tomorrow — good luck to them.”
Then the encore, and the note: the last “anymore” a cappella, the note bent upward, the orchestra surging in beneath her. She fanned herself, laughing at her own relief.
She closed with two Jean-Jacques Goldman standards and a last line to the room: I love you, my loves. Take care of yourselves.
It had taken her 2,379 days to get back. She has 25 more nights to go.
Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion reacts during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her "Celine Dion Paris 2026" residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, France, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
Singer Celine Dion performs during the opening concert of her 'Celine Dion Paris 2026' residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, outside Paris, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
ADEN, Yemen (AP) — The conflict in Yemen intensified on Sunday, as government forces launched attacks against Iran-backed Houthi rebels along the Red Sea and Houthis fired into neighboring Saudi Arabia, which supports Yemen’s government.
The Yemeni government vowed to send more forces to the Red Sea coast and one official conceded a “painful” defeat last week when Houthis captured the port city of Mokha and an island on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a crucial shipping alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.
The escalation – especially Houthi attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and its shipping in the Red Sea – adds pressure on global oil supplies and prices, and that could give Iran leverage in its war with the United States.
As Yemen risks descending into another civil war, the United Nations estimated that more than 80,000 people in the impoverished country have been displaced by the fighting since the start of September.
One woman said a mortar shell fell nearby as she fled in the middle of the night from the town of Khawkha in Hodeida province along the Red Sea, shortly before it was captured by Houthis.
“I saw with my own eyes cars and buses burning, and bodies of children and women were lying on the road in a horrific scene,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for her and her family’s safety.
Saudi authorities sounded sirens Sunday afternoon in the southern city of Abha and Khamis Mushait province, warning residents to take shelter from potential incoming fire. Both areas were repeatedly attacked by the Houthi in recent weeks.
The Houthis claimed to have used drones and missiles to target Saudi Arabia, including a military base just over the border with Yemen. Houthi military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree didn’t provide evidence or say when the attack occurred.
The Saudi civil defense overnight said a projectile fell in a different area near the border with Yemen along the Red Sea, injuring two people and damaging a mosque and several other buildings. The statement blamed the Houthis.
Saudi Arabia did not announce any new attacks targeting the Houthis.
The Houthis are targeting Saudi oil infrastructure and shipping as part of a recently declared blockade, but they have said they do not intend to threaten other countries' commercial shipping.
The National Resistance, a government-allied force that had controlled coastal areas, said more than 500 government fighters were killed on the west coast over the past four weeks — its first comprehensive toll.
It also said more than 1,000 Houthis had been killed in Hodeida and Taiz provinces. A spokesman for the Houthis didn't respond to a request for comment.
Yemen is home to over 40 million people who fear a return to the civil war that began more than a decade ago and killed 150,000, bringing many others to the brink of famine. Yemen’s internationally recognized government and Saudi Arabia have been battling the Houthis for 12 years. A ceasefire that began in 2022 had mostly halted the fighting.
A senior government official in Yemen said its forces will return to the Red Sea coast and fight back. People fleeing the Houthi advance told The Associated Press they saw forces withdrawing and urging people to run.
Sultan al-Arada, a member of the ruling presidential leadership council, described the collapse of government forces in the port city of Mokha and elsewhere on Yemen’s west coast as “painful and regrettable.” He said in the televised interview aired late Saturday that forces “are currently regrouping and will return to the battle.”
On Sunday, Rashad al-Alimi, who leads the presidential council, sought to downplay the defeats as “incidental,” according to comments published by the country's state-run SABA news agency. The government, he said, "will remain clear and fixed on the goal of retrieving (state) institutions and of reclaiming sovereignty over all national territories.”
On Sunday, the Yemeni military said it launched airstrikes on Houthi positions in Mokha, the coastal town of Dhubab and elsewhere in Taiz province. The rebels reported strikes by the Saudi-backed forces in Taiz province and artillery shelling in Saada province, a Houthi stronghold on Yemen's northern border with Saudi Arabia.
The Houthis' advance puts them just 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the U.S. military base in Djibouti, on the other side of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. It's the main U.S. base in Africa and one of several foreign military bases in Djibouti, including those of China, France and Japan.
The small Horn of Africa nation is already seeing the arrival of displaced Yemenis making the perilous water crossing. More than 2,000 Yemenis have reached Djibouti, the International Organization for Migration said Sunday.
Djibouti's Economy and Finance Minister Ilyas M. Dawaleh, said on X that the country's navy, coast guard and other specialized agencies were conducting rescue operations and providing emergency assistance.
The U.N. migration agency said Sunday that more than 82,000 people in Yemen have been displaced since the beginning of September.
“The displaced people are in a very bad condition,” said Ahmad al-Masawi, the director of the Al Salam camp in the southern port city of Aden, who appealed to international organizations for assistance. “They left their homes quickly without any clothing or anything. They are crammed in camps, houses and even on roads."
Hussein Haydara sat outside a shelter at the camp in a white undershirt, as his children waited to be assigned to a tent. He worried about how far the shelter is from schools, hospitals and markets, and wondered how they will survive the next weeks or months.
Haydara had fled his home in Hodeida once before, when the Houthis took it over in 2015. But this time feels more precarious.
“With the first displacement, we had time to plan things but this time we were forced to escape all of a sudden. One could hardly take their children and the lightest stuff possible,” he said.
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Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Omar Farouk in Mogadishu, Somalia, and Noha ElHennawy in Cairo, contributed to this report.
Displaced Yemenis, from Al Khawkhah city, 400 kilometers (249 miles) south west of Sanaa, walk past their temporary shelter in Aden, Yemen, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdulnasser Alseddik)
Displaced Yemenis, from Al Khawkhah city, 400 kilometers (249 miles) south west of Sanaa, wait to enter a temporary shelter in Aden, Yemen, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdulnasser Alseddik)
This image taken from undated video released by the Ansar Allah Media Office, the media arm of Yemen's Houthi rebels, on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026, shows, according to the group, Houthi fighters among vehicles abandoned by Saudi-backed forces during a Houthi advance at an undisclosed location in southern Yemen. (Ansar Allah Media Office via AP)
This image taken from undated video released by the Ansar Allah Media Office, the media arm of Yemen's Houthi rebels, on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026, shows Houthi fighters chant after praying beside military vehicles during what the group says was their advance against Saudi-backed forces at an undisclosed location in southern Yemen. (Ansar Allah Media Office via AP)
This image taken from undated video released by the Ansar Allah Media Office, the media arm of Yemen's Houthi rebels, on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026, shows Houthi fighters inspecting what the group says is an abandoned position during their advance against Saudi-backed forces at an undisclosed location in southern Yemen. (Ansar Allah Media Office via AP)
People walk at a street in Sanaa, Yemen, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Osamah Abdulrahman)
Yemeni civilians celebrate while riding in the back of a pickup truck in the Bani Matar district, Yemen, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026, as they follow a convoy carrying Houthi prisoners freed in Mokha on its way to Sanaa following the Houthi takeover of the southern Red Sea port city. (AP Photo/STR)
Displaced Yemenis rest at a temporary shelter in the Dar Saad district of Aden, Yemen, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026, after fleeing Houthi attacks in the western coastal cities of al-Khokha and Mokha. (AP Photo/Abdulnasser Alseddik)
This photo provided by the Saudi Press Agency shows damage to a building after a projectile fell in Al-Tawwal, Jazan, Saudi Arabia, on the southern border with Yemen, Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. (Saudi Press Agency via AP)
