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      Up Next at the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial: Dawn Richard and Former Employees

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      After four days with Casandra Ventura, known as Cassie, on the stand, prosecutors will be seeking to corroborate her testimony with additional witnesses.As the second week of Sean Combs’s racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking trial begins, the first witness is set to be Dawn Richard, a singer in two music groups backed by Mr. Combs who says she saw him physically abuse his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura.A performer in the now-defunct groups Danity Kane and Diddy — Dirty Money, Ms. Richard began her testimony on Friday, recalling an incident from 2009 in which she said Mr. Combs attempted to hit Ms. Ventura, known as the singer Cassie, with a skillet, then punched and kicked her.“She went into fetal position — you could see she was literally trying to hide her face or her head,” Ms. Richard testified. She also said that Mr. Combs threatened her and a bandmate to keep silent about the event, saying he told them that “where he comes from, people go missing if they say things like that, if they talk.”Ms. Richard filed a lawsuit against Mr. Combs last year, shortly before he was arrested. She accused him in the suit of threatening her, groping her and flying into “frenzied, unpredictable rages” while he oversaw her career. The girl group Danity Kane was formed during the third iteration of Mr. Combs’s MTV reality show “Making the Band.”After the jury had been dismissed on Friday, a lawyer for Mr. Combs called Ms. Richard’s accusation of abuse from 2009 a “drop-dead lie,” noting that Ms. Ventura had not mentioned it during her four days on the witness stand.Ms. Richard is the first of a series of government witnesses scheduled for this week who are expected to testify about what they saw of Ms. Ventura’s 11-year on-and-off relationship with Mr. Combs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A Game of Light and Shadow in Gounod’s ‘Faust’

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      Sara Holdren’s new production for Heartbeat Opera takes its lead from Bulgakov’s Faustian novel “The Master and Margarita.”The director Sara Holdren has made it pretty clear that she’s a fan of Mikhail Bulgakov.In the biography that accompanies her new production of Gounod’s “Faust” for Heartbeat Opera, Holdren ends with a bit of Cyrillic script that translates to “Manuscripts don’t burn,” the most famous line from Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.”A passage from that book, a Soviet spin on the Faust story, also appears in Holdren’s note about her staging. During her work she thought often, she wrote, about one of the devil’s lines: “What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people.”This idea, that light and shadow, and all they represent, are intertwined and essential to life itself, guides Holdren’s take on “Faust,” which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, in a new adaptation by her and Jacob Ashworth, with a chamber arrangement by Francisco Ladrón de Guevara.Before “Faust” was a sprawling grand opera in the 1860s, sung through across five acts and including a ballet, it was a humbler opéra comique, with spoken dialogue between its flights of musical expression. Holdren blends the two versions, trimming the length and adapting the spoken lines to sound as if they were written today.The goal, as always with Heartbeat Opera, is to breathe urgency into a classic. And “Faust,” which isn’t performed often, was once the classic. Perhaps the most popular work of its day, it opened the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. (Martin Scorsese depicted one of those Gilded Age performances of “Faust” in his film adaptation of “The Age of Innocence.”) Now, however, it’s harder to come by. The Met hasn’t even presented it in over a decade.Holdren, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year, is also an excellent theater critic for New York Magazine; often, I’m convinced she’s the finest in town. You can sense a real, exciting theatrical instinct in her production of “Faust,” particularly in the inventive ways she plays with light and shadow (designed by Yichen Zhou).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Austria Wins Narrow Victory Over Israel in Eurovision Song Contest

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      Austria’s entrant, JJ, took the prize after a tense count that was neck-and-neck until the last votes were revealed.Austria narrowly edged out Israel to win the Eurovision Song Contest after a tense vote count on Saturday night in which the lead switched repeatedly and the victor became clear only at the last moment.Israel received the most points in the public vote, which accounts for half of the overall tally. Last year, the competition was overshadowed by protests over Israel’s involvement because of the country’s military campaign in Gaza.Austria was represented this year by JJ, a classically trained singer, who performed “Wasted Love,” a dramatic song about heartbreak. He received 436 points to Israel’s 357.Sweden, the pre-event favorite, came fourth.Austria last won the competition in 2014, when Conchita Wurst, a bearded drag queen, triumphed with “Rise Like a Phoenix.”JJ, a 24-year-old whose real name is Johannes Pietsch, is a countertenor, meaning that his vocal range most closely matches that of a female mezzo-soprano. He sings in the choir at the Opera School of the Vienna State Opera, and in recent months has appeared onstage in the company’s productions of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd.”Accepting the Eurovision winner’s trophy, a tearful JJ thanked the voters and called on them to “spread more love” in the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      France’s Eurovision act, Louane, wants to tell her mom she’s OK.

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      Reporting from from the St. Jakobshalle arena in BaselLouane singing “Maman,” a song addressed to her mother, who died of cancer.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Louane was offered the chance to represent France at Eurovision, she immediately knew what she wanted to sing about: her mother.As a child growing up in a small town, Louane, whose real name is Anne Peichert, watched Eurovision with her parents and five siblings while gathered around the TV eating pizza. Even when it wasn’t Eurovision season, Louane recalled in an interview, her mother would put on videos of Celine Dion’s winning performance from 1988, and they would watch together, mesmerized by the Canadian singer’s voice.Those happy Eurovision sessions ended abruptly in 2014 when Louane’s mother died from cancer.A star in France with five hit albums, Louane, now 28, said that over the past decade she had written and sung many songs expressing grief and anger over her mother’s death.Her Eurovision track, a powerful ballad called “Maman,” has an altogether different message, however. “It’s a letter to my mother saying: ‘I’m finally fine. I’m finally good in my life. I am, myself, a mother,’” Louane said. “It’s a super special song to me.”Louane makes that transformation clear when she sings in French: “I’m better now / I know the way / I’m done walking down this memory lane.”Louane said the track had a secondary message that went beyond her own story. “What I’m going to try and make everyone understand,” she said, “is that even through the deepest pain, deepest sadness, you can find a way to be better, to finally be well.” More

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      Kaj: A Finnish band, representing Sweden.

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      Reporting from from the St. Jakobshalle arena in BaselLouane singing “Maman,” a song addressed to her mother, who died of cancer.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Louane was offered the chance to represent France at Eurovision, she immediately knew what she wanted to sing about: her mother.As a child growing up in a small town, Louane, whose real name is Anne Peichert, watched Eurovision with her parents and five siblings while gathered around the TV eating pizza. Even when it wasn’t Eurovision season, Louane recalled in an interview, her mother would put on videos of Celine Dion’s winning performance from 1988, and they would watch together, mesmerized by the Canadian singer’s voice.Those happy Eurovision sessions ended abruptly in 2014 when Louane’s mother died from cancer.A star in France with five hit albums, Louane, now 28, said that over the past decade she had written and sung many songs expressing grief and anger over her mother’s death.Her Eurovision track, a powerful ballad called “Maman,” has an altogether different message, however. “It’s a letter to my mother saying: ‘I’m finally fine. I’m finally good in my life. I am, myself, a mother,’” Louane said. “It’s a super special song to me.”Louane makes that transformation clear when she sings in French: “I’m better now / I know the way / I’m done walking down this memory lane.”Louane said the track had a secondary message that went beyond her own story. “What I’m going to try and make everyone understand,” she said, “is that even through the deepest pain, deepest sadness, you can find a way to be better, to finally be well.” More

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      To stay in the competition, Malta had to change the lyrics.

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      Reporting from from the St. Jakobshalle arena in BaselLouane singing “Maman,” a song addressed to her mother, who died of cancer.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Louane was offered the chance to represent France at Eurovision, she immediately knew what she wanted to sing about: her mother.As a child growing up in a small town, Louane, whose real name is Anne Peichert, watched Eurovision with her parents and five siblings while gathered around the TV eating pizza. Even when it wasn’t Eurovision season, Louane recalled in an interview, her mother would put on videos of Celine Dion’s winning performance from 1988, and they would watch together, mesmerized by the Canadian singer’s voice.Those happy Eurovision sessions ended abruptly in 2014 when Louane’s mother died from cancer.A star in France with five hit albums, Louane, now 28, said that over the past decade she had written and sung many songs expressing grief and anger over her mother’s death.Her Eurovision track, a powerful ballad called “Maman,” has an altogether different message, however. “It’s a letter to my mother saying: ‘I’m finally fine. I’m finally good in my life. I am, myself, a mother,’” Louane said. “It’s a super special song to me.”Louane makes that transformation clear when she sings in French: “I’m better now / I know the way / I’m done walking down this memory lane.”Louane said the track had a secondary message that went beyond her own story. “What I’m going to try and make everyone understand,” she said, “is that even through the deepest pain, deepest sadness, you can find a way to be better, to finally be well.” More

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      Finland’s Eurovision entry, Erika Vikman, shows her ‘sexual power.’

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      Reporting from from the St. Jakobshalle arena in BaselLouane singing “Maman,” a song addressed to her mother, who died of cancer.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Louane was offered the chance to represent France at Eurovision, she immediately knew what she wanted to sing about: her mother.As a child growing up in a small town, Louane, whose real name is Anne Peichert, watched Eurovision with her parents and five siblings while gathered around the TV eating pizza. Even when it wasn’t Eurovision season, Louane recalled in an interview, her mother would put on videos of Celine Dion’s winning performance from 1988, and they would watch together, mesmerized by the Canadian singer’s voice.Those happy Eurovision sessions ended abruptly in 2014 when Louane’s mother died from cancer.A star in France with five hit albums, Louane, now 28, said that over the past decade she had written and sung many songs expressing grief and anger over her mother’s death.Her Eurovision track, a powerful ballad called “Maman,” has an altogether different message, however. “It’s a letter to my mother saying: ‘I’m finally fine. I’m finally good in my life. I am, myself, a mother,’” Louane said. “It’s a super special song to me.”Louane makes that transformation clear when she sings in French: “I’m better now / I know the way / I’m done walking down this memory lane.”Louane said the track had a secondary message that went beyond her own story. “What I’m going to try and make everyone understand,” she said, “is that even through the deepest pain, deepest sadness, you can find a way to be better, to finally be well.” More

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      Claude, representing the Netherlands, is a refugee turned pop star.

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      Reporting from from the St. Jakobshalle arena in BaselLouane singing “Maman,” a song addressed to her mother, who died of cancer.Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Louane was offered the chance to represent France at Eurovision, she immediately knew what she wanted to sing about: her mother.As a child growing up in a small town, Louane, whose real name is Anne Peichert, watched Eurovision with her parents and five siblings while gathered around the TV eating pizza. Even when it wasn’t Eurovision season, Louane recalled in an interview, her mother would put on videos of Celine Dion’s winning performance from 1988, and they would watch together, mesmerized by the Canadian singer’s voice.Those happy Eurovision sessions ended abruptly in 2014 when Louane’s mother died from cancer.A star in France with five hit albums, Louane, now 28, said that over the past decade she had written and sung many songs expressing grief and anger over her mother’s death.Her Eurovision track, a powerful ballad called “Maman,” has an altogether different message, however. “It’s a letter to my mother saying: ‘I’m finally fine. I’m finally good in my life. I am, myself, a mother,’” Louane said. “It’s a super special song to me.”Louane makes that transformation clear when she sings in French: “I’m better now / I know the way / I’m done walking down this memory lane.”Louane said the track had a secondary message that went beyond her own story. “What I’m going to try and make everyone understand,” she said, “is that even through the deepest pain, deepest sadness, you can find a way to be better, to finally be well.” More