Features

SEOUL — K-pop megastar Jin from BTS was discharged from his South Korean military service on Wednesday, AFP reporters saw, the first member of the band to complete the mandatory duty, freeing him up to fully resume musical activities.

The seven members of the world’s most popular boy band have been performing their service — which South Korea requires of all men under 30, due to tensions with the nuclear-armed North — with the K-pop juggernaut on a self-described “hiatus” since 2022.

Jin emerged from the gates of his army base in South Korea’s northern Yeoncheon county where he was met by fellow bandmates J-hope, V, RM, Jungkook and Jimin.

RM played the saxophone, belting out the hook of BTS’s mega-hit “Dynamite” while the bandmates hugged and presented Jin with a giant bouquet of flowers.

Fans had hung colourful banners outside the base, with one reading: “Seok-jin you did so well for the last 548 days. We’ll stand by you with our unwavering love,” referring to the star by his full first name.

A giant balloon flew in front with the message: “Worldwide handsome Seok-jin! Congratulations on your discharge.”

Yeoncheon county put up its own banner that read: “BTS Jin, The last year and a half was a joy for us. Yeoncheon will not forget you!”

Fans had been urged not to attend, and there were only a couple of admirers present early Wednesday outside the base.

BTS’s agency HYBE announced Jin’s discharge on Weverse — a superfan social media platform — earlier this week.

“We are excited to bring you the news of Jin’s upcoming military discharge,” it said.

It also “strongly advised” fans to “refrain from the visiting site” citing safety concerts, and added that there would be no special events planned.

CARENTAN, France — It might have been the longest wait but on Saturday 100-year-old American World War II veteran Harold Terens married his 96-year-old fiancee in Normandy, just days after being honoured on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in north-western France.

To the sounds of “I will always love you”, “Ave Maria” and bagpipes, Terens and his sweetheart Jeanne Swerlin said “I do” in the town of Carentan-les-Marais at a ceremony attended by dozens of guests, some wearing military uniforms.

To top off an extraordinary day, the newly wedded couple then attended the state banquet at the Elysee Palace in Paris thrown by President Emmanuel Macron in honour of visiting US leader Joe Biden.

“I waited 96 years to find the right man and now I have a wedding like only a queen and king can have,” Swerlin told AFP before the ceremony in Normandy.

“I feel young again,” Terens said. “It’s the best time of my entire life.”

Terens, who wore a light blue suit, entered the local wedding hall to applause from family and friends.

Dressed in satin pink, Swerlin made her entrance to the sound of Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you.” The bride and groom embraced, swaying with emotion.

“Oui!” Swerlin said in French when asked by the mayor, Jean-Pierre Lhonneur, if she wished to take Terens to be her husband.

Terens and Swerlin, who live in Boca Raton, Florida, tied the knot after commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 Normandy landings.

‘Dreams of big things’ 

“Today Harold chose our country to marry Jeanne. They are among us today. cogratulations to the young couple!” Macron told the pair in his toast to Biden at the state dinner.

The glitzy asembly of guests rose and cheered the couple.

“My religion is love,” Terens told AFP in Normandy. He said he always taught his family to “just love”.

“I never leave my house without saying goodbye and kissing them, always, from the day they are born until today.”

His son Bill Terens said they did not know “if he’d be alive or well enough to travel” to France for the anniversary of the D-Day landings as he regularly did in the past. But Terens said he felt good.

“I want to marry Jeannie,” he also said, according to his son.

“So we all thought it was a little crazy, but we supported him again, and here we are. He has always been a dreamer, he dreams of big things and sometimes he gets them.”

Anne-Marie Ruffier, a 66-year-old local, called the wedding a “unique event”.

“It’s also a way of thanking this man who helped liberate France,” she told AFP.

Pierre Le Goubey, 69, said he “wouldn’t have missed this wedding for the world”.

“It’s a powerful symbol,” he said, adding that in a way the veteran was “marrying France”.

‘Unbelievable guy’ 

Philip Taubman, Swerlin’s son-in-law, praised the “once-in-a-lifetime” celebration.

“It proves what life is all about,” he said. “Harold was a hero and he made a safer democracy of all the world and this is just the final celebration of his particular life.”

Terens was awarded the French Legion of Honour by Macron in 2019.

“We are very honoured that Mr. Terens has chosen to marry here, in Carentan, where in June 1944 the Allied troops landed on the beaches of Utah and Omaha,” the mayor said.

“We’ll be offering him champagne, of course, but also a gift to thank him for taking part in the liberation of France.”

During the war Terens was also part of a secret mission that took him to Soviet Ukraine via Casablanca, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Cairo, Baghdad and Tehran.

After the war Terens married his first wife, Thelma, with whom he spent 70 years and raised three children until her death in 2018.

In 2021, a friend introduced him to Swerlin, a charismatic woman who had also been widowed, and the two have been inseparable ever since.

“She makes life worth living,” Terens told AFP last month in Florida.

Swerlin said Terens was “an unbelievable guy”.

“He’s handsome — and he’s a good kisser.”

PARIS — The Picasso Museum in Paris launched an online portal on Monday, providing access to tens thousands of little-seen photos, artworks and other memorabilia from the iconic artist’s archives.

It comes ahead of a study centre dedicated to Pablo Picasso, due to open later this year near the museum in central Paris for researchers and artists-in-residence.

The digital portal opens up access to the museum’s vast collection of artworks, essays, conferences, podcasts and interviews.

Many have never been accessible to the public, including some 19,000 photos.

In the coming years, some 200,000 texts from Picasso’s workshops will also be digitised and uploaded.

Picasso was born in 1881 in Spain and lived almost all his life in France, where he died in 1973. The family entrusted his archives to the French state in 1992.

Meanwhile, the Paris museum opens a new exhibition on Tuesday, “Picasso: Consuming Images”.

It places dozens of famous works by Picasso alongside the historical masters that inspired him — including Poussin, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Goya and Matisse — and many other images and concepts that he drew from.

“Picasso grew up with a flood of new images and works that he went to see in person in Paris museums,” said curator Cecile Godefroy.

But his absorption of images went way beyond the academic, she added, saying that his fascination with postcards, art magazines, photographs, television images, cinema, comic strips and advertising presaged the torrent of images we consume in the age of social media.

By Dina Halaseh,
Educational Psychologist

Our children’s engagement in play helps them learn and develop many skills including social, emotional and even cognitive skills! Here are some good games to introduce to your children and how they can help!

Connect 4: A classic strategy game that›s easy to learn but offers depth in gameplay. It’s easy for all ages and the strategic element keeps players engaged.

The game encourages critical thinking and planning ahead, making each move critical.

Players take turns dropping coloured discs into a vertical grid with the goal of connecting four of their own discs in a row horizontally, vertically, or diagonally before their opponent does.

This game works on divided attention, logic and reasoning, planning, executive function and problem solving.

Tetris: This is a timeless puzzle game that is simple, yet, addictive. The challenge of fitting falling blocks together to create solid lines while the pace increases, creates a thrilling and rewarding experience.

In Tetris, players manipulate falling shapes by rotating and shifting them to create complete horizontal lines without gaps.

This game works on logic and reasoning, processing speed, planning, long and short-term memory, selective and sustained attention, as well as visual processing.

Squint: This is a fun group game that combines drawing and guessing elements. Players take turns drawing pictures while their teammates try to guess what the drawing represents. But there’s a twist! The drawings must be created using a set of abstract shapes rather than traditional drawing tools. This adds a creative challenge and often results in hilarious interpretations and guesses.

This game works on divided and sustained attention, logic and reasoning, planning, speed, problem solving, sensory motor integration, short term and working memory and visual processing.

Let us spend some fun time together as a family and help boost our brains a little! Hope you enjoy the games on this list with your loved ones.

Sequence: This is a strategic board game that combines elements of card games and traditional board games. Players aim to create rows, columns, or diagonals of five connected markers on the game board by playing cards from their hands and placing markers on corresponding spaces.

This game works on: working memory, logic and reasoning, planning and numerical fluency.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

BOCA CHICA, United States — SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket achieved its first ever splashdown during a test flight on Thursday, in a major milestone for the prototype system that may one day send humans to Mars.

Sparks and debris flew off the spaceship as it came down over the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia, dramatic video captured by an onboard camera showed, even as it succeeded in its goal of surviving atmospheric reentry.

“Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!” tweeted SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic achievement!!”

The most powerful rocket ever built blasted off from the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas at 7:50am (12:50 GMT), before entering orbit and soaring halfway across the globe, in a journey that lasted around an hour and five minutes.

Starship is key to Musk’s vision of colonising the Red Planet and making humanity an interplanetary species, while NASA has contracted a modified version to act as the final vehicle that will take astronauts down to the surface of the Moon under the Artemis programme later this decade.

Three previous attempts have ended in its fiery destruction, all part of what the company says is an acceptable cost in its rapid trial-and-error approach to development.

“The payload for these flight tests is data,” SpaceX said on X, a mantra repeated throughout the flight by the commentary team.

During the last test in March, the spaceship managed to fly for 49 minutes before it was lost as it careened into the atmosphere at around 27,000 kilometres per hour.

Since then SpaceX made several software and hardware upgrades.

On Thursday it also succeeded in the first soft splashdown for the first stage booster called Super Heavy, in the Gulf of Mexico, to massive applause from engineers at mission control in Hawthorne in California.

The cheers grew even louder in the flight’s final minutes. Ground teams whooped and hollered as the upper stage glowed a fiery red during its descent, in footage relayed by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.

A piece of flying debris even cracked the camera lens, but the ship ultimately stuck the landing.

“Congratulations SpaceX on Starship’s successful test flight this morning!” NASA chief Bill Nelson wrote on X. “We are another step closer to returning humanity to the Moon through #Artemis — then looking onward to Mars.”

Twice as powerful as Saturn V 

Designed to eventually be fully reusable, Starship stands 121 metres tall with both stages combined.

Its Super Heavy booster produces 16.7 million pounds (74.3 Meganewtons) of thrust, about twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets used during the Apollo missions — though later versions should be more powerful still.

SpaceX’s strategy of carrying out tests in the real world rather than in labs has paid off in the past.

Its Falcon 9 rockets have come to be workhorses for NASA and the commercial sector, its Dragon capsule sends astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, and its Starlink internet satellite constellation now covers dozens of countries.

But the clock is ticking for SpaceX to be ready for NASA’s planned return of astronauts to the Moon in 2026, using a modified Starship as the final vehicle to take astronauts from orbit down to the surface.

To accomplish this, SpaceX will need to first place a primary Starship in orbit, then use multiple “Starship tankers” to fill it up with supercooled fuel for the onward journey — a complex engineering feat that has never before been accomplished.

At least one SpaceX fan has grown tired of waiting. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced this week he has canceled a planned trip around the Moon on Starship with a crew of artists, because he has no idea when it might actually happen.

LOS ANGELES — Alec Baldwin is to star in a reality TV show, the US actor announced on Tuesday, a month before he stands trial for manslaughter over a deadly film set shooting.

The “30 Rock” star and his wife Hilaria said they wanted viewers to see “the ups and downs” of life with their seven children, who range in age between 19 months and 10 years.

“We’re inviting you into our home to experience the ups and downs; the good, the bad, the wild and the crazy,” the couple said on Instagram.

“Home is the place we love to be most. We are the Baldwins, and we’re going to TLC! God help you all,” they added, referring to the channel that will broadcast the fly-on-the-wall show.

The announcement comes just weeks before the 66-year-old faces a jury in New Mexico over the on-set death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Baldwin, a producer and star of “Rust”, was rehearsing a scene in October 2021 with a loaded Colt .45 when it discharged, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.

Baldwin has repeatedly denied responsibility, insisting he did not pull the trigger on the gun, which should not have contained a live round.

The actor last month sought to have the charges dismissed, but the application was rejected by the judge in the case.

He faces up to 18 months of incarceration if convicted.

The armourer who loaded the gun, Hannah Gutierrez, was sentenced in April to 18 months’ prison after being convicted of manslaughter.

Baldwin, who memorably portrayed Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live”, has been largely absent from the screen in the years since Hutchins died.

News of his new show — which is due to hit the airwaves in 2025 — brought a mixed response on social media.

A number of commentators applauded the idea, while others noted the proximity to the trial.

Some said they thought it would be a sanitised version of a wealthy Hollywood star’s life.

“If this is a reality show, you need to acknowledge the people we never see, who take care of your children,” wrote @lee_ann56, asking how many nannies the couple employ.

The Emmy award-winning Baldwin was previously married to actress Kim Basinger, with whom he has a 28-year-old daughter, Ireland Baldwin.

CRIEFF, United Kingdom — Dior tapped into Scotland’s traditions and rebellious streak late Monday, presenting its 2025 “cruise” collection, with punk tartan, chain mail and magical ball gowns.

Haute couture has increasingly taken the catwalk on the road to showcase its latest creations, with “cruises” to spectacular locations all over the world.

After Athens, Seville and Mexico, this year Dior plumped for historic Drummond Castle, near Crieff in Perthshire, central Scotland.

Among the audience in the castle’s formal gardens were Dior muses Jennifer Lawrence, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rosamund Pike and Laetitia Casta, with an army of waiters in elegant black kilts in keen attendance.

Models descended the stone stairs from the castle to the sound of bagpipes, disappearing from view behind the manicured hedges and trees.

They appeared as warriors from the bushes, with long braids down their backs, clad in leather, chain mail and flashy breastplates.

Elsewhere, there were magical lace collars, capes, heavy velvet ball gowns and pearl-embroidered corsets.

Some styles were combined, with skirts opening onto thigh-high boots, kilts, shorts, teddys, knee-high socks and punk-inspired leather and silver chokers.

Tartan, Scotland’s most famous fabric, was mostly everywhere — in purple, gold and bright red — giving a grungy feel.

French actress Camille Cottin said Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri wove tartan and punk culture “with huge grace”.

“It was magnificent,” she said afterwards.

Art of embroidery

Strong female characters are often present in Chiuri’s collections, and the Scottish show was no exception as she took inspiration from Mary, Queen of Scots.

The tragic heir to the throne of England spent nearly 20 years in captivity before being executed in 1587.

“She spent decades embroidering as a means of comfort and reflection but also to express herself during her 19 years of imprisonment,” Chiuri wrote on Instagram.

The collection as a result featured Scottish emblems such as the unicorn and the thistle.

Dior, which is part of luxury brand LVMH, joined forces with local artisans and designers, notably Samantha McCoach, who founded the brand Le Kilt, to reinterpret the Scottish wardrobe essential.

The show also paid homage to Dior’s founder, Christian Dior, and his love of Scotland and its traditions.

Nearly 70 years ago, he organised a spectacular show at the nearby Gleneagles Hotel, and an evening of dance with high society of the time.

“Cruise” shows in exceptional locations are helping to boost a brand’s image as the luxury industry struggles to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic.

LVMH for example saw a two-per cent fall in sales in the first quarter of 2024 compared with the same period last year, with spending hit by inflation globally.

There is also a boost to local tourism.

“To have Dior, an iconic fashion house, come to Perthshire will bring worldwide attention to the region,” Caroline Warburton, from VisitScotland, told AFP.

STOCKHOLM — Sweden’s king on Friday handed royal orders to the members of iconic pop group ABBA, marking the first time in 50 years the honours have been awarded in the Nordic country.

At a ceremony at the royal palace in Stockholm, King Carl XVI Gustaf presented the Royal Order of Vasa to Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog, Anni-Frid Reuss and Bjorn Ulvaeus, who made a rare public appearance together.

Known for disco hits like “Mamma Mia” (1975), “Dancing Queen” (1976), and “The Winner Takes It All” (1980), the four were honoured for “outstanding achievements in Swedish and international music”.

Sweden stopped awarding royal orders to its own citizens in 1975, as the practice was deemed anachronistic.

The country continued to award royal orders to foreign citizens.

However, the country’s parliament reinstated the practice in 2022 and Friday’s ceremony marked the first time the orders were awarded to Swedes in half a century.

This year also marks the 50th anniversary of ABBA’s 1974 Eurovision Song Contest win with “Waterloo”, which launched the group’s international breakthrough.

With their unique style and catchy melodies, the group personified disco around the globe until they stopped performing in 1982.

ABBA’s popularity was rekindled by the “Mamma Mia” films, which introduced the group’s music to new generations.

The quartet has also returned to the stage through ABBA Voyage, a new album released in 2021, and a permanent show of the same name in London in which they are represented by digital avatars (holograms).

In total, 13 Swedes were honoured for their achievements at the ceremony, including two Nobel Prize winners: geneticist Svante Paabo and French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier.