Life Style

Dominica Yang started noticing changes in her mother’s behaviour in 2012.“Mum had a sharp mind, but one day while preparing dad’s medication, she insisted on emptying the tablets from each packet and became obsessed with counting them. She kept losing count, which made her angry and frustrated,” says Yang, a Hongkonger, of her usually kind and gentle mother.As the days and months went on, Alzheimer’s disease – a type of dementia that affects memory, thinking and behaviour – tightened its grip.“It came very suddenly and very dramatically, like a big cliff drop,” she says.Yang co-founded Hong Kong’s Brain Health Initiative in 2015, a dementia support group that provides a network for carers. Photo: Jonathan Wong

One of the most popular K-dramas of all time is set to return, a star makes a long-awaited comeback, and new occult and medical dramas get ready for production.Read on for more about these stories and other news of casting for coming Korean drama series.1. Reborn Rich season 2Song Joong-ki, pictured in a still from the first season of Reborn Rich, will be joined by Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae in season 2. Photo: JTBCAlthough it has not been made official that Lee will star in the series, he will be involved to some degree because Artist Company, the production company and management agency he owns, will take part in development of the new season.Reborn Rich, which starred Song Joong-ki as a loyal corporate lackey who was left for dead, then reincarnated as the grandson of the company’s chair...

As they painstakingly scrape grime off a monumental painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, the restorers do a remarkable job of ignoring their unusual surroundings: they are watched by crowds of people, many recording on mobile phones.Paris’ Orsay Museum has thrown open to the public a process that often happens behind closed doors.The cleaning and repairs to A Burial at Ornans, one of the museum’s signature works that Courbet painted between 1849 and 1850, are taking place in a bespoke enclosure with windows for visitors to peer through.“A great idea,” said Jennifer Dasal, a visiting art historian from the US state of North Carolina. “If it’s lasting for a while, people can come back and they can watch the restoration over time.”An art restorer carefully removes layers of varnish that...

With its exposed concrete, sharp lines and overhanging roof, the St Jakobshalle, an icon of 1970s Brutalism in Switzerland on the outskirts of Basel, will provide a stark contrast to the bright colours and flaming-piano pyrotechnics of the Eurovision Song Contest when it plays host to the event from May 10 to 17.Its cold concrete and unwelcoming facade is representative of why so many travellers heading south to Italy or onwards to the Swiss Alps speed through without giving the city a second glance.Basel’s industrial legacy still looms large. With a long history as a centre for textiles and chemicals industries, the city is often associated with an industrial skyline, grey highways and smoking chimneys.But Basel’s image is being redefined. The Rhine, a river once tainted by industry, is n...

Since the start of the year, Brandy Hernandez has applied to nearly 200 entertainment jobs.The 22-year-old film school graduate said that for most of those applications, she never heard back – not even a rejection. When she did land follow-up interviews, she was almost always ghosted afterwards.“I knew that I wouldn’t be a famous screenwriter or anything straight out of college,” said Hernandez, who graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 2024. But she thought she would at least be qualified for an entry-level film industry job.“It shouldn’t be this hard,” she kept thinking.The wildfires that ravaged parts of Los Angeles in January 2025 were some of the most costly in California’s history, and have not done the city’s film industry any favours. Phot...

Visitors mill around a bright red hilltop pagoda in southwest China, gazing down at a sprawling cigarette factory that has put an otherwise unremarkable city on the map.China is home to a third of the world’s smokers and tobacco-related diseases are a major cause of death in the country – and likely to worsen as its population rapidly ages.The Chinese government hopes to dramatically reduce that by the end of the decade, but is struggling to do so as it clashes with a powerful state tobacco monopoly and local economies reliant on the crop.That contradiction smoulders in Yuxi, Yunnan province, whose nascent tourism businesses and farmers thrive on its history of cigarette production.Students walk past a mural of workers at a cigarette factory on a wall in Yuxi, in China’s Yunnan province. P...

Hong Kong artist and freelance writer Helen Law was just 38 when she was diagnosed with stage-three colorectal cancer.She had been feeling tired and weak in the months leading up to the diagnosis, but was unaware that these were symptoms of cancer.“I thought I was just sleep deprived,” Law, now 49, says.“One day, after rushing to cross the street during my lunch break, I felt so out of breath that I had to sit and rest before walking back to my office.”Law knew something was wrong when crossing the road left her breathless, but she never imagined it would be cancer. Photo: Jonathan WongShe saw a doctor, who ordered a blood test that confirmed she was anaemic – her red blood cell count was low. Follow-up tests including an endoscopy and colonoscopy revealed a malignant tumour in her colon.L...

It has been a while since Tony Leung Ka-fai last made a high-profile appearance at a European film festival to promote a film, so the occasion feels a little special.Still, when we sit down with him during the 2025 Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, the Hong Kong film legend is waiting patiently in the hospitality suite of the Teatro Novo, quietly sipping a beer as journalists and photographers swirl around the room.“I like this festival,” Leung says. “I enjoy Udine and the audience here. Cannes is more formal, more commercial. You have to be on all the time.”This year the Far East Film Festival awarded filmmaker Tsui Hark a Golden Mulberry for Lifetime Achievement. Leung introduced Hark to a sold-out crowd and handed him the award after a screening of Legends of the Condor Heroes: Th...

Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, Japan, I was sitting alone at a Melbourne bar in Australia. Next to me a woman was bragging to a friend: she, too, was heading to Kyoto. Except that her trip was in four months, and she had just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations.As I snooped on the conversation I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I had yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: eating well in Japan is not something to lose sleep over.It is true that the best-known institutions book up faster than tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and that casual noodle joints have queues longer than for a Disney theme park ride.But zoom out and you will see that those spots are mobbed because they have been repeatedly glorified by a handful of Ti...

In April and May this year, at least a dozen countries held or will hold elections to choose their political representatives, including Australia, Canada, Portugal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Singapore.I was supposed to cast my ballot at my local community centre in Singapore on May 3, but I was travelling overseas and it was next to impossible to change my travel plans.Voting is compulsory in Singapore and failing to do so meant that my name was struck off the electoral rolls. But overseas travel is a valid reason for not voting, and I can easily re-register online as a voter without paying a fee.I take voting seriously because it is my right, and my duty, as a citizen.When I was living in Hong Kong, I always voted at Singapore’s consulate-general in Admiralty during elections. While I was ...