Kunioki Kurihara has shunned the spotlight since closing a deal to sell three uninhabited islands in the East China Sea to Japan's government in September. The islands are also claimed by China and deemed part of its national territory for centuries. The sale sent tension soaring between Tokyo and Beijing. "It's odd that they owned the islands for so long," said Jeffrey Kingston, director of Asia Studies at Temple University, Japan Campus. "It's only now that the ante is up."

Tuesday was National Memory Screening day. More than 130 sites around Pennsylvania offered free screenings to increase early detection of memory problems. The screenings can help reassure people who are worried by the kinds of normal forgetfulness that come with age, says Ausim Azizi, chair of neurology at Temple University School of Medicine. "Hopefully if that happens, and people come for memory screening and (it’s) normal, that will alleviate that worry and that concern and that anxiety," Azizi said.

Cigarette packs featuring images of cadavers, a field of tombstones or cancer-riddled mouths may indeed convince smokers to quit, a new study suggests, and those kinds of pictures may have a particularly strong impact on less-educated smokers who are less informed about health. "I'm not that surprised," said Aditi Satti, director of the Smoking Cessation Program and an assistant professor of medicine at Temple University Health System. "A picture is probably worth a thousand words in this type of patient,” she said.