The 10 Most Important Things In The World Right Now

DINA SPECTOR

 OCT. 7, 2014

REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett

Professor John O’Keefe speaks at a news conference in London October 6, 2014. Anglo-American John O’Keefe and Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for discovering the brain’s internal positioning system, helping humans find their way and giving clues to how strokes and Alzheimer’s affect the brain.

Good morning. Here’s what you need to know for Tuesday. 

1. Islamic State militants have entered the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border. The Guardian warns that capturing Kobani would “give the group full control of a large stretch of the Turkish-Syrian border.”

2. A Spanish nurse has been infected with Ebola after treating two patients in Madrid. She is thought to be the first known person to have contracted the virus outside West Africa.

3. President Obama said the White House was taking an “all-hand-on-deck” approach to preventing an Ebola outbreak in the US. Last week, a man traveling from Liberia was the first patient to be diagnosed with the virus while on US soil. 

4. Samsung has forecast a 60% drop in third-quarter profits from a year ago. This is the biggest decline in quarterly profits since 2009. 

5. South Korean and North Korean patrol boats exchanged fire on a disputed sea border, before the North Korean ship retreated. 

6. Hewlett-Packard confirmed Monday that the company will split into two seperate businesses. The breakup that will lead to massive layoffs.

7. The recipient of the Nobel prize in physics will be announced on Tuesday from Stockholm. On Monday, the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded jointly to John O’Keefe and husband-and-wife team Edvard and May-Britt Moser for “their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”

8. Russian president Vladimir Putin turns 62 today. 

9. A proposed chapel on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, took the top award in the seventh annual World Architecture Festival held in Singapore. 

10. An extremely rare lunar eclipse, a horizontal eclipse, will be visible to those in Australia, western Asia, islands in the Pacific Ocean, and much of North America on Wednesday, Oct. 8 

And finally …

American conservatives are going nuts over a third-grade textbook math problem that shows students how to subtract using the “counting-up” method rather than the standard “borrow and carry” approach.