10 things you need to know today: October 30, 2014

(Image credit: (Doug Pensinger/Getty Images))

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1. Giants win their third World Series in five years
2. Fed ends its bond-buying stimulus
3. Nurse tests Maine's Ebola quarantine policy
4. Apple CEO Tim Cook says he's 'proud to be gay'
5. Mudslide buries more than 100 people in Sri Lanka
6. WHO reports Liberia's Ebola rate appears to have slowed
7. NATO fighter jets turn back Russian military planes
8. Palestinian suspected in assassination attempt killed by Israeli police
9. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell dies at 87
10. First piece of Amelia Earhart's lost plane identified

last updated 26 January 2015

1. Giants win their third World Series in five years

The San Francisco Giants beat the Kansas City Royals 3-2 in a hard-fought Game 7 to win the World Series on Wednesday night. The Giants were the first team to win their third Major League Baseball championship in five years since the New York Yankees did it in the late 1990s. Giants ace and Series MVP Madison Bumgarner, who had already earned two wins in the Series, pitched the last five innings and held onto the team's narrow lead by allowing just two hits, getting the final out with the tying run on third.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday ended its longstanding effort to stimulate the economy by purchasing bonds, citing improvement in the job market. The end of the six-year program — called quantitative easing — marked a significant milestone in the nation's recovery from the Great Recession. The program contributed to a long-running bull market for stocks, and helped businesses and individuals by keeping borrowing costs low. Fed policymakers said that they still planned to keep short-term interest rates near zero for the foreseeable future.

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Maine Gov. Paul LePage late Wednesday sent police to enforce the state's Ebola quarantine on nurse Kaci Hickox, after she threatened to sue if the state didn't let her leave her home by Thursday. Hickox said the policy was "not scientifically nor constitutionally just," and vowed not to "sit around and be bullied around by politicians and be forced to stay in my home when I am not a risk to the American public." Maine's Ebola protocol calls for Hickox to remain isolated at home for 21 days after returning from treating Ebola patients in West Africa.

At least 10 people were killed and as many as 190 remained missing, apparently buried alive Wednesday by a landslide on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka. Survivors and rescue workers dug by hand searching for victims immediately after the disaster. Crews used heavy excavating machines on Thursday expand the search. More than 300 people survived the mudslide, which was caused by torrential rains, but authorities said the hope of finding more people alive was slim.

World Health Organization officials said Wednesday that the rate of new Ebola diagnoses appeared to have slowed in Liberia for the first time since the epidemic started. Liberia is at the heart of West Africa's outbreak, which has killed an estimated 5,000 people. WHO has warned that if the rate continued to rise as it had been there could be 5,000 to 10,000 new cases per week by December. The slowing pace doesn't mean the worst is over, said WHO's Bruce Aylward. "It's like saying your pet tiger is under control," he said.

NATO scrambled jets to intercept at least 26 Russian military aircraft flying over Western Europe and the Black Sea on Tuesday and Wednesday. The unauthorized flights further strained relations already damaged by Russia's support of separatists in Ukraine. NATO said the violations of its members' airspace also put civilian planes at risk, partly because the military planes don't use transponders. The flights came days after Sweden staged its biggest naval mobilization since the Cold War to hunt for a suspected Russian submarine.

Israeli security forces early Thursday shot and killed a Palestinian man — identified as Muatnaz Hijazi, 32 — suspected of shooting a prominent American-born right-wing Israeli activist. Police said Hijazi fired first. The activist, Yehuda Glick, was seriously wounded Wednesday night in a drive-by shooting outside the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem after a conference promoting Jewish presence at the Temple Mount. Two employees at a restaurant where Hijazi worked were arrested.

Poet Galway Kinnell died of leukemia this week at his Vermont home. He was 87. Kinnell won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1983 for his collection Selected Poems. He won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship the following year. Galway, often compared to Walt Whitman, was known for his unique lyrical style, and his ability to evoke everything from urban streetscapes to pastoral scenes in his home state of Vermont, where he was the first person since Robert Frost to hold the title of state poet.

Researchers say they are highly confident that they have identified a battered piece of aluminum as a fragment of Amelia Earhart's plane, which disappeared in the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, as she attempted a record flight around the world at the equator. The fragment was found in 1991 on the uninhabited atoll of Nikumaroro, where researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery believe Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crashed landed, then lived and died as castaways.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.