Tonight:

Attacked for fighting back. In Pakistan, a fourteen-year-old girl named Malala Yousafzai is targeted by Taliban assassins who despise her activism -- but she survives.

You can hear a kingpin drop. The leader of a notorious drug cartel is killed by the Mexican military -- although his body has since gone missing.

Dream home, nightmare mortgage. I'll speak with a young Irish homeowner who is holding out hope for government legislation that could keep a roof over her family's head.

For students, it's a major and minor problem. An Israeli university faces the closure of its political science department -- and faculty members say it's because they're not toeing the government line.

Now you're cooking with petrol. An American English professor finds a surprising number of Britishisms have crept into American English.

And..."Come into my parlour," said the spider to the wasp -- and then it said, "GLURK!" A one-hundred-million-year-old blob of amber captures an arachnid right in the middle of attacking its prey.

As It Happens, the Tuesday edition. Radio that knows sometimes your golden years sneak up on you.

That's the voice of Malala Yousafzai -- a voice that almost went silent today.

Malala Yousafzai is a fourteen-year-old Pakistani girl. A few hours ago, in Swat, Taliban assassins shot her.

Ms. Yousafzai is an outspoken advocate for girl's education. Here she is speaking to The New York Times in January 2009. At that time, the Pakistan Taliban was in control of Swat, and had shut down her school.

Rob Crilly has been following today's events for The Telegraph newspaper. We reached him in Islamabad.

Yesterday, while most people spent Thanksgiving Monday relaxing, Robert Reaney went flying -- as he had done hundreds of times before. But this time, somethign went wrong.

Just after noon, near the town of Calabogie -- about a hundred kilometres west of Ottawa -- Mr. Reaney's plane crashed. He was the only person on board -- and police have confirmed that the seventy-four-year-old pilot died in the accident.

The cause of the crash is now being investigated by the Transportation Safety Board.

The plane crashed in a dense wooded area close to Black Donald Lake. And Shawn Popkie saw it plummet from the sky. He's the owner of the nearby White Pine Resort, and was among the first to reach the crash site.

Yesterday, he told CBC Ottawa what he had witnessed.

Irish homeowners hope the end is near for their life underwater.

Many people who bought homes in Ireland during the boom times before 2008 are now buckling under the weight of large mortgages and low incomes. So the Irish government has proposed legislation that will bail them out. Sort of.

The new law would make it easier for people to claim bankruptcy and leave their homes and mortgages. But the hope is that the easing of insolvency rules will force mortgage providers to renegotiate with people who can't pay.

Laura Crowley is among thousands of people who hope it works. She's struggling to avoid the loss of her home. We reached her in County Kildare, just outside Dublin, Ireland.

As you just heard, Canada's Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, was in Ireland over the weekend, touting the job prospects here in Canada.

On Friday night Mr. Kenney appeared on an Irish late-night TV show. In the audience, a number of young Irish people shared their stories and why they're considering a life in Canada.

For the record, here is some of Mr. Kenney's Irish TV appearance, and some of the stories he heard.

Lay off.

That's the latest word from Big Bird and his crew -- to the President of the United States.

It all started last Wednesday during the first presidential debate, when Mitt Romney said this to moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS:

Of course, much tweeting and clucking ensued -- leading to Big Bird dropping into the set of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update segment over the weekend. But he refused to let anchor Seth Myers egg him on, and remained decidedly non-partisan:

So it was no surprise that President Obama's campaign team caused a flap with Big Bird and his team, upon the release of this ad featuring the iconic Muppet, released earlier today:

He was simply known as "El Lazca".

Heriberto Lazcano was the leader of one of Mexico's two largest and most deadly drug cartels, Los Zetas. Until Sunday -- when he was killed in an operation carried out by Mexico's Navy Marines, in a rural area of the northern state of Coahuila.

His death is being seen as a major victory in Mexican President Felipe Calderon's six-year war against the cartels.

But where the cartels are concerned, nothing is ever predictable: after he was officially identified and was being prepared for burial, it's believed that the body of El Lazca was stolen.

Diana Washington Valdez is a reporter with the El Paso Times. She's in El Paso, Texas -- near the Mexican border.

It's an ignominous death, preserved in all its glory -- for a hundred million years.

Scientists have revealed A rare piece of amber containing a prehistoric spider, attacking a prehistoric wasp.

George Poinar studied the amber.

He's professor emeritus of Zoology at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, Oregon.

Maybe it's Harry Potter's fault. Or those gossips at Downton Abbey. But there's a new group in the U.S. these days: the chattering classes.

These are otherwise ordinary Yanks who have embraced terms like "chat up," "ginger-haired," and "spot-on" -- expressions that were once the exclusive domain of the British.

It's a trend that Ben Yagoda has been tracking for some time. He's a professor of English at Delaware University, and he keeps a blog of "American Britishisms." We reached Professor Yagoda in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

As an offensive tackle, Eric Winston doesn't usually make headlines. But today -- after an impassioned post-game speech -- the Kansas City Chiefs player is one of the biggest names in football.

On Sunday, the Chiefs lost, nine to six, to the Baltimore Ravens. And they also lost starting quarterback Matt Cassel, who was knocked unconscious during play, and suffered a concussion.

It's disturbing when your quarterback is knocked out. But for Eric Winston, it was infinitely more disturbing when spectators started cheering at the sight of the unconscious quarterback -- who's been blamed for the team's lacklustre one-and-four start to the season.

That enthusiastic response to an injury horrified Mr. Winston. And after Sunday's game, he had some harsh words for those cheering fans. Here's some of what he had to say.

When thousands of Egyptians marched through Cairo today, they went back in time.

The march marked the one-year anniversary of the so-called "Maspero massacre" -- which took place during a protest led by Egyptian Coptic Christians. They were angry after attacks had been made on their churches. But the protest turned violent -- and more than two dozen people were killed.

A day after the protest last year, Carol spoke with Sarah Carr, a reporter with the Al Masry Al Youm newspaper. Here's part of their conversation -- from our archives.

Israel's academics have long faced boycotts from their international colleagues over the Israeli government's position on various political issues.

Now they're facing censure from their own government.

Later this month, Israel's Committee for Higher Education will decide whether to heed the advice of one of its subcommittees, and close the political science department at Ben Gurion University. The recommendation to close the department is based on the committee's concerns about quality of education.

But faculty at the school say the department is really under threat because some academics from the school vocally espouse a liberal point of view at odds with those of the current Israeli government.

David Newman is the dean of Ben Gurion's Department of Humanities and Social Science. We reached him in Metar, Israel.

Here's a challenge for you -- one both etymological and entomological.

It's a public appeal from the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to identify the origins of a particularly colourful and cheeky expression. I'll let one of them explain, in our Sound of the Day:

You can view the OED's appeal here.

The city of Stormwind is intimately familiar with carnage. For generations, the blood of paladins, dread lords, and dragons has been spilled on its cobblestones. But this weekend, the virtual city of Stormwind played host to an event that sent thousands to their knees, rending their garments, screaming, "Why?" to a pitiless sky. Or, to put it less melodramatically, it left thousands sitting in swivel chairs, staring at their computer monitors, so stunned that they hardly noticed they were spilling their lattes on their track pants.

The mass death happened in the "World of Warcraft" -- a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG.

We last visited this particular MMORPG last week, when we spoke with Colleen Lachowicz, a Democratic State Senate candidate in Maine. Her Republican opponents are targeting her for being an avid "World of Warcraft" player -- because her avatar is a violent rogue orc.

As we go to air, we don't know if Ms. Lachowicz's orc survived the bloodbath. Thousands of characters did not, when a hacker went berserk, and managed to kill off every avatar in various cities, including Stormwind. As one player put it on a message board, "It was really weird. I was AFK for like one minute, and when I came back I was dead, and so was everyone else."

"AFK" means "away from keyboard".

One player in Stormwind put up a video of the horror. Here's a short clip. And be warned: if you find the sound of voice actors pretending to be killed by some unseen force disturbing, this is disturbing.

It's that time of the year again. The leaves are turning, the days are getting shorter, temperatures are dropping.

Not for Dr. Alexander Kumar. For the past nine months, he has been living at Concordia Station in Antarctica, one of the most remote places in the world -- conducting research for the European Agency's human spaceflight program on the effects of cold, dark isolation.

After months without sun, it is now spring in Antarctica.

We reached Dr. Kumar at the Concordia Station.

Don't freak out, but we're surrounded by trillions of microscopic organisms. I said don't freak out. Swinging your arms around isn't going to do anything.

Now, you have three options: you can just relax and accept the presence of these minuscule creatures; you can try to forget they exist; or you can study them. But if you choose the latter, be prepared to be overwhelmed.

That's what happened to Peter Larsen, a biologist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. he had to find some way to deal with these hordes of tiny organisms, in a way that would help him -- and us -- understand them. So he took a bunch of microbial data from samples of the English Channel, and translated the data into music.

It's complicated, as you'd imagine. He assigned chords to sunlight, temperature and nutrient levels. Then he matched the proper quantities of microbes to each of these environmental conditions to create a musical scale.

I know. I don't know what I'm talking about either. But the thing is, in a nutshell, he turned the data into music.

Now, this kind of thing has been done before -- but often, the results are dissonant, at best. But Dr. Larsen's musical data proved to be...kind of jazzy.

Here's an example: this is called "Fifty Degrees North, Four Degrees West".