NPR News

Malala, the 15-year-old shot in the head by the Taliban, has been airlifted to Britain, the Pakistani government said in a press release today.

The government said that they were "pleased with her present condition, which has been described as optimal."

After days of rumors, the Japanese telecom Softbank announced it would buy a 70 percent stake of the American mobile carrier Sprint Nextel.

Two reasons this is important: Sprint had been overshadowed by mega companies Verizon and AT&T. When T-Mobile announced a merger with Mobile PCS, Sprint was left in a kind of nowhere land.

Imagine a lawyer's lawyer, a fighter's fighter and a pol's pol. Now imagine one person as all three. That was Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who died Sunday at age 82.

Over the course of three decades in the U.S. Senate (1981-2011), Specter came to personify the pragmatic, independent operator who sized up the substance and politics of every issue for himself. His vote could be one of the hardest to get, and often the one that made the difference.