As It Happens

Plus: A retired Scottish police officer’s quest to find a home for his collection of thousands and thousands of bricks. 

Also: Why giant rats (wearing tiny backpacks) may be the next frontier in sniffing out smuggled goods.

Plus: The strange saga of Quasi, a giant hand-shaped sculpture that divided Wellington, New Zealand…and is now on its way out of town.   

Also: Beloved Montreal political cartoonist Terry Mosher pays tribute to John Little – the painter who immortalized Quebec winter streetscapes.

Plus: A Calgary man manages to up the ante on Halloween, challenging his own home’s structural integrity by giving away thousands of 2L pop bottles.  

And: New York officially legalizes jaywalking, a term Gersh Kuntzman of Streetsblog NYC says you shouldn’t even use.

Plus: It’s a nay from them. A new crop of British MPs challenge “bobbing” and other (frankly strange) parliamentary traditions. 

And: A petition filed to Ecuador's copyright office makes an unprecedented request to recognize one of the country's forests as the co-creator of a newly released song. Writer Robert Macfarlane tells us it's only natural.

Plus: A short piece of music written on a tiny card appears to be a lost work by Frédéric Chopin.

And: In Lebanon, displaced people find shelter and support in the country's historic old movie theatres; and with Georgians on the streets of Tblisi a politician who led a team of EU observers tells us about the “democratic backsliding” taking place.

Plus: A team of Belgian ultrarunners set a truly punishing record by running a 6.7 kilometre loop every hour ... until they just can't anymore. 

And: Samar Abu Elouf sits down with Nil in studio. The Palestinian photojournalist and New York Times contributor was honoured this week by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. 

Plus: A Tory MP is fighting to have the classic Cockney dish “pie and mash” given protected status (but you can hold the eel). 

Also: A Canadian artist debuts his giant biodiversity jenga tower sculpture at the UN's COP16 climate conference.

Plus: A researcher was so frustrated by the lack of data on women that she scanned her own brain 75 times.

Also: Two years after a foiled attempt on Masih Alinejad’s life, US prosecutors charge a senior official in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the plot. The activist tells us threats to her life won’t stop her from speaking out.

Plus: A Harvard scientist describes “S2”, which has a pretty boring name for an event that once boiled oceans and levelled mountains on earth. 

Also: More than a hundred women soccer players sign an open letter, calling on FIFA to drop its sponsorship deal with a Saudi company. Canadian captain Jessie Fleming says FIFA is choosing money over women’s safety and the safety of the planet. 

Plus: We check in with food writer Jonathan Bender, as Kansas City gets set to open its Museum of BBQ.  

Also: The father of a murdered woman discovers his late daughter's name and image used to create an AI-powered chatbot; and after a major cyberattack Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle tells us it's all part of a chilling set of attacks on library systems around the world.