Benjamin Ola. Akande, PhD
Dean, School of Business & Technology
Webster University

I’ve found racial and ethnic harmony in the most unexpected place, Sesame Street. Sesame Street is a world of respectful puppets and kind friends where everyone owns a piece of the neighborhood. With puppets (including those played by Webster University alumni Matt Vogel and Victoria Rudolph) representing the good in all of us, Sesame Street shows us the value in believing in ourselves and in the resilient energy to overcome, to persevere, and to make a difference.

Kermit the Frog taught us the value of friendship and reminds us all that we were all born original yet we spend the rest of our lives trying to be copies. Kermit challenges us all to strive to stay unique.

Big Bird taught us that we are all birds of different feathers and that life is not about how different we are but the difference we make. Big Bird challenges us all to continue to strive towards building relationships with others and not to confuse our net worth with our self worth.

It is the Count who introduces us to the intricate value of money and warned against the tendency of putting too much value on material things.

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Pete Cashmore
Special to CNN

In the ongoing saga of paid content on the Web, Rupert Murdoch is once again threatening to pull his Web sites from Google's search results.

In a Sky News interview posted online this week, he said "There's not enough advertising in the world to make all the Web sites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our Web sites, but paying."

Meanwhile, social game maker Playfish, with estimated revenues of up to $75 million from selling virtual goods in its games on Facebook and other platforms, has been acquired by Electronic Arts in a deal worth up to $400 million.

The company is not alone in turning virtual goods into gold: Playfish rival Zynga reportedly brings in over $100 million in revenue (a proportion of which, admittedly, is driven by schemes in which users receive virtual currency when signing up for questionable special offers).

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Mishan Afsari
AC360°

“What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!”
-Victor Hugo, author of 'Les Miserables'

It seems so complicated – killing by lethal injection. Strapping an inmate to a gurney, sticking on heart monitors, inserting needles in veins, connecting intravenous drip tubes.

And then the wait: drip drip drip. First saline – harmless. Then sodium thiopental – puts one to sleep. Then a paralytic agent – stops the breath. And last, potassium chloride – stops the heart. Drip.

All this, versus one bullet.

It only took one bullet to kill each of the 10 victims when John Muhammad and his young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo terrorized the D.C. Beltway for three weeks in October 2002.

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Stamps on one of Chris Guillebeau's passports.

Chris Guillebeau
AC360° Contributor

This post is relevant for readers with U.S. passports who travel frequently. If you don’t fit in that group, feel free to skip this one — or just read it for the entertainment value.

I’ve mentioned a few times that I have two U.S. passports, and each time at least one person asks me how that works. Well, I’ll tell you exactly how I got the second passport, and what you need to do if this would help you too.

First, the need for a second passport. Why bother?

U.S. passports are good for a number of reasons: notably, they are valid for 10 years, and when you fill up the pages with lots of stamps and visas, the State Department in Washington, D.C. or any embassy abroad will issue more pages at no charge. I’ve had three passport page extensions so far, and without that option I would have needed at least four passports by this point. No other major country of which I am aware offers a passport that includes both of these important features.

As good as a U.S. passport can be, there are still two problems with having only one passport of any kind. First, when you visit politically sensitive countries (especially in the Middle East), the ensuing stamps can cause delays and other problems for you later.

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His shooting spree left at least 10 dead and millions terrified of bullets coming from an unseen sniper.

But Mildred Muhammad believes she was the ultimate target of her ex-husband, John Allan Muhammad, the man dubbed the "D.C. Sniper."

And for some time, Muhammad said she felt extreme guilt for the victims that were gunned down in grocery store parking lots and gas stations. The youngest was a 13-year-old boy who was shot while walking to his Maryland school.

Muhammad spoke about the guilt she felt after the killing spree on CNN's "Larry King Live" on Monday night, the day before her ex-husband was scheduled to be executed.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolized the end of communism across Eastern Europe.

David W. Fitzpatrick
CNN Special Investigations Unit

There’s a lot to read and a lot to see today about the events 20 years ago on Nov. 9, 1989 when East Germany (technically a splendid oxymoron called the German Democratic Republic) took no action and the infamous Berlin Wall was reduced to a footnote of history.

I was there for those tumultuous and joyous events as a producer for the CBS Evening News and above all else, the one thing that sticks in my mind is not the tremendous geo-political fallout, but rather the voices and faces of the people of both East and West Berlin.

When I arrived in Berlin after an overnight flight from New York and then on the only Western airline allowed into West Berlin (remember Pan American World Airways?), enormous crowds had already started to build near the Wall and the adjacent Brandenburg Gate.

One of the first people I recognized — and he, being a seasoned politician enjoyed the recognition — was the mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt. His long time symbol was a red rose that he always wore in lapel of his suit. He was beaming as we approached with our camera crew and in perfect English began to give us an interview drenched in politics and logic, but mostly void of emotion.

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World leaders gathered in the German capital Monday to mark 20 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Sean Yates
AC360° Senior Producer

Before I was a TV producer, or had even thought about making journalism a career, I was a 20-year old exchange student in England spending a semester abroad at Reading University, outside London.

My friends and I had started the weekend early and we were on a Friday morning train, heading from London to the beach in Brighton, when the businessman across from me opened his newspaper with the headline, “Berlin Wall Falls”.

I slumped in my seat to get an angle to read the details of his paper until finally in a very proper, and very annoyed, British accent he said, “Would you like to read my paper?” (It still makes me laugh thinking about it.)

At the next stop I got off the train, headed back to London, threw some clothes in my backpack and flew to Berlin with no idea where I was going to stay or what I was going to do but I recognized a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be part of history.

One memory stands out.

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Two East German border guards atop the Berlin Wall look westward

Terry Irving
Senior Producer
CNN Washington Bureau

I was in Berlin for a week in 1989. Three days before ‘The Opening,’ three days during, and one day after. My memories are fragmented – not only by 20 years of time, but also by a near total lack of sleep during the week that marked the “end of history.”

I was working for ‘Nightline’ at ABC News at the time. After a busy period, the bosses decided to give me a “vacation” – two weeks covering the London bureau. Since nothing was really going on in the world, I decided to fly my wife and little girl over to see the Peter Pan statue and wander the little streets of London. As they were waiting for the taxi to the airport, I called and said I was being sent to Berlin. East Germans were streaming across to the West through other – less restrictive – countries in Eastern Europe and it looked like there was enough material for a good story. I think my daughter still hasn’t forgiven me.

While flying into Berlin, I looked down on Templehof Airport. The only other time I’d been to Berlin was to cover Ronald Reagan’s famous “pull down this Wall” speech. He’d flown in and out of Templehof which was a fantastic display of Nazi architecture – designed in the shape of an eagle with spread wings – and almost completely unused. It had been replaced by two newer airports and still had no jet ways – just canopies. You could almost see the ghost of the prop planes of the Berlin Airlift lining the empty tarmac. In the strange fashion of political and military locations, it was kept in perfect working order. I spoke to the manager and asked, “On an average day, how many flights come out of Templehof?” He thought for a minute and said, “Well, on an average day…none.”

I checked into one of the best hotels in Berlin and met up with my correspondent, the incredible Barrie Dunsmore. He was doing stories for both ‘World News Tonight’ and ‘Nightline,’ which meant I had to do the field reporting so that he could craft it into a story. I gathered up a camera crew and driver (all German) and a young interpreter. All the German citizens had to pass through one checkpoint into East Berlin and I would have to go through the American one – Checkpoint Charlie.

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World leaders were gathering in the German capital Monday to mark 20 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall redrew the map of Europe and brought about the end of the Cold War.

Christopher Chivvis
RAND Corporation

The fall of the Berlin Wall retains its status as an epoch-making event in modern world history, even as it passes from recent into truly historical memory.

The year 1989 ended what the historian Eric Hobsbawm dubbed the “short” 20th century. Over its course, the European states that once bestrode the world spent themselves in two world wars and were then superseded by the new superpowers of East and West, each dedicated to its own ideology, each armed with weapons of unsurpassed destructive force.

To those raised in the shadow of possible nuclear holocaust, the chief sentiment when the Wall fell 20 years ago was disbelief, followed by relief. Relief naturally brought hope that the end of the Cold War would bring lasting peace, and the end of conflict. And in Europe, at least, it mostly did - but not everywhere.

At the time, not a few of Germany’s erstwhile adversaries feared that a reunited Germany would revert to the militarism of its past, that Europe’s “German problem” would be reborn. Here the pessimists were wrong. Reunited Germany opened the door to a new European order and a continent at once whole, free, and at peace.

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CNN

On November 9th 1989, the Berlin wall was cracked open, putting an end to the Cold War. Today, 20 years later, the day has become a memory of a turning point in history, one that changed the world.

Click here to discover personal memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall.