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A tiny island glimmering in the middle of the Aegean Sea. Scientists believe it holds a treasure. Find out why it may hold the "Secrets to a Long Life." Don't miss the start of our special series and see why sex and naps might be the key ingredients.
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[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/WORLD/europe/04/20/racism.conference/art.eu.walkout.gi.jpg caption="European Union delegates leave during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech Monday."]
Octavia Nasr
CNN Senior Middle East Affairs Editor
AC360° Contributor
Today was supposed to be all about eradicating racism… or at least dealing with the problem… or just talking about it. The conference opened in Geneva, Switzerland, but not with everyone attending. The US, Israel and Canada boycotted the gathering out of concern that Israel was “singled out.” Furthermore, Israel recalled its ambassador to Switzerland for consultations in protest over allowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to meet with his Swiss counterpart. If things weren’t difficult enough, Mr. Ahmadinejad was scheduled as the first (perhaps only) speaker at the conference. With his known anti-stance on Israel, there was widespread concern that the speech will turn into a ranting session against the Jewish state.
The UN named this year’s conference on anti-racism, Durban II, in reference to the first conference which was held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. So much has happened in the last 8 years and the world is more polarize and societies divided, that a Durban II was an anticipated event among nations and non-governmental organizations alike.
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/CRIME/01/16/teen.strip.search/art.scotus2.jpg caption="The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether school officials were right to strip-search a student over ibuprofen."]
Maureen Miller
AC360° Writer
In the eighth grade, Savana Redding had to strip to her bra and underwear in the school nurses' office. She was told to pull on her bra to expose her breasts and the same with her underwear to expose her pelvic area. What were looking for? Prescription-strength ibuprofen. None were found.
That was more than six years ago. Savana is now 19, but she's never forgot what happened to her in 2003.
Tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court will here arguments in the Arizona case. A federal appeals court found the search "traumatizing" and illegal.
Though, in its appeal to the high court, the Safford Unified School District said restrictions on conducting student searches would cast a "roadblock to the kind of swift and effective response that is too often needed to protect the very safety of students, particularly from the threats posed by drugs and weapons".
Do you think the school went too far or made the right decision?
Share your thoughts below.
We'll have more on this case tonight on AC360° and tonight's other headlines.
Join us at 10pm ET.
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NY Daily News
The U.S. Army wants you – to be its friend on Facebook.
You can also follow the Army on Twitter. Or post a comment on its new blog. They're all part of the Army's new mission: social networking.
"If Ashton Kutcher can do it, the U.S. Army can do it," said Lindy Kyzer, who posts the Army's "status updates" on Facebook and "tweets" on Twitter.
Kyzer issued a public challenge – to get more followers on Twitter than Kutcher, an actor and social networking fiend who recently won a bet with CNN that he could reach 1 million followers first.
"We know that our ability to share the Army story is shaped by how we tell it and where we tell it," said Lt. Col. Kevin Arata, who heads the Army's new Online and Social Media Division. "Using social media platforms allows us to tell our story where we know people are at and are listening."
Even Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is on Facebook. With nearly 5,000 "friends," the four-star general is updating his status straight from the battlefield – something unheard of in past conflicts.
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Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Reza Aslan's new book "How to Win a Cosmic War" published by Random House and in bookstores today. See Reza on AC360 at 10 pm ET tonight!
Reza Aslan
The problem with the ideological War on Terror is that “terrorist” is a wastebasket term that often conveys as much about the person using it as it does about the person being described. It can hardly be argued, anyway, that this was a war against terrorism per se. If it were, it would have included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christian insurgency in East Timor, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, the Jewish Kach and Kahane underground in Israel, the Irish Republican Army, the Sikh separatists in the Punjab, the Marxist Mujahadin-e Khalq, the Kurdish PKK, and so on.
Rather, this was a war against a particular brand of terrorism: that employed exclusively by Islamic entities, which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict was gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the persons who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and the organizations that supported them, but also an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups such as Hamas in Palestine, Hizballah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Chenchen rebels, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban, and any other organization that declared itself Muslim and employed terrorism as a tactic. According to the master narrative of the War on Terror, these were a monolithic enemy with a common agenda and a shared ideology. Never mind that many of these groups consider one another a graver threat than they consider America to be, that they have vastly different and sometimes irreconcilable political yearnings and religious beliefs, and that, until the War on Terror, many had never thought of the United States as an enemy in any war. Give this imaginary monolith a made-up name – say, “Islamofacism” – and an eerily recognizable enemy is created, one that exists not so much as a force to be defeated as an idea to be opposed, one whose chief attribute appears to be that they are not us.
By lumping the disparate forces, movements, armies, ideas, and grievances in the greater Muslim world into a single category (“enemy”), assigning them a single identity (war), the United States manufactured what the counterterrorism expert David Kilcullen termed “an undifferentiated enemy.” And as Sun Tzu said so long ago, if you do not know who the enemy is, you cannot win the war.
Editor’s Note: See Jeffrey Toobin talk about the newest students' rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court tonight on AC360 at 10PM ET.
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Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
The Supreme Court has struggled with the issue of students’ rights for years. In the 1960s, in the heyday of the liberal Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the justices more and more treated students the same way they treated everyone else – as individuals with rights. In one famous case from Des Moines in 1969, a student was thrown out of high school for wearing a black armband to oppose the Vietnam War, but the Court ruled that the student had the right to express himself in this way and ruled against the school.
But times have changed at the Supreme Court. Students have far fewer rights than it once appeared they did. In 1985, the Court ruled that a student caught smoking could have her purse searched. Last year, in a crazy case out of Alaska, the Court ruled that a student could be suspended for holding a sign that said BONG HiTS 4 JESUS (even though Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion couldn’t say what those words meant).
Ready for today's Beat 360°? Everyday we post a picture – and you provide the caption and our staff will join in too. Tune in tonight at 10pm to see if you are our favorite! Here is the 'Beat 360°' pic:
US President Barack Obama is escorted to his limousine by Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta and Stephen Kappes, deputy director of the CIA, after speaking to employees during a visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on April 20, 2009.
Have fun with it. We're looking forward to your captions! Make sure to include your name, city, state (or country) so we can post your comment.
________________________________________________ But wait!… There’s more! When you win ‘Beat 360°’ not only do you get on-air prime-time name recognition (complete with bragging rights over all your friends, family, and jealous competitors), but you get a “I Won the Beat 360° Challenge” T-shirt!