Asia Lindsay
AC360° Intern

Zambia’s president was talking up his country’s economy at an outdoor press conference when a monkey sitting in a tree above urinated on him, mid-sentence.

President Rupiah Banda, whose controversial inauguration in 2008 provoked small-scale riots, called the press conference to speak about recent riots that have erupted throughout the country due to a deepening global recession and its effect on the price of copper, Zambia’s principal export.

“You have urinated on my jacket!” he shouted back at the monkey.

“I will give this monkey for lunch to Mr. Sata,” he joked, referring to his political rival, Michael Sata.

Banda took control of Zambia in 2008 after the former president, Levy Mwanawasa, suffered a stroke.

Since his inauguration, he has focused on improving the economy and reducing taxes on food and fuel to “help Zambia to become a middle income country by 2030.”

Zambia’s ruling party has already put Banda forth as a candidate for the 2011 presidential elections, despite widespread claims that his 2008 victory was fraudulent. Banda beat Sata by 2 percent, though Sata had led in the polls.

Strange incidents involving presidents and press conferences are not unprecedented, of course. At a 2008 press conference in Iraq, former U.S. President George W. Bush ducked to avoid a shoe thrown by an angry Iraqi journalist.

Bush was unphased by the incident, despite it being a grave insult in Arabic culture, saying later, “If you want the facts, it’s a size 10 shoe that he threw”.

In the department of strange liquids landing on politicians, in March 2009 British Business Secretary Lord Peter Mandelson had a cup of green custard thrown in his face by political activist Leila Deen at a summit on low carbon industrial strategies in London.

Deen is a member of the environmental group ‘Plane Stupid’ and threw the custard in protest of the third runway at Heathrow Airport. She described the incident as a “last resort.”

In Zambia, President Banda took the monkey’s misstep with good grace, later laughing with journalists saying that, “perhaps these [monkey urine spots] are blessings.”

If so, there could be more such blessings. Plenty of animals live near the State House, including antelopes and birds.

AC360°

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are in Toronto for a private audience at the Metro Convention Centre.

The former presidents, both 62, will spent 90 minutes discussing global and domestic challenges facing Canada and the U-S.

The event was private but we followed their conversation through Twitter updates. Take a look at some of the commentary:

@CBCNewsDesk: #Bush and #Clinton went for laughs in opening remarks, getting serious now with Afghanistan, Cuba, Darfur and Rwanda – KR #bcpto

@CBCNewsDesk: #Clinton defends #Bush on Darfur and “agonizing process” of building intl consensus, compares it to Bosnia – AD #bcpto

@CBCNewsDesk: On same sex: Bush doesn’t agree with repeal of defence of marriage act, agreed with #Clinton’s don’t ask don’t tell – AD #bcpto

See more Twitter updates at #bcpto

In a Michigan speech, Bush spoke out about his administration's efforts to combat terrorism.

Peter Hamby
CNN Political Producer

Former President George W. Bush on Thursday repeated Dick Cheney’s assertion that their enhanced interrogation program was legal and garnered valuable information that prevented future terrorist attacks.

In his largest domestic speech since leaving the White House in January, Bush told an audience in southwestern Michigan that after the September 11 attacks, “I vowed to take whatever steps that were necessary to protect you.”

Although he did not specifically allude to the high-profile debate over President Obama’s decision to halt the use harsh interrogation techniques, and without referencing Cheney by name, Bush spoke in broad strokes about how he proceeded after the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March 2003.

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After 100 days, Obama’s shiny-new dream for our cities is looking more like a bureaucratic nightmare.

Dayo Olopade
The Root

In November 2008, less than one week after winning the votes of city dwellers by a margin of 28 points, President-elect Barack Obama announced he would reward them by creating the first-ever “White House Office of Urban Policy.” Like other new aspects of Obama’s executive branch, appointing a city czar was intended to fast-track communications among city governments, federal agencies and the White House. With great fanfare, Obama dispatched his friend and fellow Chicagoan Valerie Jarrett to tell America that he was making good on his campaign pledge to “stop seeing cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution.”

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Torture Is a Breach Of International Law

Mark J. McKeon
The Washington Post

On Sept. 11, 2001, when the twin towers were hit, I was sitting in a meeting in The Hague discussing what should be included in an indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes in Bosnia. I was an American lawyer serving as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and there was no doubt that Milosevic should be indicted for his responsibility for the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners. As the head of state at the time those crimes were committed, Milosevic bore ultimate responsibility for what happened under his watch.

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Earl Hutchinson
The Huffington Post

President Obama will get the ritual grade for his first 100 days in office on April 29. His first days will be compared to FDR’s first 100 days. And to a lesser extent JFK’s first 100 days. But comparing him to these two presidents is not a fair comparison. FDR faced the worst economic crisis in American history. JFK faced no immediate foreign or domestic crisis. President Obama falls somewhere in between the two.

The better comparison is with his predecessor President Bush. He is the president whose towering White House failures helped pave the way for Obama’s win. And there’s some eerie similarities in the way Bush handled his first 100 days and the way Obama is handling his.

Bush got the same intense look in his first 100 days as President Obama will get in his; and for good reason. Bush’s win was deeply tainted but also historic. Millions thought then and now that he bagged the White House through fraud, deceit, manipulation, and a huge helping hand from a politically compliant High Court. Obama’s win was historic and tinged with racial and ideological fears.
Though the Bush legacy is truly dreadful, it wasn’t that way at the start. He got the same first 100 days pass from voters that Obama and every other president has gotten. His April 2001 poll numbers topped sixty percent. This matches Obama’s April numbers. A Washington Post/ABC Poll even gave Bush high marks on his handling of the economy.

Bush did what every other new president did during his first hundred days. He used the early public goodwill to make politically favorable appointments, ink executive orders and shove through Congress programs that likely would draw fire later on, clamp a vise like grip on executive power, and cast an eye on cementing his historic legacy. Obama has done the same.

Read more…

President Obama met with CIA workers and Director Leon Panetta, left, in Virginia on Monday.

Robert Zimmerman
AC360° Contributor and CNN Political Analyst

After thoughtful deliberation, President Obama released memos from the Bush administration revealing brutal CIA interrogation tactics. These memos, authored by leading officials in the Bush Department of Justice, made every attempt to create a legal rational to engage in nothing less than torture. Despite the use of bureaucratic language to justify their intent, there is no question these memos were an exercise to excuse tactics like “stress positions” that were employed by the Nazis in World War II or water boarding used by the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh Cambodia. In fact, these memos have the temerity to actually point out that other countries that behaved in a similar fashion, like Indonesia, were engaging in torture.

While President Obama deserves great credit for releasing these memos in the face of strong opposition within his administration and with minimal deletions in the documents, he has not ended the debate. On the contrary; he has started it. The questions that need to be addressed focus on whether the release of these memos compromise our ability to combat terrorists. We also have a right to know what, if any, measures should be taken to hold those who authored these memos, as well as those who attempted their legal justification, accountable. In short, the answers to those questions reflect the core values and the guiding principles that define the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress’ commitment to transparency and accountability.

Keep reading

Andrew J. Bacevich
Special to CNN

At every stop during his recent trips abroad, President Obama went out of his way to assure observers that he is the un-Bush: a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, with both his feet firmly planted in the reality-based world.

To yesterday’s untouchables, like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, the cordial Obama offers smiles and handshakes. Although all to the good, this falls well short of being good enough.

Pragmatism devoid of principle provides an inadequate basis for coherent strategy. At the end of the day, there is no avoiding what the elder George Bush once called “the vision thing”: a conception of how the world works, where it is headed and the role the United States should play in getting it there.

Obama’s sympathetic nod to “soft power” and willingness to listen rather than preach do not qualify as that vision. Nor does his pledge to engage the Islamic world in respectful dialogue while working toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. They are at best markers that may suggest the outlines of something larger.

Keep Reading…

The Obama administration declassified and released torture documents.

Michael Hayden and Michael B. Mukasey
The Wall Street Journal

The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

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Ed Rollins
CNN Contributor

A president makes many decisions, but none is more important than those he makes as commander in chief. Committing young men and women to war zones where their lives are at risk is a decision that can’t be easily reversed, and the consequences can be fatal.

The second type of difficult decision a president faces is setting the rules of engagement; allowing American troops to do their job even if that means taking the life of the enemy.

Ronald Reagan, a president I served, was beloved by the American military. He rebuilt a military crippled by the nightmare of Vietnam. After the humiliating evacuation from that costly war, we had planes that couldn’t fly and ships that couldn’t sail due to missing parts and deferred maintenance.

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