6 Years, 6 Months, 19 Days

Ron Tang — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:04:00 -0400

It's now more than six years since the 9/11 attacks, yet al Qaeda's leader Osama Bin Laden remains at large.

A slew of video and audiotapes, referencing current events and analyzed by the US government, indicate he's still alive. And his recent appearances have silenced most of the rumors about ill health.

The question, then, is should Americans care? After all, Osama doesn't run his terrorist organization as he did before the fall of the Taliban.

Unfortunately, Bin Laden remains all too relevant. Today he doesn't need to pick up a phone to order terror attacks as he did before 9/11; he just… more

Rourke O'Brien in the New York Post on Opportunity NYC

Communications — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:08:00 -0500

New America in the News:

More than 1,400 families have collected $740,000 in the first payout from the city's daring two-year experiment that rewards the poor with hard cash for doing good, officials said yesterday.

Another 919 families who enrolled in the "conditional cash transfer" program did not qualify by the first cutoff date, Nov. 15.

But city officials called the initial results of Opportunity NYC a success, noting that the first-in-the-nation initiative had been launched within months of being proposed and is now fully operational. ...

Rourke O'Brien, an asset-building analyst at the New America Foundation, said the complexity of the undertaking made the city's achievement thus far "really impressive."

He said it was especially important that poor people now had access to regular financial services through mandated bank accounts rather than "walking to the check casher down the street." ...

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