A good alternative to Google news is http://newsnow.co.uk

It has high information density. It is headlines only which makes it easy to scan lot of information in one go. The categories are also very wide covering everything one can imagine a news aggregator to cover. Only problem is that it doesn't filter or categorise by events or topics so there tends to have duplicate coverage from different sources.

http://radio3.io/rivers/ by Dave Winer is also good. You can make your own aggregator with his River5 (node.js) program. Do anyone of you have any other suggestions?