wikiepedia's "Current Events" page, google news
Nerd-world news:
programming.reddit, science.reddit, news.yc (though lately I've resorted to upvoting stories that are actually "Hacker News"...)
Slashdot has gotten surprisingly good again in recent years (most of the dregs have gone to other sites), and the snarky tags (that users inevitably add) instantly indicate when an editor messes up or gives a crappy summary.
I regularly read the NYTimes opinion pages and occasionally more of the NYTimes for background if I find I'm missing it.
I listen to the New Yorker (Audible.com offers it as a for-pay podcast).
I Tivo the McLaughlin group every week and occasionally even watch it when I have a hankering for talking heads.
I used to read the NYTimes religiously, but I've become convinced that the idea of regular news consumption in non-varying amounts is poison b/c of the way it elevates the importance of trivial events that happen on slow news days (see any local TV newscast in the US for the extreme version of this).
I think the Economist is somewhat immune to this effect because of its international focus. NPR survives this effect pretty well because it has enough arts/humanities-oriented material to round out slow news days.
If I were in Italy or the US, I think I would consider a local paper, to read about local goings on. If I subscribed to a more international paper, I think I'd go for the Financial Times.
I'm a bit of an information junkie:-/
I sometimes check reddit when the Hacker News anti-procrastination feature locks me out. :-)
N.B. There have been some recent claims here at news.YC that The Economist has been going downhill recently. This may be true, but I've been reading it for the better part of a decade and haven't noticed any decline in quality.
- http://lambda-the-ultimate.org
- http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.announce
Podcasts: Highlights from PBS: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on the media apm: marketplace NPR: it's all politics talk of the nation science friday
Slashdot, BBC, Gizmodo, New Scientist, Bilogy News Net, Eureka Alert, YC News (of course), TechCrunch (US and UK), Techgain, How To Change The World, VentureBeat, Get Venture, FoundRead.
I've found that checking news sites and RSS only once a week makes me far more productive and I don't miss out on much
News.YC is generally the best filter for relevant news.
http://news.myway.com/ - a number of the standard news sources through a fairly clean interface.
Maths: http://www.arsmathematica.net/ http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ (not exactly maths but...) http://plus.maths.org/blog/ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/ http://blog.plover.com/ (sometimes) http://blog.wolfram.com/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/
Physics: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress (very biased) http://angryphysicist.wordpress.com/ http://scottaaronson.com/blog http://motls.blogspot.com/ (very biased)
economist.com
realclearpolitics.com
(Heavy flash-blocking required for both.)