I want to re-recommend The Agonist to you, whether or not you ever visited there before, or if you were put off by the whole Stratfor thing. It is now a sort of group blog, totally news oriented (with opinions exchanged on the site's bulletin board), with a focus on global news. It really is the best way to keep informed on global happenings, that is, if you can take a more or less constant diet of bad news. Which the world is full of these days, from Nigeria to the Congo to the Middle East to Colombia, it seems....