English news sources for non-predominantly English countries?

October 18, 2014 2:43 AM

Something that often frustrates me reading the newspaper or stories on the internet is that a majority of the "current serious issues" things are going to come from Western English-speaking countries. Can you recommend websites that provide English news about fairly non-English countries? (From my Australian perspective these include anywhere in Africa, Russia, India, Eastern Europe, so on.)
posted by solarion to Grab Bag (25 answers total)

English Russia isn't really a serious news site, but it's definitely interesting.
posted by neushoorn at 3:16 AM on October 18, 2014

Tico Times for Costa Rica and Central America.
posted by Jacqueline at 3:18 AM on October 18, 2014

The Caravan for India. Long articles, but totally worth the time spent reading.
posted by 9000condiments at 3:54 AM on October 18, 2014

General news sites?

Al-Jazeera is good generally
Pravda for Russia
The Times of India for India
The Jakarta Post for Indonesia
The Straits Times for Singapore (quite conservative though IMO)
The Post-Courier and The National for Papua New Guinea
Haaretz for Israel

The Arts and Letters Daily has a good list of international pubs on their left side bar:

www.aldaily.com
posted by evil_esto at 3:59 AM on October 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

The International Herald Tribune. I have not tried to evaluate the web site, but the dead tree edition used to be the go to source for English news of non-English speaking places.
posted by Bruce H. at 4:11 AM on October 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Mainichi has an English section. I took a Japanese culture course once that required us to read articles here and contrast them to NYTimes articles on the same subject. Interesting exercise.
posted by deathpanels at 6:11 AM on October 18, 2014

Al Jazeera is essential reading.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:37 AM on October 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

Kathimerini for greece.
posted by crazy with stars at 6:38 AM on October 18, 2014 [1 favorite]

The New Straits Times for Malaysia
The Bangkok Post
The South China Morning Post for Hong Kong is excellent.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:47 AM on October 18, 2014

http://www.euronews.com is pretty good to add to a mix of sites, not a great standalone, but more France / Germany /Belgium /EasternEurope etc than many.
posted by Joeruckus at 6:47 AM on October 18, 2014

Also the New Light of Myanmar
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:58 AM on October 18, 2014

The BBC world news site is less focussed on English speaking countries than the main BBC news site.
posted by gnimmel at 7:15 AM on October 18, 2014

I wouldn't really recommend The Times of India for India - to my mind, The Hindu is the better newspaper. Seconding the Caravan. Quartz India is not bad as a source of aggregated news.
posted by peacheater at 7:16 AM on October 18, 2014

South China Morning Post? I don't know much about it other than my HK friend sometimes emails me articles from it.
posted by fiercekitten at 8:10 AM on October 18, 2014

Seconding The Hindu for India.

From the African continent,


The East African. The Star is one of my favourites.

The best news for Nigeria is Business Day. Ghana needs a bunch of websites but for an overview, browsing Ventures Africa is a good way to stay in touch.

For tech specific news, TechMoran from Kenya and TechLoy from Nigeria are better for regional news, VentureBurn and a host of others are all published out of South Africa and that tends to skew their perspective accordingly.

Nazret, Ethiopia

If you prefer Twitter, then here is a pretty good list of African news sources while this contains most of the media houses mentioned.

And YLE currently offers daily summaries in English for Finnish headline news.
posted by infini at 8:31 AM on October 18, 2014

Francophone Africa can get a bit frustrating as their English language versions tend to lag behind the French. otoh, if you read french, then there are a couple of good locations which collate = Jeune Afrique and Afrik News
posted by infini at 8:33 AM on October 18, 2014

There is a LOT of English-language media in India. When I was in India, I was able to pick up a newspaper anywhere and read about the news of the day in English, with no problem. The Times Of India is a good start, though there are others.
posted by Sara C. at 8:39 AM on October 18, 2014

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posted by showbiz_liz at 9:26 AM on October 18, 2014 [3 favorites]

One of my go to: Al Jazeera English
posted by Mister Bijou at 10:31 AM on October 18, 2014

South China Morning Post? You soon run into a paywall.
posted by Mister Bijou at 10:34 AM on October 18, 2014

(Andean Air Mail &) Peruvian Times.
posted by bentley at 10:51 AM on October 18, 2014

In Brazil, one of the largest dailies, Folha de S.Paulo has a rather good English site. They have been quite good in covering this most recent presidential election cycle.
posted by msali at 11:37 AM on October 18, 2014

I love Chile and The Santiago Times cover Chilean and South American news.
posted by Memo at 12:36 PM on October 18, 2014

The Daily Star, Lebanon

Al Akhbar, Lebanon

Abna, Iran
posted by standardasparagus at 7:04 PM on October 18, 2014

http://www.buenosairesherald.com for Argentina.
posted by conifer at 3:15 AM on October 19, 2014