The latest version of Google Earth allows you to read news headlines based on the geographic region you're looking at. A NYT icon appears on the globe and clicking it pulls up the relevant geo-coded news article. Not a bad idea but not really taken far enough. Eventually I'd like to be able to focus on a region and move backwards in time to see historical news articles for that area. I'd also really like to see these stories linked to other related articles, especially if you can then 'fly' around the globe tracing a story through space and time.

Full details are over on the Google Latlong blog.  A good way to get background information to better inform your reading of news articles would be via Wikipedia; overlays from here are also available in Google Earth and have been for some time.