Surprisingly I have not been able to find a site which does this:
- has a craigslist minimalistic design with paragraph summaries of the most important 100 news events that has happened around the world in the last 24 hours
- the closest I have found is the two-page news summary in the print edition of the Economist in the front, I'm looking for something like that
- news.google.com is close to what I mean, but its purpose is more of a "launch pad" for you to go read headlines and then click to read the news stories in more depth, the site I'm looking for has a different purpose: for you to spend 5 minutes reading it (on screen or print) and you know pretty much everything important that happened in the last 24 hours, not in depth, just the bullet points
- just like at news.google.com you can search and customize it, so if you want the top 100 news "things that happened in Sri Lanka" you can get it with a simple search
I just went to Google News and read through five articles in about 10 minutes. I summarized them here in the format that I am looking for, which takes about 10 seconds to read:
Example:
TECH: Bing has cornered 12.7% of the market in the 12 months since it launched. / The top five top search engines are still Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL. / Apple acquired Canadian company Poly9 which creates browser-based 3D software, last year it also bought PlaceBase which produces maps that can be layered with private, public, or commercial data.
POLITICS: U.S.-led United Nations Command met with North Korea about sinking of a South Korean warship, North Korea maintains innocence, the result of meeting will probably be just more talks. / Argentina granted full rights to gay citizens. / Russia and Germany concluded talks: Medvedev welcomed German enterprises' participation in the hi-tech hub Skolkovo outside Moscow.
If a site like this exists, it would probably be best created by crowd-sourcing: people reading the news and writing reviews such as the above. I know I would write for it since writing those reviews helps you pay attention to the news you read, remember facts etc. Would be cool if a site like this existed.