Before the flaming starts, let me qualify that headline - I mean 'foreign' as in 'foreign to me'. Yes, the web is worldwide and you may be reading from one of the countries that I reference. That's cool. Welcome.

The goal of this article is driven by the axiom that when there are two opposing views on something, the truth usually lays somewhere in the middle. Everyday, North Americans are bombarded by news that seems, to me, very biased and ethnocentric. America this, Canada that, come vacation in Mexico with the drug lords. We barely even hear about what's going on in Europe, let alone the further corners of the world. So I put my Canadian flag on my data packets and went hitch-hiking through the world unseen through their newspapers. Enter my favorite english foreign newspapers.

Islamic Republic News Agency

english-foreign-newspapers

Islamic Republic News Agency - All that my local news tells me about Iran is that we may, or may not, be enemies with them. I don't understand. Yet, at the time I wrote this, IRNA tells me that the U.S. is making concessions with Cuba for telecommunications companies and Cuban-American families can visit and send money to Cuba as often as they like. Where was that on Fox news?

China Daily

China Daily - With the US Navy engaging the Somali pirates, you'd think they were the sole protectors of freedom, to hear it from mainstream US media. Don't get me wrong, the U.S. has done some good things internationally. Yet I haven't seen any coverage of the Chinese sending naval vessels as escorts around Africa's pirate-laden waters. Not just a couple ships, but a couple fleets! That's pretty cool of them, I think.

Russia Today - Although a little less wordy than some papers, Russia Today does present articles and video's about North America that you don't normally hear about. Apparently there were a bunch of tax protests, or T.E.A. parties (Taxed Enough Already) to protest President Obama's tax policies. Did you hear about these? Me neither.

Aljazeera

Aljazeera - published from Qatar, a country on a peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf, tells about how the main water supply for two million Mexicans was shut down, due to drought. Did you know that? I knew there was drug and immigration problems between Mexico and the US, but not that the Mexicans had little water.  Or how about Leon Panetta, director of the CIA announcing they will close down their secret overseas prisons. Mighty good of them, I didn't know they had any. I also didn't know that private contractors handled a lot of the interrogations of prisoners in these places. How do you put that on your resume?

Granma Internacional

Granma Internacional - Cuba's foreign language paper opened my eyes to the fact that the U.S. is currently where Luis Posada Carriles and former President Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was responsible for the Caracazo massacre, make their homes. Apparently Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has been requesting their deportation from President Obama, without any luck.  Venezuela seems to thinking these guys are terrorists and would like to deal with them. So much for the U.S. war on terror.

Are all those stories 100% of the truth? Probably not, yet there is truth in them. Take them in context with what you hear on your local news and you get an eye opener about what's really going on in the world. I know I did.

What alternative news sources do you use? Did we miss any good foreign newspapers that are published in english? Do you think all news is biased? Let me know in the comments.