I'll second news.yahoo.com. It's better than Google's layout, and you can dive right into subregions of the world to get more specific world news.

Also, nba.yahoo.com has a better layout than nba.com itself for following stats and even following the games live (a really well-done java applet).

Finally, I've been playing around with switching search engines from Google to something else, and I found for most tech stuff, Yahoo! actually has more relevant search results than Bing or DDG.