Finding the best resources.

Lindsay has already recommended the New York Times and content from the BBC. I'll add a few other sources that are excellent:

• The Christian Science Monitor. Please don't confuse it with Scientology. It's very different, and this online-only newspaper is an excellent source of coverage of world events.
• The New Yorker. Most of its content is available for free online, and each week they will typically have two or three 5000 word essays which are excellent.
• The Economist. Staunchly pro-free market, this British magazine is a good alternative to openly political journals such as The Nation and he National Review.

But that's just the open web. The UO Libraries has a huge assortment of material available to you (we spend about $4 million per year). Try the topical lists of databases available for searching. These databases are especially good at finding news sources:

• Newspaper Source. A search engine that includes content from many different newspapers.
• Lexis Nexis. Has even more news content.
• Ethnic News Watch. An index of newspapers by and about ethnic minority groups in the US.

And this is just news stuff! I'm sure you'd get bonus point if you were to use scholarly journals in your work--stuff like a couple of the journals I have listed under geography on my blogroll. Try GeoBase, or some of the indexes under Political Science and International Studies to get a taste of what these are good for.

As for the cheese--when I returned to the coffee shop, I'm sure the two young ladies thought I was pretty smooth when I walked in and said "Excuse me, did you see a piece of cheese sitting here when you sat down?" I finally bit the bullet and rode my bike all the way back downtown. I had left the dang goat cheese sitting on the cheesemonger's table when she gave me her change. She had set it aside for me in a little wax paper bag. "I knew you'd be back."