Thanks, Pine, for flagging this up. I came across it a few years ago when I was thinking of doing something similar---not to detect news in my case, but simply to highlight what was popular in different language editions as a way to possibly increase multilingual editing/consumption. My research went a different direction, but I still think that would be a nice extension (i.e., lists of trending articles by language/region) that could alert Wikipedians to "hot/trending" articles in other languages that quite possibly do not exist in their first language. I think it could be a nice tie in with the beta translation tool, the MIT Media Lab work on serendipity, and/or the Omnipedia-related work. I am very open to working on this idea with others if anyone is interested.