Can I make a request for some long news audio, either ripped from a video or radio news. I think having this available will save people a lot of effort when it comes time to understand the news, which I hope to start trying to do soon. Thanks if anyone has anything.

Noone has anything? How about some good audio ripping software at least?

I think most of the people here watch live news channels directly online. Maybe you should do that. (so for audio, you just have to not look at the images )
Khatz talk about it somewhere.
Best of luck!
EK

I subscribed to some Japanese news pod-casts on iTunes.

I think these are the news ones, but I'll admit that my Japanese reading isn't good enough to tell for sure

http://podfeed.podcastjuice.jp/app/rss_c...Fkotoba%2F

http://www.jfn.co.jp/susume/podcast_susume.xml

http://www.radionikkei.jp/podcasting/roundup.xml

http://www.tbsradio.jp/horio/index.xml

http://www.radionikkei.jp/podcasting/dial.xml

i just want to put some stuff on my mp3 player though.

You can use iTunes (and probably other things) to convert the podcast entries into .mp3 - I've done it myself, but as I've got an iPod it's easy enough to just listen to the podcast

I believe it's just selecting the podcast entries, right-clicking and selecting "Convert to AAC version".

Podcasts are basically just blogs that upload their content as mp3 files.

You don't even need a particular media player to play them. You could even just subscribe to them with an online rss reader and download the audio files one by one or all at once using DownThemAll! or other download manager.