What countries make the news? What's the relation between different locations of the world? Buzztracker watches Google News, tries to geotarget each news and creates a top. You can find a very well organized archive from 2004 to the present. You'll see that very few locations are featured in the news every day: Washington, Baghdad, Gaza.
Azstarnet offers another service that puts world news on the map and also shows some information about each country.
Newsmap is a mashup between Google Maps and Yahoo News that shows realtime news for each country in the world. Just click on a country, and preview the news. You can also get local news.