The Guardian, BBC and NPR are the only good answers here. Al Jazeera is "good for an international perspective" -- but it's also probably the most biased major source of journalism in the world. My advice is to avoid as much as possible "learning about the world" from day to day news and articles. Get your facts and news alerts from the BBC etc if you must, but for becoming knowledgeable and informed, stick to longform journalism and books. Read Pando, Vox, Foreign Affairs or anything else which provides perspective and collates events over time. I say this because it's really not helpful to start from scratch simply by going to CNN World and clicking on something about the Islamic State. First of all you'll need to pull up maps of Syria, Turkey and Iraq to visualize what you're reading. Then you'll probably need to reference a half dozen Wikipedia pages before you get two inches into the story. And so on. It's not as simple as reading the paper every day. Pando, for example, gives you this context internally. Honestly, a good first step is to follow rrrrr, b_b, kleinbl00, myself and a handful of others (or various news-related tags) and to read the hubski comments -- we have a lot of foreign policy/news/world wonks here.
I agree with this. I was recently reading an essay by Huxley in which he discussed the overwhelming amount of journalistic information that he read every single day. He argued that it was detrimental because all the reports segued into the next without giving time for a particularly distinct picture. This is part of why books are so important. Firstly you'll get an abridged and generally accurate overview of events and secondly you'll get some historiographical interpretation. "He who is closest to the event is the best witness but the worst judge." I read The Guardian but can't recommend it alongside the BBC as others have done. At times, its left bias verges on the ridiculous.My advice is to avoid as much as possible "learning about the world" from day to day news and articles.