International Applicants: Improve your English Listening Ability

I just had a conversation with one of my clients about how to improve his listening ability. Our talk reminded me of my former journalism job stringing (i.e., freelancing) for National Public Radio from Japan. Anyways, NPR is a fantastic news resource, and best of all for those of you trying to improve your listening ability, all (I believe) of their audio programming can be downloaded and followed with the accompanying written story, which can act as a script. Now, the written story does not follow the audio story 100%, but it follows pretty closely, enough to help you understand the different speakers and the overall storyline. You can learn new vocabulary, hear a lot of different topics, voices and accents. It's also free. Here is a quick sample story I found where the "script" tracks the audio version fairly closely. I listen to NPR a lot so I will continue posting good stories (i.e., interesting with a good script) whenever I find one.