This Al Jazeera news clip, from a month ago, has the headline:
الجيش التركي يعلن إنه بدأ عملية عسكرية برية في شمالي العراق

There are some key words here to help understand the news clip, including:

With these words, the headline translates as “Turkey announces the army is beginning military ground operations in northern Iraq”

عن كثب - القطب الشمالي+ ثاني أكسيد الكربون

عن كثب is a program on Al Jazeera about science and technology. The first 10 minutes of the program, which was shown in October 2007, is about climate change and the Arctic. The second part is about bacteria, but I’m focusing on the first part here.

Keywords to know for understanding the first segment include:

This video is of an Al Jazeera program, nearly an hour-long, where they interview Syrian Prosecutor-General Ghada Murad. She was the first woman to enter the judiciary in Syria and is now in the position, equivalent of “Attorney General” in Syria. She is involved in “investigating” the killing of former Lebanese premier Rafik Harari and is expected to cooperate with the United Nations on their investigation.

I was able to pick out numerous words in the program that I understand and get the gist of it. Some key words here include:

محام (muhaamin) - lawyer

ولدت (waladat) - she was born

نساء (nisaa’) - woman (singular)

رجل (rajul) - man (singular); رجال (rijal) - men (plural)

مدرسة (madrassa) - school

جامعة (jami’ya) - university

كلية (kulia) - college

الجقوق (al haquq) - law

This video has a lot of good content to work with, so I will likely come back to it again later. It helps just to listen to it and see what you can understand and figure out from the context.

Here are some words to help understand this news clip, which is about banks and money in the Gulf area:

مقتل 100 شخص في تحطم طائرة ركاب تايلاندي
This Al Jazeera news clip is from September 2007, about a plane crash in Phuket in Thailand.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20800512/
مقتل (maqtal) - murder, death
شخص (shakhs) - person
حطم (hattama) - to wreck, smash, shatter, demolish
ركب (rakiba) - to ride, travel
طائرة (ta’ira) - airplane

Al Jazeera posts video clips and programs on YouTube. Watching these helps with learning vocabulary, pronunciation, and improving listening comprehension. This video is from last spring, about the Mahdi Army in Iraq. The word for “army” is جيس (jeish).