Ditto on the lockups. I’m down here in Oz and whenever I go to a US news site the laptop freezes. I think some sort of script is running in the background and when it’s done all’s okay. Don’t know what the US sites are doing but my European and Asian sites work okay.
It may be due to latency. The big sites cache content at different places around the world to reduce perceived download times.
There may not be enough users in your location to trigger the content to preload at the cache site. So when you load the site it has to go back to the US servers, download content, download ads, send a note to the NSA, and then serve the content to your browser.
As do mine. I have a single processor machine and I keep cleaning and deleting cookies, so I suspect advertising spyware is installing and starting to run, via script, when I click on these sites. Maybe I'll try NoScript, or just get over US media sites, there is nothing on 'em anyway.
Interestingly, I have noticed no problem on the few times someone has linked the "printer friendly" or print page directly, bypassing the article page.