I have spent the last decade at ICT Innovations building tools that help businesses communicate better — auto-dialers, cloud fax servers, VoIP platforms, live chat software. Throughout that time, one thing has stayed constant: the best tools are the ones that quietly solve real problems people have every day.
This one started with a frustration our own team kept hitting. We use AI assistants constantly for research, writing, and analysis. And constantly, we would hit the same wall — the model does not know what happened last week. The training data has a cutoff, and no matter how capable the AI is, it cannot tell you about today’s news.
So we built a fix. Today, ICT Innovations is launching a free, public MCP news server at news.ictinnovations.com. Any AI assistant that supports MCP can connect to it and start reading live news headlines immediately — from BBC, Reuters, AP News, Al Jazeera, TechCrunch, Dawn, Geo News, and more.
The endpoint is: https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp. No API key, no account, no cost.
What Is MCP?
MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is an open standard from Anthropic that gives AI assistants a standard way to connect to external tools and data sources. Think of it as a universal plug that works across AI tools. Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Continue.dev, Cline, LibreChat, and OpenWebUI all support it today.
When you connect our news server to your AI tool, the model gains six new capabilities it can call whenever it needs fresh information. You do not need to configure anything — the AI discovers what is available automatically.
Six Tools, One URL
- get_latest_news — Current headlines ranked by recency and source credibility. Filterable by keyword, source, category, or time window.
- get_breaking_news — Only articles from the last two hours, for fast-moving situations.
- get_pakistan_news — A dedicated feed from Dawn and Geo News.
- search_news — Full-text keyword search across all stored articles.
- refresh_news — Trigger an immediate fetch from all sources.
- news_stats — A status summary: total articles, sources, last fetch time.
Connecting Your AI Tool
The server URL is https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp for every tool below.
Claude Desktop
Edit ~/.claude/claude_desktop_config.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"news": {
"command": "python3",
"args": ["-m", "mcp_proxy", "https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp"]
}
}
}
Claude.ai
Settings → Integrations → Add MCP server → paste https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp.
Cursor
Settings → MCP → Add MCP Server → HTTP type → paste URL → restart Cursor.
Windsurf
Settings → MCP Servers → Add Server → HTTP/SSE type → paste URL.
Zed Editor
{
"context_servers": {
"news-mcp": {
"url": "https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp",
"settings": {}
}
}
}
Continue.dev
{
"mcpServers": [{
"name": "ICT News",
"transport": {
"type": "streamable-http",
"url": "https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp"
}
}]
}
Cline (VS Code)
Cline sidebar → MCP Servers → Add Server → paste https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp.
LibreChat
Admin → MCP Servers → Add: Name “ICT News”, URL https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp, Type “Streamable HTTP”.
OpenWebUI
Settings → Tools → Add Tool Server → MCP type → https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp.
Why Free, Why Now
The MCP ecosystem is young and growing fast. The more high-quality, freely accessible servers there are, the more useful the whole ecosystem becomes. We wanted to contribute something real to it.
We also built it for ourselves. Our teams use AI tools every day, and the knowledge cutoff problem was genuinely getting in the way. Building this server and making it public just made sense.
Visit news.ictinnovations.com to explore the service, and add https://news.ictinnovations.com/mcp to your AI tool of choice today. Questions or source suggestions: support@ictinnovations.com.
— Tahir Almas, Managing Partner, ICT Innovations