This piece of your code does not make sense to me:

   open(NEWS,"news.html");
    while(<>) {
        $pagetext .= $_;
    }
    close NEWS;
[download]

I guess what you want is: (otherwise why open/close the file?)

   open(NEWS,"news.html");
    while(<NEWS>) {
        $pagetext .= $_;
    }
    close NEWS;
[download]