It gets news over RTTY (the ancient teletype, some sort of radio comms used by journalist, military and so on). Curl just downloads the HTTP stream to the standard output, as a music player would do with a online radio. The stream it's in MP3 format, so the terminal output it's piped (chained) to LAME's input. LAME it's an infamous MP3 decoder for Unix/Linux since the old Napster times. This part of the command, as you could guess, send the converted WAV data (raw audio, like the ones from music CD's) to the standard output and then that stream it's being sent to minimodem, which parses the RTTY signal in its own native format.
RTTY signal in MP3 -> Convert it to a raw WAV -> decode the raw RTTY signal to a readable a TXT output.
If you had a ham radio tuner (phisycal radio, with an antenna and the like) and you picked some RTTY signal at non-commercial radio frequencies, if you jacked a wire from the speakers' output from that radio tuner to the input of your sound card, you could do almost the same with just the Minimodem command, as you were already getting the audio format in WAV/RAW, and you could get the same news output with less effort.
Neat! I decided to play around with it (mostly, to be honest, because I was curious what it sounded like) - and it's really interesting to see it stream in a few bytes at a time
