Firstly, you need to have a newsreader program. Currently as far as I know there isn't any newsreader software on the LMB VMSCluster. However, you can read news on the OUCS vax or black, on the molecular biology data centre VMSsystem, or if you have access to a Silicon Graphics or other Unix workstation, then you can easily install the newsreader xrn. Once you have done this you should define the environment variable NNTPSERVER to point at vax.ox.ac.uk.
By default, the first time you start xrn you are subscribed to all 3,500 news groups! To avoid this, make sure you put a copy of the file .newsrc in your top directory. There is a copy of this on my anonymous ftp server (barton.ebi.ac.uk) in the /pub/.newsrc file. This controls to which news groups you are subscribed, the syntax is pretty obvious if you look through the file. You can edit the file to select the groups that interest you, or you can use xrn to do this.