I've similarly had no luck with the pine port. While I appreciate all the effort people have already put in to porting apps, I'm really waiting for an offline newsreader (slrn maybe?). When I'm online I can ssh to freeshell.org and use pine for usenet. (No, it's not ideal, but it does work (for very small values of work).)

If anyone is looking for a shell account, I can reccommend freeshell.org (aka sdf.lonestar.org) and silenceisdefeat.org.

Etaoin