Idle Time to Poll Serve

[Richmond]

I have devised this script to set up idle timers to poll the news
server. But it seems to cause emacs to hang after a while. If I use gtk
I can get it to respond with ctrl-g, but running in a terminal,
i.e. konsole or lxterminal, it is more difficult. What's wrong? This is
placed in .gnus

(defun news-check ()
  (ignore-errors
    (gnus-group-get-new-news)
    )
  (setq result (run-with-idle-timer (time-add (current-idle-time) 300) t 
(lambda () (news-check))))
  )

(defun tell-me-news ()
  (interactive)
  (setq result (run-with-idle-timer 300 t (lambda () (news-check))))
  (message "timer result %s" result)
)

(tell-me-news)