Whether on mobile or desktop, Chrome always has a few experimental tricks up its sleeve. You can find these at chrome://flags where they can be enabled or disabled. Google uses these to test new features ahead of turning them on permanently, and lots of what we love about chrome started out as an optional flag.
The latest of these experiments to hit the Canary channel of Chrome for Android is a flag that could offer up push notifications for breaking news events. 'Breaking News Push' is described thus:
Listen for breaking news content suggestions (e.g. for New Tab Page) through Google Cloud Messaging. – Android
It sounds pretty self-explanatory, and it will use the Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) platform to receive the news alerts. GCM was created for developers to send information to Android applications, but now it seems Google wants to try it out itself. Chrome Story discovered the new flag but hasn't received a notification yet, so we can't say what it looks like. If anyone is curious and using Chrome Canary, why not enable it and see what happens. I'll update this post once I get a notification from the service.