150
You can set you default module to "none" in your XOOPS general preferences. This will remove the redirect.
You can edit the News template so that only the news item title is displayed. That is most certainly not a biggy.
You should be able to set custom images on a topic level. Not sure about per article level though, as I use AMS. You can use the built in XOOPS image manager to do this at any rate.
Not sure where to edit the date & time stamp format, never felt the need. I'm sure it is not too hard though.
Don't see there being too much of an issue to get the News module to display in a similar way to the site you linked to. It WILL take some effort on your behalf though to learn and work with the XOOPS system.