... for those, who had fun with the additional newsblocks ... here is an update, i added some blocks so now there are 6 blocks for different categories of news to display. It works fine with news version 1.1 but should work with 1.3 (but there we have some additional blocks though).
note: This is a "module" from a theme dabbler and perhaps not the way a coder will do to get similar result. If in doubt, please try on a test page first.