Yes. You can do this by having a JSP page that calls into the repo to get a list of news items to display on the main page. It can do that by just reading all the XMLs from a given directory using our native Java API (either in-process or via RMI) or, in 2.1, but querying the repo using our new search support. Also in 2.1, you can instead of using our Java API create a web script to do the same thing, but write that web script in Javascript. Then, in your JSP page, you can just call on this web script to pull the needed list of XML assets.
Kevin