I'm not clear which news feed you're talking about, the news feeds presently displayed on the main page, or the "Admin Site News" displayed on the user's home page, in any case I'll try to address both.
I can't offer too much help with the news feeds displayed on the main page because I never used it have it disabled on my sites. By default the source of the news feeds comes from
http://feeds.feedburner.com/OriginalSignal/tech, Google has since taken over Feed Burner, if you go to feedburner.com it now takes you to a Google page where you can login and manage your feeds. I don't know how it works because I don't use it but you can create an account and find out more about it.
You can change the source of your news feeds in the admin by going to "Features and Options" and scroll down to "Widget: Original Signal Tech Feed" and add the source link to the news feed that you want.
You can also edit the title of "Original Signal Tech Feed" to anything you want in the Admin by going to "Skin Settings" and clicking "translate" and scrolling down to Key string #212.
The news feeds on the main page aren't an Etano in-house thing, they are like most feeds which means they are fed from a third party source, such as blogs and news sites.
You can change the number of feeds that are displayed by editing the number of stories in the widget which is located in the
skins_site/def/index.html file
<!--widget="osignal_feed(array('module_code'=>'osignal_feed','area'=>'front','num_stories'=>
4))"-->
In regards to the wrong date showing, if this is happening when creating "Admin Site News" the problem may possibly be with your host's server time stamp, this issue is typically related to the unix timestamp where any invalid date gets converted to 1st Jan 1970. I've never come across this issue before and really have no idea what to suggest other than searching the net for possible causes or contacting your host.
"Admin Site News" isn't like the news feeds on the main page, it's meant for the admin to write news bulletins for it's site members. You can't modify the admin site news so members can also write news, to accomplish something like that would require developing an entire new feature.
You can change the number of admin site news feeds that are displayed by editing the number in the widget which is located in the
skins_site/def/home.html file
<!--widget="site_news_feed(array('total'=>
3))"-->
It's possible to display the Site News on the main page by placing the above widget code in the skins_site/def/index.html file, it should be placed directly below the osignal feed widget, but you may need to do some CSS to make it appear the way you want.
If you're familiar with using Twitter maybe something like a Twitter News Feed on your main index page could made to be a suitable substitute. There's a free Twitter News Feed mod available here ...
http://www.maverickwebworks.com/free.html
