Yes, that's pretty much exactly what I need. We're actually using the Latest News as a secondary "Latest Posts." We have our website filtered into two categories and have set the Latest Posts to exclude a handful of forums, which the Latest News then uses -- although I've edited the phrase to be "Latest Technical Posts" So while we're trying to use Latest News as a secondary "Latest Posts" it's still organized by thread creation date, we need it by latest post date.
I did find how Latest Posts was using $get_new_posts so I went into the template for Latest News and changed $get_news_posts to be $get_new_posts but then it came up blank for everything so I had to change it back.