I had a similar requirement ages ago, which I assume is the same sort of thing - the homepage on the site had news articles on it, but with the most recent ones given more prominence, like this:
http://www.mphrp.org
The trick turned out to be to use one recordset, and then use some PHP to control which records you show in each section. So that example has this to show the main story at the top:
<?php
mysql_data_seek($WADAtbnews, 0);
$row_WADAtbnews = mysql_fetch_assoc($WADAtbnews);
?>
CONTENT HERE
This to show the next three:
<?php for($i=1;$i<=3;$i++) { ?>
<?php
mysql_data_seek($WADAtbnews, $i);
$row_WADAtbnews = mysql_fetch_assoc($WADAtbnews);
?>
CONTENT HERE
<?php } ?>
And these to show the two columns of the oldest news further down:
<?php for($i=4;$i<=6;$i++) { ?>
<?php
mysql_data_seek($WADAtbnews, $i);
$row_WADAtbnews = mysql_fetch_assoc($WADAtbnews);
?>
CONTENT HERE
<?php } ?>
and
<?php for($i=7;$i<=9;$i++) { ?>
<?php
mysql_data_seek($WADAtbnews, $i);
$row_WADAtbnews = mysql_fetch_assoc($WADAtbnews);
?>
CONTENT HERE
<?php } ?>
Hope that makes sense and helps.
