Re: Selective frontpage news
The bp home theme is really just a widget framework. You can install any widget you like in that theme. You can modify the standard ‘activity’ and ‘recent blog posts’ widgets. You can install a plugin that aggregates feeds from specific blogs. Your requirements are pretty specific so you have to decide if you are going to develop custom code or try to utilize some off the shelf plugins.
To answer your question. No there isn’t a mechanism in place that allows you to be selective in the posts that show up using the ‘sitewide activity’ or ‘recent blog posts’ widgets.
Have fun. (but don’t tell anyone we are though)