“latest news” box on seperate homepage?

I have a blog within my current site (under “news”), but i would like a “latest news” box to appear on my homepage too, with the latest entry from the blog.

preferably from a specific category, and if possible automatically limited to a certain number of characters (so it fits in the box) -though a manual “read more” as normal would be ok.

Is there a plugin or hack that covers this sort of thing? i’m not even really sure what i should be searching for..

thanks,

david