2 questions on a news and calendar script

First:
I am writing a calendar page for an organization I belong too. I want it to be in the format as is on teh current sitehttp://www.suanhacky.org/calendar.php.It looks like
May 2003
1-event
event description

23-event
event description
June 2003
10-event
event description

I want my calendar page tp look like this. But i am not sure how to do it correctly.

I have a DB with 7 columns
ID(primary)
Type [to show which divisiont he date belongs to]
month
date
year
event
event description
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The next is for the news portion of the index page

I want the index page to list only the 4 most recent news stories

the DB for news has 5 columns
id(primary)
type[to show which sub division it belongs to]
date[varchar(11)]
title
news
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I am also more then willing to change DB columns so if I have the DB tables set in a way that what I want can't happen easily or at all I can make it so I can