Showing recent posts

Hello, you can see my site at nrlnews.com, what I am trying to do is get it so that the latest post from any category shows up on the front page in the middle column, and is formatted the same (with the category title in the yellow, title of post in blue and so on).

The problem is that I am able to make it so that I can set up the categories and show the latest post in that category, but I’m having trouble making it so that I don’t have to set up categories it will just show the list of the most recent articles regardless of what category it is in. Right now it is restricted to the miscellaneous category.