I personally would never place links in the middle of the page. I'd put all the links to your left and enlarge the news thingy.
You'd could try to code a tree-like structured links
Like at first you only see the link "Section 1" but after clicking on it, the 2nd level links will pop under it 🙂
Before clicking on Section 1
- Section 1
- Section 2
- section 3
After clicking on section 1
- Section 1
|
|--- Link 1a
|--- Link 1b
|--- Link 1c
- Section 2
- Section 3