At it's most basic, try something like this, where NewsItem is the document type alias of your news items:

<ul>
@foreach (var newsItem in Model.Descendants("NewsItem")) 
{
<li><a href="@newsItem.Url">@newsItem.Name</a></li>
}
</ul>

There's no need for the outer foreach loop, unless you've got multiple news sections (even then, it's not really needed, depending on how you want to present the page). Also, trying to get descendants of children will fail - descendants is all you need as it includes children. 

This example simply finds all NewsItems that are descendants of the homepage, and builds the list item accordingly. You'd probably see better performance by first finding the news index page, then getting it's descendant news items, especially if you had a large site with multiple children at the first level. Regardless, my example should get you what you need.