I'm trying to remember how this looked before... I will have to say this is a much better design. My main suggestion would be to blend the corners of all of your images with the background, it is real faint, and may not show up on some monitors, but every image with a rounded corner has a white 90 degree corner extending out to the edge of the image. Thats an easy fix, just paint over the corner in your images with the background color on your site, or change your background to white. All in all I think you did great.
Also you may wish to work the ads on your main page into the content, I would move the bottom ad above the scrolling news, and change the background of the ad to match the background of your site