drupal filtered block

[der.hans]

moin moin,

anyone know of a way to make a block that's a filtered list of articles
that has a 'read more' link to either an arbitrary URL or a less strict
set of filters?

Essentially, I'd like only some of the items to be promoted to the blocks, but
want to be able to point at all of the items in that category to be on
the main page.

I also want this to work for events, so might need the arbitrary link.

I've tried with views, but not yet found anything that allows having two
sets of filtes.

ciao,

der.hans
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