It appears to be a time zone issue.  The date for creation and publishing has the timezone offset added
to it in the database.  I fixed the problem by changing the following in helper.php

I changed

          $now = date( 'Y-m-d H:i', time() );

to

          $date =& JFactory::getDate();
          $now = $date->toMySQL();

This is the way the mod_latestnews gets the current time.  Hope this helps.