Thanks for your response. I'm working on a firewalled dev machine, but I replicated the condition on your demo server.
The feed URL is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/wi_geoevents(the feed list the next 25 upcoming events from our calendar, sorted by date, with tomorrow's events listed before events two weeks from now... you can confirm by looking at the raw feed.)
If I add a {rss2} tag to the home page layout on your News Portal demo server, and enter in my feed URL in the zones manager for "syndicated news 2", the LAST meetings will show up FIRST on the list. Again, this behavior makes complete sense in most traditional situations.
Thanks again for considering an enhancement!