Seeking some advice for section setup and external articles

I have started to use the TWN template and am loving it. There are two things though that I am missing to make the site complete. I figure these items may need to be installed but the level of experience here seems like it would be a good place to start.

1. Is there any method to allow inputting of articles that are from other web sites. Not feeds, just links. So when I input an article, that is on an external site, I just want to input a link and instead of going to a section, the link would open the external article in a new window. I want this to happen solely within a sub section, not within a section that displays articles normally.

2. Since we are breaking down our sections based on continents, there are some articles that may be actually international. I figured the best way to overcome people missing articles would be to have a "WORLD" section where all articles are displayed based on date (most recent to oldest). Any ideas?