For me NPR news (03-03-2020 5AM ET) is working. Are you on cssu stable or testing?
I think you need microb-engine and libnss3 from community-testing.
Can you make a package look up for maemosec if all packages are from devel?

Maybe I implement enclosure download with wget and will also look into region problem.
But it could be for region that qt has a locale region bug or that something need to be changed for the sql database.
In principle I managed to download also with other region settings also with https by patching qhttpresponse.cpp. But then I guess the database gives wrong time or date and cutenews behave as there were no new feeds. The source is very modular and flexible but you need to make changes at many different location in the source.