The news forum is already there on the front page - you could probably just edit the settings on that forum to allow other users to post discussions if you wanted to and then set the front page to show the x most recent posts as you need
Other than that the normal set up for moodle is that a forum has its own page so that it is styled as a forum aand not as a front page/course page or any other type of page.
It depends whether you want to have peoplle contribute on the front page or just read it I guess - you could always display an RSS feed of a forum on the front page?
Not sure at all if these are the sort of ideas you're looking for, I'm afraid forums is not an area I've dug into much beyond using them on my sites, but I'm not aware of being actually able to embed the whole forum into a front/course page directly.
Richard