Avoid duplicate content on Home page

On my Home page I have an element at the top for “Featured” stories which will be used for the major stories of the day – these could come from any Category (News, Sport, etc) depending on what the major news is, and so I am using the “Featured” category to populate this

Further down the page, I have a News element and then further down a sport element (and then other such as Farming, Lifestyle, etc.)

The issue is that the articles that appear in the “Featured” section at the top of the page also appear in the other sections, e.g. if a story is marked as Featured and News it appears in both places. How do I stop this duplicate content appearing? Obviously you just want each story to appear once on the Home page.

Other newspaper style themes I have used (e.g. Jnews+, Publisher) have an option to prevent this duplication but I can’t find anything in the Newspaper theme.

Thanks

Stuart

I can’t use the offset in the News module or Sport module as you will never know from hour to hour how many stories from each section would appear as “Featured”.