Can I out news articles on my site if I reference them?

No one really reads the Adsense program policies lol.

Scraped content: Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.

That's under the websmaster guidelines in the content guidelines subcategory. So although they're saying it nicely, yes you need to (usually) have unique content, not taken from another site.