You are using the wrong date format pattern see this page for info.
yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZZZZ
Is what you want for your date format.
Also if you want to check that NewsDate
is today you should use:
BOOL today = [[NSCalendar currentCalendar] isDateInToday:NewsDate];
Checking if a date is equal to NSDate date
would me that the dates would have to matches exactly - down to the millisecond!
Note that -isDateInToday:
is iOS 7 only. Leave me a comment if you want a version that works for iOS 6 too :)