also, visiting /news/ would lead you to the PAGE called /news/ . If you want to have it just be localhost/news/ just create a page called news, then use a page template for that page and query for all posts in the category news.

This is a text copy from:
http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-remove-category-from-your-wordpress-url

"
By default, WordPress category permalinks are displayed that way:

http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/category/wordpress

As you can see, the category in the url is pretty useless. Here's how to remove it:

First backup your .htaccess file. Then, open it and append the following line:

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourblog.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Once saved, your categories pages will be displayed like this:

http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/wordpress
"

WIll i be making more trouble in future with this, or is it safe?

What is your end goal? Is it to make a page called "news" and display all of the posts with the news category attached to them?

you could try querying for the news category on your news page.

Make a blank news.php page in your theme file and use this code to make it a template

<?
/*
Template Name: News
*/

get_header();

then to query for posts in the news category, just use the query_posts function

//The Query
query_posts( 'category_name=news' );

//The Loop
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
//put all of your code in here to echo a post, such as:
the_title();
endwhile; else:

endif;

//Reset Query
wp_reset_query();

//this calls the sidebar, if you dont want that, then delete this next link
get_sidebar();
//this next line calls the footer.
get_footer();
?>

So all together your code in news.php looks like this.

<?
/*
Template Name: News
*/

get_header();

//The Query
query_posts( 'category_name=news' );

//The Loop
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
//put all of your code in here to echo a post, such as:
the_title();
endwhile; else:

endif;

//Reset Query
wp_reset_query();

//this calls the sidebar, if you dont want that, then delete this next link
get_sidebar();
//this next line calls the footer.
get_footer();
?>

then go into your backend to the news page and choose "news" from your template dropdown on the right-hand side.

Hope this helps you get where you need to go.