How to implement pager in custom page template?
This can and should almost certainly be done entirely with the Views module (which is/will be in Drupal 8 core!). The filtering of your content by type and the value of the "top news" field can all be done with Views, along with the ajax pager. You can then use the Views attachment display type to attach those news items which do not have the "top news" box checked. You may also want to look into the Nodequeue module for ordering content in more ambiguous ways than just the most recent or whatnot, but you can also use Drupal's "sticky" setting on nodes that you want to keep at the top of the list and highlight, format them differently, etc. Views also allows you to rewrite the output of every item in the results in the UI or using tpl files. Views, my friend. Views.