Views - Date Filtering (Panels?) this is one of the most confusing tasks I've been asked to accomplish in Drupal. I have a Content Type called Latest News that has a Date field (not the creation date, a date that represent's the new itself and may be used for the filtering process).

What I need is the following page:

_________________________
|  _____  ____________  |
|  |   |  |          |  |
|  | A |  |    B     |  |
|  |   |  |          |  |
|  |___|  |          |  |
|         |          |  |
|  | C |  |__________|  |
|                       | 
|_______________________|


Where A is a list of Latest News nodes' titles, B is the node itself (smells like Panels), and C is a menu that contains dates spanning from 2004 to now (dynamic preferably), that acts as a filter to view A.

Whenever a user clicks on a date on C, the titles in A are filtered (much like an exposed filter), and the node display on B should change to the topmost item of the currently filtered list on A.

The current displaying node's title should be highlighted.

If the user has filtered A to display news from 2011, clicking on one of them should retain the filter, and simply display that node.

How would you go about doing this?
I will be editing this question if more clarification is needed. Thanks in advance.
Here's what I would do.

First I'd enable the CTools Page Manager and Views content panes and create a page (admin/structure/pages) for that display that has arguments in it's path.

Then I'd create three views with display type "content pane": one that lists nodes based on a contextual filter (A), one that shows only one node (B) and one that lists dates (C).

Then I'd create the column layout in the page's content and would provide the arguments with Page Manager.

Here's a really nice tutorial from NodeOne that addresses most of the tricky parts here:
http://dev.nodeone.se/en/learn-page-manager-part-5-views-content-panes-basics