Use CURL or fsockopen() to get the result from Google, then simplexml_load_string()
$zip = 10001;
$url = "http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=".$zip."&output=rss";
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$rss = simplexml_load_string($result);