If you didn't want to use a module, you could use split to separate both dates into month (mm) day (dd) and year(yyyy), then reconstruct them as a number in the form 'yyyymmdd'. Then a simple numeric comparison would do the trick:

#assumes format dd/mm/yyyy (Australian format)
#and vars $start and $end already in yyyymmdd format

($day, $month, $year) = split(/\//, $newsdate);
$newsdate = "$year$month$day";
if ($newsdate >= $start && $newsdate <= $end) {
       #do stuff
}
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