Many thanks to @marcco for sharing this nginx confs, i'm using it with success! I only made 2 small additions: first one to block access to log files (location ~* \.log$ { deny all; }) and the second one are the rewrites for the news manager plugin, so @incognito can test it also:
## rewrites for news manager
rewrite ^/news/post/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&post=$1 last;
rewrite ^/news/tag/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&tag=$1 last;
rewrite ^/news/page/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&page=$1 last;
rewrite ^/news/archive/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&archive=$1 last;
## rewrites for news manager
rewrite ^/news/post/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&post=$1 last;
rewrite ^/news/tag/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&tag=$1 last;
rewrite ^/news/page/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&page=$1 last;
rewrite ^/news/archive/([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?id=news&archive=$1 last;