Simple URLs in Apache2 not working

I've tried several different approaches that are supposed to work. I tried
adding Option FollowSymLinks into the <Directory> config for the server's
root directory. I tried adding a <Files> tag to force the type to php which
doesn't want to work either.

I want http://mydomain.com/news/123 to point to
http://mydomain.com/news.php then I can use php to parse the REQUEST_URI to
get all the other arguments.

I had it working fine in 1.3, and I think it worked by default and I didn't
have to do anything to turn it on. Apache2 doesn't have it by default and I
can't figure out how to turn it on.

Any help would be appreciated.

-Kadaan

Well I got it working with mod_rewrite, but this approach forces me to
create a rule for each new file I put in instead of working for any file.