Strange…
The second section that is just below this one, displays the News links…
Once I make above changes to the first part (category=-7) as told by you, the second part works correctly the previous way, i.e.
$myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5&category=7'); //GET RECENT POSTS IN NEWS CATEGORY
foreach($myposts as $post) :?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
works perfectly fine…
So, the first part is making some side effect…does this have something to do with the_post() call…I read documentation for these API’s, but couldn’t figure out much…