I'm not a Smarty expert, but when I see a 'db:' in front of a template, I think it means it is accessing a source from the DB.
Try going into the DB, look at xoops_tplfile table, check the tpl_id of the template mentioned above, then look at the HTML code of that template in xoops_tplsource table using the tpl_id as reference.
Just in case I was wrong in my assumptions, could you specify the file you were editing when this happened?
You don't need 'News' for that. You can set up a Custom Block with the text you want (similar to the Welcome Block here in xoops.org). Set that block (from Group Permissions) to be seen only by Anonymous Users but not by Registered Users.
Looking at your left column, it seems that there is a <br> at the end of each block. This would cause the space.
Look in the theme_blockleft.html if it has that, or in the theme.html, if it doesn't. BTW, if you want to keep the <br>, I suggest you use <br /> instead to keep with the XHTML specification.
That would probably take a good amount of code-hacking so as to output all of them in just one block. That would include block templates and the block display function.
You could, of course, design it that it looks like one block by adjusting the background or font-weight of the block titles.
Maybe the devs here can give a much more specific response on the code hacking.
Seems I can't test it out because it's too specific for your setup. But I noticed the script tags. If you use PHP for custom blocks, you do not have to enter the <? and ?> tags. Just place the script you made inside without the tags and save it as PHP. Please try it out and see what happens.
Maybe some of the XOOPS dev/mod team can comment on connecting to MySQL from a custom block as I personally have no experience with that.
The div with the <{$xoops_contents}> handles your news items (and any other items/content of a module). Place that above your center blocks if you want it to show first before the blocks.