Some of the latest versions of WordPress use a new taxonomy database schema which can make it a bit tricky to get at and display posts data from MySQL. Here is a query we use to display the latest news and events throughout our site:
SELECT wp_posts . * FROM wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta ON wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships ON ( wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id ) LEFT JOIN wp_term_taxonomy ON ( wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id ) WHERE wp_postmeta.meta_key = "_edit_last" AND wp_posts.post_status = "publish" AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = "category" AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id IN ( [Put your category ID here] ) ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
The IN clause is where you would want to put the ID from the category you want displayed. This query has been tested and works with WordPress version 2.9