It's your current value for Spacer Size. Your value of 15 is compressing the first post table by 15 on each side. I would recommend either setting Spacer Size to 0, or if that makes your forum look horrid, could you post the 10 lines above and below $firstbit in your SHOWNEWS template?
Then I'll try to figure out how to rearrange $spacer_open and $spacer_close for your case, since I am using a modified version of the template.
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