hack not showing up in templates

[Ratchet]

I'm in the last stages of including our site headlines on the side of our forum home page. The only problem is I can't get the template system to actually show the headlines. Here's what I have in index.php:

PHP Code:

require('./global.php');
@include("headlines.php");

$showheadlines = getHeadlines(); 


headlines.php is a file (which is in my php include dir) with the function getHeadlines() which returns the site news headlines. I know the function itself works fine because when I echo $showheadlines it's outputs the headlines as expected (just i the wrong place). In my header template I have

PHP Code:

.
.
.
<!-- content table -->
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%"><tr><td valign="top">

$showheadlines

</td><td width="100%">
<table bgcolor="{pagebgcolor}" width="{tablewidth}" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
  <td> 


$showheadlines doesn't output anything at all. I can put some text there and it shows, and putting a vB var like $bbuserinfo[username] there works as expected as well, so it's not simply something like a malformed table or stray " or something.

I've never really hacked vB too much before, so I'm sure I'm missing something important. Any takers?

(I also posted this in "Help me finish... " forum, but it wasn't getting much attention there and I need help with this asap, so sorry about the dbl post.)