Problems with a mini-loop

I am trying to add the 5 most recent posts from my blog to the homepage of my website (just an index.html page). I am looking at how to make a mini-loop on the support pages, but it deosn’t work.
When I follow these instructions this is the output I get:

# get_results(“SELECT ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status= \”publish\” ORDER BY ‘ID’ DESC LIMIT “.$how_many); foreach($news as $np){ print (“ID); print (“\”>$np->post_title
“); } ?>

Can anyone help me out?