Your page is behaving weirdly because you are using query_posts which clobbers the main query. Anything else on the page that depends on the main query has the wrong information after your query_posts runs. Don’t use query_posts.
$qry = new WP_Query('category_name=News and Events, Uncategorized&showposts=5');
if ($qry->have_posts()) {
while ($qry->have_posts()) {
$qry->the_post();
// your Loop as normal
}
} else {
// no posts found
}
At the end of this Loop the global $post variable will be set to the last item in the secondary Loop, and not to the current item in the main query Loop. You can demonstrate this with the following code:
var_dump($post->post_name); // main Loop
$qry = new WP_Query(array('post_type' => 'page','posts_per_page' => 1));
while ($qry->have_posts()) {
$qry->the_post();
var_dump($post->post_name); // secondary Loop
}
var_dump($post->post_name); // Still the secondary Loop
Since most Loops have the_post() at the beginning, that variable should be reset at that point, so resetting $post may not be necessary at all. To avoid that issue, I originally had wp_reset_query on the line following the end of the Loop, which does sort out $post, but as @Rarst points out here, that is overkill and wp_reset_postdata would be the better choice.