php code to load latest posts from a term
One way would be to use taxonomy_select_nodes() to build and run the query for you, it orders by n.sticky DESC, n.created DESC by default but you can change that to just n.created DESC if you need to by passing the 5th argument to the function. 

It also limits the query to the number of records found in the default_nodes_main variable, which defaults to 10.

$tids = array(1); // 1 is the term id (tid)
$result = taxonomy_select_nodes($tids);

while ($row = db_fetch_object($result)) {
  $node = node_load($row-&gt;nid);

  $title = $node-&gt;title;
  // etc...
}