I'd really appreciate some help!

Here is my site in-progress: http://staging.wagner.edu/wagnermagazine/

The featured content box has the following problems:

1) The photo and the text become mismatched once in awhile. They'll scroll a few times all ok and then be completely off or vice-versa. This is the worst of the problems.

2) The text from the headline runs straight into the body text (except when the headline bumps to a second line).

3) I only want the first photo in each feature story to show up – it is scrolling through all photos from the associated story.

4) I would like to know how to control how many sentances (not how many lines) show up in that feature box. This may be a function of my theme and not the feature box.

Thank you again for any help you can give…obviously I am not very good with this kind of thing.