1) Most likely there is conflicting css causing the separator not to show, I would need a link to the site to troubleshoot that.
2- 3 ) in the webassist/plugins/cms_templates/news.php page, you can change the number of articles to show by editing line 4:
$newsArticles = 2;
and the number of characters to display by editing line 7:
$newsLength = 190;