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Hi mesmeric,
1) You can, but only by hacking the code.
2) The character limit set for your AMS spotlight block counts all characters, not just the ones visable on your screen. So each character in your HTML code is counted toward your chracter limit, and also some symbols (;!, etc) take more than one character to render.
What will be happening in your case is that you character limit will be being reached before the end of your HTML, and thus cutting some HTMl code out making it invalid. Try setting your character limit in your spotlight block to 0 as that will tell AMS to use the entire introduction of your article as the spotlight text, rather than just a character limit.