How do I get just the first entry with a 'for' loop?
As you'll only ever be working with one entry I wouldn't bother with the for loop for the first part of your question. Just set a variable with your featured news article. Something like this (not tested though):

{% set featuredArticle = craft.entries.section('news').first() %}

&lt;div class="container" id="featured-news"&gt;
    &lt;div class=col-md-6&gt;
        &lt;h2 class="news-title"&gt;{{ featuredArticle.title }}&lt;/h2&gt;
        &lt;h3 class="news-date"&gt;{{ featuredArticle.postDate.format('F d, Y') }}&lt;/h3&gt;
        &lt;p&gt;
        {{ featuredArticle.body }}
        &lt;/p&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
    &lt;img class="col-md-4" src="images/pic-block-pic1.jpg" style="float:right;"&gt;
    &lt;div class="col-xs-12" &gt;
    &lt;a href="{{ featuredArticle.url }}" style="float:right; padding: 20px 0px 20px 0px"&gt;READ FULL STORY...&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;


EDIT: Then for the second part of your question this other answer tells you how to exclude an Entry:

How can I exclude the current entry when I've structured my syntax like this?

So from the other article, you'd do:

{% set entries = craft.entries({
  section: 'news'
}).id('not ' ~ featuredArticle.id) %}