See the content-type header: 
> HEAD http://www.georgewbush.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=2768
200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:09:36 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Length: 55012
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Client-Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:14:04 GMT
Client-Peer: 65.172.163.121:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=kma4jj55oyrrn245ujknpdab; path=/
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

[download]
It's UFT-8 encoded, and translating it back to ASCII might be lossy. See perlunicode and Encode::PerlIO for some pointers on how to handle unicode - you probably need a recent perl (at least 5.6, but preferably 5.8 or higher).

Joost.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re: LWP::Simple returns strange encodings by Joost
in thread LWP::Simple returns strange encodings by Anonymous Monk

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