I'm going to throw it out. It _is_ valid xml, and its it is _valid_ utf8 - but its still garbage. The final result is supposed to be, simply, "A's" (I checked the link the rss item points to).

I don't think the extra  is exactly random, however, and I'm sure if I really understood unicode and encodings I could at least make a reasonable guess at what has been done to that poor string. One day...

qq