I've been seeing this for two days: http://flickr.com/photos/breflection/76394552

This is more than somewhat ironic:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2005/12/xml-errors-in-feeds.html

Quote: "not trying to make you feed sorry for the Reader team".

The feed validator they recommend throws 1 warning (but no errors) when parsing a Google News feed search for "google":
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.google.com%2Fnews%3Fhl%3Den%26ned%3Dus%26q%3Dgoogle%26ie%3DUTF-8%26output%3Drss

The Google News Sci/Tech RSS feed displays OK for in Reader:

http://www.google.com/reader/preview/*/feed/http://news.google.com/?ned=us&topic=t&output=rss

Brian, if you could point me to the feed URL that you were using, I can see if there's anything that we or the News team can do.

Phillipp, your quote pointed out a typo in my post. I'm not sure if it counts as a Freudian slip (feed vs. feel) but it's fixed now :)

Those errors are no longer occuring..thanks.

I take that back, it's still messing up. Here's the feed:

http://news.google.com/?ned=us&topic=t&output=rss

When I create rss feeds I always escape the html tags etc... In fact I thought you had to do it in order to be valid xml...this feed is not doing that.

I see what's going on. The feed has an invalid UTF-8 character in it (the top error in my blog post). We'll be deploying some code in Reader to make it more resilient to these errors soon, but in the meantime I'll let the News team know.

Extended rss specification/standard:

*You can claim UTF-8, but it doesn't really matter if your characters actually are
*Don't worry if your opening and ending tags mismatch, we're down like that
*Entities don't have to be defined. We're pretty good at guessing
*Starting your document with a tag is not necessary (really!)

... this is the thing that makes me wonder, sometimes, about standards.