Time to stop the bleeding....

[AChimp]

Those &'s followed by numbers are the Unicode numbers for various characters (kinda like ASCII, but bigger). In this case, they're the fancy "tilted" quotation marks.

Some news sites use them because they feel that it makes them look more posh. Unfortunately, they don't translate well when you copy and paste articles (especially into phpBB where everything is just stored as plain text and not parsed for special character codes).

:geek