RSS subscriptions non-SAX compliant - Character reference "&#1a" is an invalid XML character.

Lehman Brothers are developing an application which uses jira REST styled service to download jira RSS feed and parse it. However, we find the RSS feed having invalid XML characters in some of the queries, which causes the xml parser to fail. We see the following exception in log when we try to parse xml:

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Character reference "&#1a" is an invalid XML character.
at weblogic.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1189)
at weblogic.xml.jaxp.WebLogicXMLReader.parse(WebLogicXMLReader.java:135)
at weblogic.xml.jaxp.RegistryXMLReader.parse(RegistryXMLReader.java:152)
at javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser.parse(SAXParser.java:345)
at javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser.parse(SAXParser.java:143)
at org.codehaus.swizzle.jira.JiraRss.<init>(JiraRss.java:63)
at org.codehaus.swizzle.jira.JiraRss.<init>(JiraRss.java:53)
at org.codehaus.swizzle.jira.JiraRss.<init>(JiraRss.java:49)
at com.lehman.jira.nugget.viewFilterServlet.printJiraIssues(viewFilterServlet.java:219)
at com.lehman.jira.nugget.viewFilterServlet.doGet(viewFilterServlet.java:156)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:740)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853)
at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl$ServletInvocationAction.run(ServletStubImpl.java:1077)
at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:465)
at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.invokeServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:348)
at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext$ServletInvocationAction.run(WebAppServletContext.java:7047)
at weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:321)
at weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:121)
at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.invokeServlet(WebAppServletContext.java:3902)
at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletRequestImpl.execute(ServletRequestImpl.java:2773)
at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:224)
at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:183)