PEAR XML RSS problem

Hi guys

I hope someone can help, Using
http://www.stargeek.com/php_scripts.php?script=1
as a basis and using the PEAR XML_RSS parser
http://pear.php.net/package-info.php?pacid=22
I've hacked together a PHP script which pulls feed addresses from a
database then dumps new feed items into my mysql database - all was
going well with feeds such as
lineages.co.uk/wp-rss2.php
working fine but i've found a number of feeds that just get skipped over
rather than inserting ....
some of the feeds causing
problems....http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.ph...15&q=genealogy
http://genealogyresources.blogspot.c...yresources.xml
http://news.genealogytoday.com/index.xml

At first I thought the cause was the difference in files decalring
themselves RDF rather than RSS but thats not the case - then I thought
it was the parser choking on & but the genealgytoday feed doesn't have
an & in it

The bit of the script that does the parsing and insert to the database....

foreach ($feeds as $f)
{
echo $f['address']."\n";
$this = split('/', $f['address']);
$fp = fsockopen ($this[2], 80, $errno, $errstr, 8);
if ($fp)
{
echo "connected to feed...";
//use php library's, pear's, XML_RSS class as the parser
$r = &new XML_RSS($f['address']);
$r->parse();
echo "....feed parsed now getting items....";
foreach ($r->getItems() as $value)
{
echo "I am inside the foreach but have I got any damn items....";
$value['title']= trim($value['title']);
echo $value['title']."\n...title of feed....";
$value['link']= trim($value['link']);
if ( (!in_array(trim($value['title']), $titles)) and
(!(in_array($value['link'], $links))) and ($value['title']))
{
$titles[] = $value['title'];
echo $value['title']."\n";
$links[] = $value['link'];
list($link, $extension) = explode(".", $value['link']);
$title = $value['title']." ".$value['description'];
$title = $value['title'];
$link = $value['link'];
$desc = $value['description'];
$date = $nowtime;
$site = $f['site'];

$querya = ("insert into genealogy_posts ( post_author,post_date ,
post_date_gmt, post_content, post_title, post_category, post_excerpt,
post_modified, post_modified_gmt, link) values ( '1',NOW(),
DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1
HOUR),'".mysql_escape_string($desc)."','".mysql_es cape_string($title)."',
'0', '".mysql_escape_string($desc)."', NOW() ,DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1
HOUR), '".mysql_escape_string($link)."')");

flush();
mysql_query($querya);

}
else {
echo "....nothing new here....";}
}
}
else
{
echo "unresponsive\n";
}
}

For those that fail I DONT get "I am inside the foreach but have I got
any damn items...." message

It has been suggested I need to escape the items (eg by addslashes() )
which I assumed to be cData in the PEAR RSS.php - but from what I gather
the script doesn't get far enough?

Any help is gratefully appreciated as I really don't have a clue ;-)