Ah, our FRiend cynwoody knew about this:
“This is a recent problem. It started around the time FR was having problems getting banned by Google’s malware filter, apparently due to an FR page that linked to a malware site.”
Something changed and broke smart quotes.
Here’s a link to some of the threads. Looks like it began around Sep 27 => http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?s=+malware&ok=Search&q=quick&m=any&o=time&SX=564ea2876c724978a516af590ae170c44b88e569