After looking at this briefly, I am not sure that this is a plain-text file. Interpreting it as UTF-16 LE shows that the characters are as they appear.
Immediately after the BOM is: SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK' (U+201A) START OF HEADING (U+0001) SPACE (U+0020) SPACE (U+0020) LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS (U+00FF) LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN (U+00FE) LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS (U+00FF) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
