Okay, I've published Dispatch 0.6.1 with a solution to this problem. Since the resource doesn't specify a charset and it doesn't use Dispatch's default encoding, you need to do this to get it as a string:
import dispatch._
import Http._
val http = new Http
http("
http://bae.cf.huffingtonpost.com/" <:< Map("User-Agent" -> "Mozilla/4.0") >\ "iso-8859-1" as_str)
The new >\ operator changes the default character encoding for the request. To use this you'll need to update the version spec in whatever project you're using to 0.6.1 and also refer to the databinder.net repository because I haven't been able to publish to scala-tools for the past few days. In your sbt project:
val databinder_net = "databinder.net repository" at "
http://databinder.net/repo"
Then run update in sbt. (Or if you're running Dispatch from a cloned repo or something you can just pull the changes.) I've also published a new Twine jar which refers to this version.
And thanks for reporting the problem!
Nathan