The format in devref doesn't actually have any justification, which is odd. I also think that if the format of some file in a package is normative, then it should be in policy, not devref. Oh well.
What do you suggest we do here? Open debian/NEWS in readme-debian-mode? That suports only a single timestamp. Asterisks are (literally) hardcoded into debian-changelog-mode, so I don't know how easy that would be to change.
