<img width=1 height=1 alt="">It's not that they're not in <a> tags. It's that the first one doesn't have an src. That's bizarre. I'm not sure it's a behavior I'm too worried about.
Sorry, your right..news.google.com uses src-less imgs 16 times and that is exactly how many errors mech reports.
The patch keeps my log files much smaller. :-) I do hope you will add it to the standard release. Thanks Peter