We found that there is unicode in the Rally API responses.
Here is what it looks like:
"Description": "\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ccode\u003EHello world hjklh\u003C/code\u003E\u003C/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003Evfdgfdsg\u003C/
We recommend that your team code for any Unicode that may come through by using a Unicode to ASCII converter of some type in your code before it gets to the application.