Figures. I have my copy of Python Essential Reference (3rd edition) for a week, and it's immediately outdated as Python 2.5 goes to alpha. Sigh.
The new features in Python 2.5 look really interesting though. As I tell my scripting languages class, while enterprise neanderthals and programming semantics snobs may give these languages short shrift, there's actually a fair amount of language design that goes into their evolution. Perl might look all gnarled and mangy, but it looks that way on purpose! Ha, ha. Only serious.
Anyhoo, at a glance the coolest additions are the inclusion of the etree module, for XML processing, and sqlite3, a lightweight, embeddable RDBMS system. If the Python junta is going that route, they should just include pycurl to replace the somewhat archaic urllib2. Core Python, pycurl, etree, sqlite3, and bsddb start to make a nice platform for webfeed aggregation straight of the box, although a reimagining of Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser in ElementTree would be nice.