RSS2.0 feed items not being created

Hi, I've had some trouble lately with FeedAPI and RSS2.0 feeds. In particular, I am able to create the Feed but no items are being retrieved. When I refresh the feed it says:

0 new item(s) were saved. 1 existing item(s) were updated.

although no items exist for the feed. This feed specifically does not contain a guid element, only a link element. After stepping through the code, I believe a line fails when it should succeed. On line 598, this checked is performed:

if (!empty($news['link'])) {
$original_url = "{$news['link']}";
}
else {
$original_url = NULL;
}

$news['link'] is a SimpleXMLElement and passing it into the empty function returns true even though it does have a link. This causes original_url to be null, along with guid (I mentioned the feed does not contain a guid). When the item is tested for uniqueness, it returns false (because link and guid are both null).

For a temporary fix, I've changed the above to:
if ( isset($news['link']) )

The items are created successfully. I'm not sure if the empty test was used for another reason because all the above test use isset.

Thanks