It turns out there is a bad feed in the current default feed list.
Slate is pointing to the wrong address.
The problem is that news feed doesn’t deal with this properly – which stops notifications, and disables the ‘update all feeds’ preference.
The quick fix is to delete the slate newsfeed, or point it to http://feeds.slate.com/slate
I have uploaded a new version which deals with bad feeds and just gets on with things. Hopefully Palm will approve it shortly.