If you inspect the HTML of the above you can see that the 'not working' sections are like the following:
<i>
<span class="sm">This doesn't</span>
</i>
Text is small, not italic.
<span style="color: red;">
<a title="www.allakhazam.com" rel="external" href="HTTP://www.allakhazam.com">This doesn't</a>
</span>
Link is skyblue, not red.
In the case of .sm, the stylesheet (common.zam.com/shared/basestyle.css, line 15) explicitly sets font-style to normal, when it shouldn't. Its counterpart, .lg (for large text), does not do that.
In the case of the 'a' tag, it also gives an explicit color which ends up overriding the color set in the span. This, however, I don't regard as a bug (directly). Links without the extra color set need to have their color default to the appropriate value as determined by the site. The one thing that could fix the ordering issue here is to set the color span's style to "color: red !important;" to make it override colors set in contained elements' styles.