Nano-and-Weird Blank Lines?

[Hart Larry]

Well, back on January 08, 2008 Tim gave me a quite helpful command to get rid 
of blank lines, useing sed.  Most times it works quite well, however, when I 
try-and-edit an article from the printer friendly version of Time Magazine, 
these sample supposedly blank lines will not go away.

      *
      *
      * [1]Back to Article
      *

      *
      *
      * [2]Click to Print
      *

    Thursday, Jul. 30, 2009
With speakup I can hear some stars on a line, I can search-and-replace those, 
but there must be other atributes which I cannot get rid of automaticly in Nano 
or with this sed command.
I remember in my older DOS days, running World Perfect 6.0, you could get an 
ascii value for a charactor highlighted, you could then search or replace it as 
well.  I suppose there are no Linux WP versions?
Thanks so much in advance
Hart