weird character  , how to make it disappear?

I'm trying to get a raquo character to appear, but I'm
getting a  Â before it.
How do I get rid of this   ??

I've got the following for my xsl file at the top:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='US-ASCII'?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
	<!ENTITY raquo 	"&#x000BB;">
	<!ENTITY sep 	" ">
]>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
	<xsl:output method="html" encoding="US-ASCII"/>

then when I want the raquo to appear, my usage is:

&sep;&raquo;&sep;

but thru the browser, I'm getting as output:

»

how do I make that  disappear?
I've also tried to change the encoding to iso-8859-1,
and the entity reference to &x187; but with no
success.  any help greatly appreciated.

thanks
Paul

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