This looks like a problem with the Al-Jazeera Web serving infrastructure rather 
than a PHP issue. Basically, it's responding to a HTTP 1.0 request with no 
Connection header with a HTTP 1.1 response with a "Connection: keep-alive" 
header, which is counter to section 8.1.2.1 of RFC 2616, which states:

"Clients and servers SHOULD NOT assume that a persistent connection is 
maintained for HTTP versions less than 1.1 unless it is explicitly signaled. See 
section 19.6.2 for more information on backward compatibility with HTTP/1.0 
clients."

It's a SHOULD NOT, not a MUST NOT, but nevertheless it doesn't line up with 
normal HTTP server behaviour out there on the 'net, and there's no support for 
handling keep-alive connections within the HTTP wrapper. The problem can be 
worked around from within PHP by sending an explicit Connection request header 
like so:

<?php
$options = array(
    'http' => array(
        'header' => 'Connection: close'
    )
);
$ctx = stream_context_create($options);
$content = file_get_contents('http://english.aljazeera.net/', false, $ctx);
?>

Since php_stream_url_wrap_http_ex() downloads the entire response from the 
connection (and blocks until the socket is closed) before parsing the HTTP 
response (including headers), it would require a considerable amount of work to 
refactor the code to allow the Content-Length header to be examined.

This _might_ be something we could look at post-5.3, but I think this is best 
closed for now.