Does Arc support i18n?

I've notice that news.ycombinator doesn't have an encoding declared in its HTML head information, and it made me wonder, does Arc use Unicode internally? (If so, true Unicode or just 16-bits worth of UTF-16 like early Java?) Or does it only allow ASCII? Are there any facilities in Arc to make internationalization easier? Looking at the example of previous web frameworks, it seems like leaving out true Unicode support early ends up biting you later when you have to rewrite stuff to support Unicode after all.