The problem is with the underlay. Once I copied the underlay from the new release to my wiki, Recent Changes worked properly again.
There are two things that should be made more clear in the documentation. 1. After upgrading to a new version, the data should be migrated. 2. After upgrading to a new version, the underlay should be copied to any wikis you have either as www-data user or as root and then chown -R to www-data:www-data. e.g. cp -r /usr/share/moin/underlay /location of your wiki -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]

