Non-breaking space

[Chong Yidong]

NEWS contains the following entry:

  *** Non-breaking space is now displayed as whitespace.

However, we also have:

  nobreak-char-display is a variable defined in `C source code'.
  Its value is t

  Documentation:
  *Control highlighting of nobreak space and soft hyphen.
  A value of t means highlight the character itself (for nobreak space,
  use face `nobreak-space').
  A value of nil means no highlighting.
  Other values mean display the escape glyph followed by an ordinary
  space or ordinary hyphen.

This is unclear: is non-breaking space highlighted by default, or not?