Not The BBC News: 28 October

A court in Iran has sentenced 4 Christians to 80 lashes each, for drinking wine during a Communion service.

A police raid in Manchester uncovered what is believed to be Britain’s first 3D-printed gun. A plastic trigger mechanism and a magazine capable of holding bullets were found next to a state of the art 3D printer. Plastic guns are attractive to criminals because they don’t show up on metal detectors.

Investigators in the USA who arrested the alleged head of the “Silk Road” black market website have seized $30 million worth of Bitcoins, the digital Internet currency, from his computer.

David Cameron was awarded “Politician of the Year” by a gay rights group, but he declined to collect the award, or to send any other senior Tories to collect the award, at the group’s upmarket annual awards ceremony. Instead Ed Milliband collected the award, “on behalf of everyone who voted for gay marriage”.

Three of this weekend’s Premier League football matches were effectively decided by refereeing decisions. When Tottenham played Hull, a Hull defender was struck on the foot by the ball, which ricocheted upwards and hit his hand. The referee gave a penalty, and Tottenham won 1-0. In Swansea v West Ham (a game in which West Ham played six midfielders and no striker), one of West Ham’s defenders unwitting blocked a cross with his elbow. The referee did not award a penalty, and the game finished 0-0. And in Norwich v Cardiff, the Cardiff goalkeeper kicked the ball into touch so that one of his team’s injured players could receive treatment. Protocol dictates that the ball should be returned to the keeper, but instead it went to a Norwich player who scored a goal. With both sets of players surrounding the referee to argue their case, and the Norwich manager privately promising the Cardiff manager that he would instruct his players to let Cardiff score if the goal stood, the referee defused the situation by ordering the throw-in to be re-taken because he had not given permission for the first one. The game ended 0-0.

The problem of sun reflecting from the “walkie talkie” building at 23 Curzon Street in London and overheating the far side of the street has been solved by hanging a dark translucent screen over the south side of the building. See photo above.

And finally, a man who died of prostate cancer at the age of 61 in the village of Brattleby, Lincolnshire, arranged for his son to read a eulogy at the funeral which confessed that father and son were responsible for the appearance of garden gnomes at random locations around the village in the previous 10 years. A TV crew had visited the village once, but failed to solve the mystery. His widow said, “He loved to make people laugh, and he thought that having people draw their curtains and see a load of garden gnomes outside might make them smile. He was right; it did.” The confession also raised a laugh in the funeral service, and the following morning, a gnome appeared on the man’s own front doorstep.