When Google doesn’t play nice

While helping out $prettybigUKnanopublisher in optimizing their visibility, I came across these odd guidelines for Google News:

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.
[...]
If the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it.

Now, this is weird and quite evil.