Unknown Deprecated Function

I get this error repeated almost a hundred times on my front page, which uses D7 and php 5.3.10:
Deprecated function: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in gcal_events_get_events() (line 599 of C:\inetpub\wwwroot\acquia-drupal7\sites\all\modules\gcal_events\gcal_events.module).

Line 599 of gcal_events.module reads:
if (!include_once(drupal_get_path('module', 'gcal_events') . '/simplepie.inc')) {

None of those functions seem to be deprecated. A few lines below, there was the split() function, but replacing it with preg_split() didn't help.

Going into simpliepie.inc and changing all instances of &$ to $ also didn't change anything.

Does anyone know how to solve this? Thank you so much.