Regret the Error

Historian or rock star?

Al Jolson: A For the Record on Thursday gave the wrong first name for the man whose last name was misspelled in Sunday Calendar's Cine File column about Al Jolson. He is theater historian Miles Kreuger, not Chad Kreuger. Link

How to get a husband in trouble

"Ghost Hunters": An article in Wednesday's Calendar about Sci Fi Channel's "Ghost Hunters" identified Mark Stern as vice president of original programming at the cable channel. He is executive vice president. The article also said that during filming of the series, former cast member Brian Harnois was constantly on the phone with his girlfriend, to whom he is now married. Harnois was speaking with his ex-girlfriend; he currently is engaged to another woman. Link

Additional pain and suffering

In a Sept. 17 story about the death of actress Brett Somers, The Associated Press erroneously listed a daughter among the survivors. Her daughter, Leslie, died in 2003.
Link

All Googlers look alike

Forbes list: The captions on two photographs in the Business section on Sept. 21 accompanying an article about Forbes magazine's list of richest Americans switched the identities of the co-founders of Google: Larry Page was identified as Sergey Brin and Brin was identified as Page. Link

Where do we sign up?

A REFERENCE to the Australian Services Union in yesterday's story "Hopes of pay rise undercut" should have been to the Liquor, Hospitality, Miscellaneous Union. Link

Thanks, Steve!

Can fine, not confine

When asked what happens to dismissed employees, Blackwater USA Chairman Erik Prince told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Tuesday: "We fire them, we can fine them, but we can't do anything else." The word "confine" was incorrectly used in place of " can fine" in the quote, which was used in a pull-out box on Wednesday's front page. Link

Acronym gone wrong

In last week's issue, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Director Vice Adm. Robert Murrett was quoted as saying the intelligence community needed to have the capability to gather and exchange geospatial intelligence not only from U.S. military space assets, but also from what he termed an "agnostic teapad." Burrett was referring to TPED, which stands for tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination.

How soon they forget

An editorial on Thursday, "An electoral plot falls apart," misstated date of the election in which Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the presidential election. It was 2000.

Like father, like son*

GRAND Prix driver Gilles Villeneuve, not his son Jacques, was involved in a fatal crash at Japan's Fuji circuit in 1977 (page 61, September 29). Link

*Editor's Note: Two readers wrote in to note that this correction is unclear, and possibly incorrect. The fatality in question was not that of Gilles Villeneuve. Though he did die in a1982 crash, the 1977 crash killed two people who were standing at the side of the track. Our previous headline on this post read, "Paper kills wrong race car driver." We have now changed it to reflect the correct information. Big thanks to regular readers Mike and Stephen for bringing this to our attention.

Update Oct. 12: We received an email from John Honeywell, the Editorial Manager of the Mirror and author of the correction. He writes:

As the author of the correction quoted above, may I be allowed to dispute your assertion that it is "possibly incorrect".
How so?
The correction states that Gilles Villeneuve "was involved in a fatal crash. . . . in 1977"
It does not state that he was killed in that crash.

Honeywell's point is that he was not suggesting that Villeneuve was the person who died in the crash, and that the correction was therefore not in error. So we've struck through the words "possibly incorrect" to reflect that reality. It's often the case that corrections, which generally aim to be as brief as possible, can lead to false assumptions. But it's important to note that Honeywell's correction did not make a factual error. We thank him for writing in.

 

Phantom author

An article published on September 24 on the Guardian's Comment is free website, with the headline From Bogota to Bournemouth, should not have been attributed to Carlos Gaviria. The manner in which the article was submitted for publication by a political officer working for a British human rights and political campaign led the Guardian to believe that the article came from Mr Gaviria, but it was not written by him and he did not authorise it to be published. We apologise to Carlos Gaviria for any embarrassment caused by the publication. Link