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"The devil made me do it." That age-old excuse for sin, a way to deny personal responsibility for one"s actions, is no longer fashionable. As I wrote in a Creation magazine editorial "Evolution made me do it!" in June 2000, nowadays, whether it"s homosexuality, infidelity or whatever, it"s become, "My genes made me do it." And, because the blind forces of evolution are supposed to be responsible for shaping our genes, that rapidly translates as, "Evolution made me do it". Thus the title of the abovementioned editorial, which pointed to a Time magazine cover story that proclaimed "Infidelity? It"s in...

The paperback version of Lies and the Lying Liars just came out, and Franken did NOT correct SEVERAL errors he haed made in the hardcover? WTF? He continued his assault on O'Reilly and the Levittown issue, even though O'Reilly exhibited the deed from his boyhood home MONTHS ago.

EAGLE, Colo. - With the parents of the alleged victim in the courtroom, the judge in the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case apologized Friday for court mistakes that led to the release of sealed information. During the brief public hearing, District Judge Terry Ruckriegle told the parents he would treat the mistakes as a learning experience. "For all of those who come through these doors, victims and defendants alike, whose names are never known and never sought, I can only assure you I have learned lessons from these mistakes, and that we will give our best human effort not to...

San Francisco-AP -- According to a federal appeals court -- if the California recall election were to take place as scheduled, it would be constitutionally flawed. The court today ordered the postponement of the October seventh vote. The three-judge panel brought back memories of the 2000 presidential election -- in saying that the use of punch-card machines by six counties would cause the results to be challenged in court. The judges in San Francisco wrote that it's "virtually undisputed" that the punch-card systems are much more likely to result in a ballot not being counted. And they said voters in...

The Preludes column on Aug. 17, about causes and effects of long hours on the job, misstated the number of hours that Americans work per week, on average. It is 39, not 49, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about the 1963 civil rights March on Washington referred incorrectly in some copies to a Civil War general to whom one marcher referred in a speech. The general, William T. Sherman, was a Union general, not a Confederate general.

PARIS (Reuters) - Richard Perle, a leading Pentagon (news - web sites) adviser and architect of the U.S. war to topple Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), said the United States had made mistakes in Iraq (news - web sites) and that power should be handed over to the Iraqis as fast as possible. In an interview with the Le Figaro daily newspaper to be published Thursday, Perle defended the U.S.-led war in Iraq and restated his belief that France had been wrong to lead international opposition to the conflict. "Of course, we haven't done everything right," said Perle, according...

On Thursday, August 7 at the end of a column of miscellaneous corrections, the New York Times published this small bombshell: Editors' Note An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases...

I hereby issue a public challenge to the New York Times. When is the "newspaper of record" going to run a correction of Paul Krugman's egregious mathematical error in which he claimed, in his August 1 column, that growth in real per capita California state spending from $1,950 in 1990 to $2,211 in 2003 was "only 10%," when anyone with a pocket calculator can tell that it is really 13.4 percent? And when will it correct Krugman's flatly deceptive claim that this growth "was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation," when calculations of real per...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"/> May 11, 2003 Witnesses and Documents Unveil Deceptions in a Reporter's WorkBy THE NEW YORK TIMES ollowing is an accounting of the articles in which falsification, plagiarism and similar problems were discovered in a review of articles written by Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned May 1. The review, conducted by a team of Times reporters and researchers, concentrated on the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since late October, when he was given roving national assignments and began covering major news events including the Washington-area sniper attacks and...

BOSTON – Surgical teams accidentally leave clamps, sponges and other tools inside about 1,500 patients nationwide each year, according to the biggest study of the problem yet. The mistakes largely result not from surgeon fatigue, but from the stress arising from emergencies or complications discovered on the operating table, the researchers reported.It also happens more often to fat patients, simply because there is more room inside them to lose equipment, according to the study.Both the researchers and several other experts agreed that the number of such mistakes is small compared with the roughly 28 million operations a year in the...

Last evening I saw a glaring example of a difference between the print media and electronic journalism. In a story on Mayor Richard Daley’s hospitalization, a local television reporter stated it was necessitated by several factors, including the Chicago mayor’s "being nauseous." My fellow nitpickers will hastily note the wrong word was used. As pointed out in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (Third Edition), nauseous means "sickening to contemplate." Now it’s very possible that Mr. Daley was and is in fact nauseous, as least to Republicans who live in Chicago. All three dozen of them. But that isn’t...

At first, the explosive e-mail was quoted as, "Close a bigger deal to hide the loss.” Then it was corrected by Salon.com to read, "Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q.” Then it became the basis for a New York Times op-ed blast that Army Secretary and former Enron executive Thomas White had drafted the e-mail as part of covering up a financial scandal at the energy giant. Now the allegations about cover-up have been retracted from one online news service – but the New York Times arrogantly won’t fess up to its errors. This week, Salon.com...

Studies of Soot Pollution Were Flawed BALTIMORE, Maryland, June 6, 2002 (ENS) - New rules governing emissions of fine soot particles could be delayed due to problems with several studies linking the pollutants to health risks. Earlier this week, scientists at Johns Hopkins University revealed that the computer program they used to analyze their data regarding the potential health effects of exposure to small particle pollution contained a glitch that caused the researchers to report an inflated risk of death from breathing sooty air. Using a corrected program to review their own data, the Johns Hopkins researchers now say...

ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) #151; Parham Jones stood behind a Rite Aid prescription counter at the crossroads of suburban and rural South Carolina, wrapping up a 12-hour shift and a 60-hour work week. It was Feb. 20, 1995 #151; Monday, a pharmacist's busiest day. With phones ringing and customers clamoring, Jones handed the mother of Gabrielle Hundley a bottle labeled ``Ritalin,'' a drug for hyperactivity. But the bottle contained Glynase, a drug diabetics use to lower blood sugar, at 16 times an adult dose. Just two pills sent 8-year-old Gabrielle into a coma. Her blood sugar sank so low that...