Thanks, Daniel!

In the Aug. 8 “Well-Traveled,” a map mislabeled Germany and Austria. Link to both

US media giant CNN's reporting of Cyclone Yasi blew Queensland off the map, when it depicted the weather-ravaged state as being in Tasmania.

The international news breaker was roundly mocked around the world, when its map of Australia on a news bulletin pointed to Queensland being several thousand kilometres south in a bulletin last week.

While CNN appears to have quickly removed the offending graphic from its website, bemused Australian media watchers and others quickly sent the image viral.

It appears CNN researchers googled Queenstown, which is on Tasmania’s west coast, instead of Queensland, when researching the report.

Thanks, Lawrie!

In an article on 16 December 2009 about procedures that can be open to misuse to enhance performance in sport, we were wrong to say that the English Institute of Sport endorses “blood spinning”; it says it does not. “Blood spinning” describes a process in which a quantity of blood is taken from an athlete and the blood platelets are captured through a method using centrifugal force. (Later the platelets may be infused or locally injected into the athlete.) The article – Legal, hard to spot and open to misuse, page 3 – appeared under the byline of Michele Verroken, an expert from a sports governance consultancy, but in reality she was interviewed; a fact we should have made clear. Michele Verroken has made clear that she did not intend to suggest that the English Institute of Sport endorsed blood spinning, but rather that it accepts another process known as autologous blood injection. (This is where a small amount of blood is taken from an athlete’s arm and then injected, without any intervening process to alter this blood, at the site of a muscle, tendon or ligament injury.)

The Guardian’s reader’s editor also mentioned some recent errors in her latest column:

… The front-page story about the people who were stuck in a pub also reported that the snow prevented a woman getting back home to her husband after she nipped out to get the turkey and trimmings for the Christmas dinner. Visibility must have been poor because the journalist located her converted lighthouse keeper’s cottage in Cape Wrath on Scotland’s north-east tip. “A quick glance at a map will tell you that it’s actually extreme north-west Scotland,” said Alex McCarren. Graeme Munro pointed out that the paper was “doubly wrong” about Cape Wrath: “It is on the north-west tip of the Scottish mainland,” he said.

That wasn’t the first geographical error of 2010. The caption on one of the photographs used in the paper’s centre-spread on New Year’s Day made the mistake of calling Lagos Nigeria’s capital, when Abuja has been the country’s capital since 1991. And an editing error in Ten journalists try out their dream jobs for a day, G2′s cover story last Monday, misplaced Maidenhead in Kent. It can usually be found in Berkshire, even in very bad weather. I think “putting locations in the right places” needs to be added to this year’s resolutions …

Crossed consonants: the accidental substitution of an “r” for an “x” led to the incorrect labelling of Paros and Antiparos as “Paxos” and “Antipaxos” in our map of “Greece’s Hidden Corners” (Escape, 10 May), thus relocating the latter from the Ionian to the Aegean sea.

And, furthermore, the capital of Turkey is Ankara, not Istanbul, as we said in “‘Free holiday’ scams abroad will catch out 400,000 Brits” (Cash, last week).

TS Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, so we were not technically correct in “Revealed: the remarkable tale of TS Eliot’s late love affair” (Review, last week) when we described him as having “Mississippi roots”, suggesting he hailed from the Magnolia State. However, the Mississippi River meets the Missouri River near St Louis. Link