Mistakes

An Ohio woman who gave birth to a baby boy after a fertility clinic implanted her with the wrong embryo is a "guardian angel," the boy's biological parents said Saturday. Paul and Shannon Morell of suburban Detroit said in a statement that they would be "eternally grateful" to Carolyn Savage, of Sylvania, Ohio, for her decision to give birth to their child despite the clinic's mistake. "We will be eternally grateful for his guardian angel, Carolyn Savage, and the support of the entire Savage family," the Morells said.

A 4-year-old boy killed last month by his mother at their Highland Park home had been the subject of a botched child-abuse investigation, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina said Tuesday. The mother committed suicide after decapitating her young son with a kitchen knife, according to police.

School's out for summer -- except for hundreds of children in western San Bernardino County who, because of an administrative snafu, must make up 34 days of school this summer. The fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at Rolling Ridge Elementary in Chino Hills and Dickson Elementary in Chino exceeded the state's requirement of minutes spent in the classroom, and the last day of school was supposed to be Thursday.

We've all found unexpected charges on our phone bills at one time or another. But nothing compares with the nearly $10,000 hit that Aliso Viejo resident Mark Elliot took from Verizon Wireless. And even though it seems pretty obvious this had to be a mistake on somebody's part, Verizon's first instinct was to stick to its guns. "We believe in the accuracy of the charges," Ken Muche, a company spokesman, told me after checking into Elliot's situation.

The son watched his father, vowing not to repeat his mistakes. The weekend before George W. Bush defeated Texas Gov. Ann Richards in 1994, he stood in the backyard of his Dallas home hitting tennis balls into the swimming pool for his dog to fetch and ruminating about the future with his media strategist, Don Sipple.

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now it says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Assn. of America claimed that 44% of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

Charter Communications Inc. executives believe a software error during routine maintenance caused the company to delete the contents of 14,000 customer e-mail accounts. There is no way to retrieve the messages, photos and other attachments that were erased from in-boxes and archive folders across the nation Monday, said Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for the suburban St. Louis company.

Super Tuesday may have lacked a runaway winner in either party, but when it came to anticipating the outcome of both primaries in California, there was one clear loser -- the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll. "We blew it," pollster John Zogby said. He pointed out that the polls he supervised got the victors right in six other races Tuesday (impressively, his had Barack Obama winning narrowly in Missouri, unlike other last-minute surveys).

In the weeks leading up to the launch of a new payroll system, Los Angeles Unified School District officials had plenty of warning that the $95-million technology project would have serious problems. Critical hardware had failed numerous times. Flawed data collected over decades proved difficult to clean up and input into the new system. Payroll clerks complained that training had fallen far short -- more than 60 schools didn't have a single staff member who'd received any training.

Michael Nola, a poll worker in Claremont, went to two training sessions before election day and was instructed that nonpartisan voters were entitled to cast ballots in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries. What he never learned in class was that in addition to selecting a candidate, these voters were required to mark a bubble on their ballots indicating which party primary they were voting in. . . .