— Monday's Image of the Day in times2 brought us one of the dreaded write-ins, when a powerful lobby group exhorts its adherents via its website to bombard a newspaper with e-mails.

In this case it was the pro-Israeli media watchdog honestreporting.com, and it had a point. The photograph was captioned “A young Palestinian boy defends the rubble of his home in the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank, razed by the Israeli Army during its assault on the town”, and the accompanying quote read: “Jenin camp area: one square kilometre. Registered refugee population: 15,496 - United Nations, 2005.”

What it failed to give was any context for the photograph, which was in fact taken in 2002 and, with its caption, forms part of an exhibition, Shattered Dreams, now showing at the Host Gallery in East London. On Tuesday times2 published a correction with the missing information.

It is always bad practice to publish an old photograph and allow readers to think it might be a recent one; against the background of the Middle East it is doubly so, and we were in error. Still, at one point on Monday afternoon the e-mails were landing in the letters inbox at the rate of almost 500 an hour, preventing anything else from getting through, so we had some comeuppance.

— Rodney Burbeck from London requests “a crackdown on meltdown. On one day last week you had Heathrow's Terminal 5 ‘in meltdown' (coping with the baggage problems) on one page and the BBC switchboard ‘in meltdown' on another (reporting Charlotte Green's giggling fit). ‘Market meltdown' has been used almost daily in reference to the US mortgage crisis, Christmas travellers were hit by ‘travel meltdown' (January 6), Britney Spears had a ‘high profile meltdown' (January 5), and a tennis player was ‘not averse to the odd mental meltdown' (March 18).

“But my favourite was your January 11 report that ‘global warming threatens to melt down sales of big four-wheel drive vehicles' (written with no apparent irony). And don't get me started on ‘crackdown'... ”

In the time it took me to reply, he'd spotted it again in a headline on Monday's letters page. He would seem to have a point.

A reader in Rye has a curious cryptic crossword request. “Sometimes, when stuck for a word, the solver's eyes wander, and I'm not convinced that what is on the rest of the page is of interest to such solvers. Normally this is drivel about football or some other game. Could you not make it more interesting by transferring puzzles and su doku from times2, or weather forecasts from the main paper?”

We brace ourselves for howls of outrage whenever we change the position of the crossword, but this is the first time we've been told off for having the wrong sort of material surrounding it. And the answer's no.

— This week, in various places, we have muddled our principles with our principals and plutonium with polonium, we have inferred when we should have implied, and appraised when we should have apprised. Sorry.

And E.W. Lighton of Crewe asks: “Why do you and the media generally persist in billing Liverpool as the European Capital of Culture 2008? It is not. That honour is shared with Norway's Stavanger and Sandness, in accord with the decision that from 2007 a number of cities would be so named each year rather than one. A European Capital of Culture 2008 would seem to be the correct usage.”

— On Monday in his Comment column William Rees-Mogg muddled the Forth Bridge and the Tay Bridge. To the many readers who pointed it out, he sends this charming reply: “I can offer two explanations. The first is Samuel Johnson's. When a faulty definition in his dictionary was pointed out, he said that the reason was ‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance'. The second explanation is that of Donald Rumsfeld: ‘I didn't check my reference because I didn't know that I didn't know.' ”

— Libby “Breath of Fresh Air” Purves's absence from our Comment pages has caused some alarm as to her whereabouts. Don't panic - she's on holiday and back next week, I'm told.

Why the nickname? Because so many of the laudatory letters you send us about her column begin “Libby Purves's column today was a ... ”