Nearly-Horribly Offensive Things

Sometimes, Spectator does horribly offensive things simply by mistake. Far more often, we avoid doing horribly offensive things just in the nick of time. The last two Mondays have been examples of the latter.
Today, we ran the above story on a Lunar New Year celebration held by the Chinese Students Club with the above photo. The story, written by former associate news editor Sandeep Soman, while not about to set the world on fire, was solidly written, but what really made the article is the accompanying photo--Asian women with parasols against a nice green backdrop, green being one of those colors that really draws readers into the page.
That photo was placed on the page at about 1:45 in the morning. When I first looked at the page at about 11:30, in that place was this photo. I said "Hey, our front page is showing a little leg today" and went back to editing. When I looked at it a second time at about 1:30, I noticed that it was probably a little bit weird to run a photo of two 7/8 naked white people for a story about Asian New Year festivities. So I asked the office to look up, explained the situation, asked how many people, when told the context, would find it horribly offensive, and after every hand in the paper shot up, we went back into the archives and pulled up the new photo.
That's actually not quite so bad as the error that almost ran last week. Without giving too much away and having you all think less of us as people and as a paper, I'll simply say that we probably should have been more careful on the first draft of a headline regarding a story on testing spaces for disabled students, including those in wheelchairs.
The daily miracle limps on.