DealBook: Office Depot's Deal for OfficeMax Said to Have Been Announced Prematurely

A merger between Office Depot and OfficeMax has been years in the making. But it appears the deal may have been announced too hastily.

A press release announcing the merger of the two office supply retailers briefly surfaced Wednesday on Office Depot’s Web site. Since then, the announcement has disappeared.

The deal negotiations are ongoing, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. As of Wednesday morning, the company’s bankers and lawyers were still attempting to finalize an agreement.

Several news organizations quickly reported the terms disclosed in the apparently errant press release for Office Depot’s earnings. Buried on page four of the release, the company outlined details of the merger.

The release noted that Office Depot would issue $2.69 new shares of common stock for each share of OfficeMax. That would value OfficeMax at $13.50, or roughly $1.19 billion, a more than 25 percent premium to the company’s closing price last week.

The two people said that the press release — that was published and then taken down — was a draft. The described terms were not final, they added.

As the details filtered through the market, shares of the companies jumped. In pre-market trading, Office Depot’s stock rose more than 7 percent. OfficeMax was up more than 8 percent.

Representatives for Office Depot and OfficeMax were not immediately available for comment.

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The New Old Age Blog: The Reluctant Caregiver

Now and then, I refer to the people that caregivers tend to as “loved ones.” And whenever I do, a woman in Southern California tells me, I set her teeth on edge.

She visits her mother-in-law, runs errands, helps with the paperwork — all tasks she has shouldered with a grim sense of duty.  She doesn’t have much affection for this increasingly frail 90something or enjoy her company; her efforts bring no emotional reward. Her husband, an only child, feels nearly as detached. His mother wasn’t abusive, a completely different scenario, but they were never very close.

Ms. A., as I’ll call her because her mother-in-law reads The Times on her computer, feels miserable about this. “She says she appreciates us, she’s counting on us. She thanks us,” Ms. A. said of her non-loved one. “It makes me feel worse, because I feel guilty.”

She has performed many services for her mother-in-law, who lives in a retirement community, “but I really didn’t want to. I know how grudging it was.”

Call her the Reluctant Caregiver. She and her husband didn’t invite his parents to follow them to the small city where they settled to take jobs. The elders did anyway, and as long as they stayed healthy and active, both couples maintained their own lives. Now that her mother-in-law is widowed and needy, Ms. A feels trapped.

Ashamed, too. She knows lots of adult children work much harder at caregiving yet see it as a privilege. For her, it is mere drudgery. “I don’t feel there’s anybody I can say that to,” she told me — except a friend in Phoenix and, anonymously, to us.

The friend, therapist Randy Weiss, has served as both a reluctant caregiver to her mother, who died very recently at 86, and a willing caregiver to her childless aunt, living in an assisted living dementia unit at 82. Spending time with each of them made Ms. Weiss conscious of the distinction.

Her visits involved many of the same activities, “but it feels very different,” she said. “I feel the appreciation from my aunt, even if she’s much less able to verbalize it.” A cherished confidante since adolescence, her aunt breaks into smiles when Ms. Weiss arrives and exclaims over every small gift, even a doughnut. She worked in the music industry for decades and, despite her memory loss, happily sings along with the jazz CDs Ms. Weiss brings.

Because she had no such connection with her mother, whom Ms. Weiss described as distant and critical, “it’s harder to do what I have to do,” she said. (We spoke before her mother’s death.) “One is an obligation I fulfill out of duty. One is done with love.”

Unlike her friend Ms. A, “I don’t feel guilty that I don’t feel warmly towards my mother,” Ms. Weiss said. “I’ve made my peace.”

Let’s acknowledge that at times almost every caregiver knows exhaustion, anger and resentment.  But to me, reluctant caregivers probably deserve more credit than most. They are not getting any of the good stuff back, no warmth or laughter, little tenderness, sometimes not even gratitude.

Yet they are doing this tough work anyway, usually because no one else can or will. Maybe an early death or a divorce means that the person who would ordinarily have provided care can’t. Or maybe the reluctant caregiver is simply the one who can’t walk away.

“It’s important to acknowledge that every relationship doesn’t come from ‘The Cosby Show,’” said Barbara Moscowitz when I called to ask her about reluctance. Ms. Moscowitz, a senior geriatric social worker at Massachusetts General Hospital, has heard many such tales from caregivers in her clinical practice and support groups.

“We need to allow people to be reluctant,” she said. “It means they’re dutiful; they’re responsible. Those are admirable qualities.”

Yet, she recognizes, “they feel oppressed by the platitudes. ‘Your mother is so lucky to have you!’” Such praise just makes people like Ms. A. squirm.

Ms. Moscowitz also worries about reluctant caregivers, and urges them to find support groups where they can say the supposedly unsay-able, and to sign up early for community services — hotlines, senior centers, day programs, meals on wheels — that can help lighten the load.

“Caregiving only goes one way – it gets harder, more complex,” she said. “Support groups and community resources are like having a first aid kit. It’s going to feel like even more of a burden, and you need to be armed.”

I wonder, too, if reluctant caregivers have a romanticized view of what the task is like for everyone else. Elder care can be a wonderful experience, satisfying and meaningful, but guilt and resentment are also standard parts of the job description, at least occasionally.

For a reluctant caregiver, “the satisfaction is, you haven’t turned your back,” Ms. Moscowitz said. “You can take pride in that.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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The New Old Age Blog: The Reluctant Caregiver

Now and then, I refer to the people that caregivers tend to as “loved ones.” And whenever I do, a woman in Southern California tells me, I set her teeth on edge.

She visits her mother-in-law, runs errands, helps with the paperwork — all tasks she has shouldered with a grim sense of duty.  She doesn’t have much affection for this increasingly frail 90something or enjoy her company; her efforts bring no emotional reward. Her husband, an only child, feels nearly as detached. His mother wasn’t abusive, a completely different scenario, but they were never very close.

Ms. A., as I’ll call her because her mother-in-law reads The Times on her computer, feels miserable about this. “She says she appreciates us, she’s counting on us. She thanks us,” Ms. A. said of her non-loved one. “It makes me feel worse, because I feel guilty.”

She has performed many services for her mother-in-law, who lives in a retirement community, “but I really didn’t want to. I know how grudging it was.”

Call her the Reluctant Caregiver. She and her husband didn’t invite his parents to follow them to the small city where they settled to take jobs. The elders did anyway, and as long as they stayed healthy and active, both couples maintained their own lives. Now that her mother-in-law is widowed and needy, Ms. A feels trapped.

Ashamed, too. She knows lots of adult children work much harder at caregiving yet see it as a privilege. For her, it is mere drudgery. “I don’t feel there’s anybody I can say that to,” she told me — except a friend in Phoenix and, anonymously, to us.

The friend, therapist Randy Weiss, has served as both a reluctant caregiver to her mother, who died very recently at 86, and a willing caregiver to her childless aunt, living in an assisted living dementia unit at 82. Spending time with each of them made Ms. Weiss conscious of the distinction.

Her visits involved many of the same activities, “but it feels very different,” she said. “I feel the appreciation from my aunt, even if she’s much less able to verbalize it.” A cherished confidante since adolescence, her aunt breaks into smiles when Ms. Weiss arrives and exclaims over every small gift, even a doughnut. She worked in the music industry for decades and, despite her memory loss, happily sings along with the jazz CDs Ms. Weiss brings.

Because she had no such connection with her mother, whom Ms. Weiss described as distant and critical, “it’s harder to do what I have to do,” she said. (We spoke before her mother’s death.) “One is an obligation I fulfill out of duty. One is done with love.”

Unlike her friend Ms. A, “I don’t feel guilty that I don’t feel warmly towards my mother,” Ms. Weiss said. “I’ve made my peace.”

Let’s acknowledge that at times almost every caregiver knows exhaustion, anger and resentment.  But to me, reluctant caregivers probably deserve more credit than most. They are not getting any of the good stuff back, no warmth or laughter, little tenderness, sometimes not even gratitude.

Yet they are doing this tough work anyway, usually because no one else can or will. Maybe an early death or a divorce means that the person who would ordinarily have provided care can’t. Or maybe the reluctant caregiver is simply the one who can’t walk away.

“It’s important to acknowledge that every relationship doesn’t come from ‘The Cosby Show,’” said Barbara Moscowitz when I called to ask her about reluctance. Ms. Moscowitz, a senior geriatric social worker at Massachusetts General Hospital, has heard many such tales from caregivers in her clinical practice and support groups.

“We need to allow people to be reluctant,” she said. “It means they’re dutiful; they’re responsible. Those are admirable qualities.”

Yet, she recognizes, “they feel oppressed by the platitudes. ‘Your mother is so lucky to have you!’” Such praise just makes people like Ms. A. squirm.

Ms. Moscowitz also worries about reluctant caregivers, and urges them to find support groups where they can say the supposedly unsay-able, and to sign up early for community services — hotlines, senior centers, day programs, meals on wheels — that can help lighten the load.

“Caregiving only goes one way – it gets harder, more complex,” she said. “Support groups and community resources are like having a first aid kit. It’s going to feel like even more of a burden, and you need to be armed.”

I wonder, too, if reluctant caregivers have a romanticized view of what the task is like for everyone else. Elder care can be a wonderful experience, satisfying and meaningful, but guilt and resentment are also standard parts of the job description, at least occasionally.

For a reluctant caregiver, “the satisfaction is, you haven’t turned your back,” Ms. Moscowitz said. “You can take pride in that.”

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Bits Blog: Marissa Mayer Puts Her Stamp on Yahoo.com

8:39 a.m. | Updated On Wednesday, Yahoo introduced a fresh new home page with Marissa Mayer’s stamp all over it.

Yahoo’s home page has long been a sort of sad reflection of the company. A jazzed-up Craigslist of sorts, the site was often cluttered with low-quality ads and irrelevant content and in no way reflected the fact that Yahoo is one of the most visited sites on the Web. With more than 700 million monthly visitors, Yahoo is still a leading source of information for sports, finance and entertainment.

Ms. Mayer took the reins as Yahoo’s chief executive last July. Before that she was a long-time executive at Google, where she was widely credited with the simple look of the Google search page. Now she seeks to apply that same, clean aesthetic to one of the most chaotic sites on the Web.

In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Mayer said she wanted to make Yahoo’s site “fresh and dynamic and add an element of surprise and serendipity.”

Gone are the low-quality ads. She has added an infinite, Twitter-like news feed and a stream of content recommended by users’ Facebook friends. Instead of trying to jam every Yahoo feature onto the site, the new design gives special prominence to Yahoo’s most popular Web properties: Yahoo’s e-mail and news service, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, its movie listing site and OMG, its popular entertainment site.

Users can now easily share content they see on the home page via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook with one click. They also have limited ability to customize the site to their liking. They can turn off home page features like horoscopes, stock quotes and sports stats. Ms. Mayer pointed out that the more items users switch on and off, the smarter the Yahoo algorithm gets and the more relevant content Yahoo will serve up.

Yahoo’s redesigned home page is the third major aesthetic improvement Ms. Mayer has introduced since joining the company. In December, she redesigned Yahoo’s e-mail service and its once-popular photo-sharing service Flickr.

In the interview, Ms. Mayer said these would be the “first of many releases” and she would turn her focus to a dozen or more Yahoo products. Her next priority for the home page, she said, will be adding content sources. In December, Yahoo signed three deals, with CBS Television, NBC Sports and ABC News. In each case, the media companies will work with Yahoo to promote each other’s content and produce original video content for the Web.

“We’re introducing a new way to welcome people to Yahoo,” Ms. Mayer said.

But it’s more than aesthetics. Ms. Mayer is betting that the renewed focus on Yahoo’s products will turn around the company’s ailing display ad revenue. Yahoo, once the biggest seller of display ads in the United States, went from a leading 15.5 percent share of all digital ad revenues in the United States in 2009, to an 8.4 percent share last year, even as total digital ad spending grew, according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, its competitor, Google, increased its share to 41 percent.

Last month, she told analysts, “More personalized content and increased product innovation will be key to getting us back to the path for display revenue growth.”

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IHT Rendezvous: True or False? The Tussle Over Ping Fu's Memoir

Did Ping Fu, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman and author of a recent memoir, “Bend, not Break”, make up her horrible experiences during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in order to gain United States citizenship? Did they help her become an American by claiming political asylum?

That’s what her critics, many of them fellow Chinese Americans, say. It’s an accusation that can stick. As a recent New York Times investigation showed, claiming persecution has spawned an immigration industry involving lawyers prepping client to make false asylum claims.

As I write in my Letter from China this week, Ms. Fu is being accused of making up a lot of things in her memoir. She’s also a successful entrepreneur: the U.S. government honored the founder of the software company Geomagic (in the process of being sold to 3D Systems) with a “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award.

Ms. Fu is on the board of the White House’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is a member of the National Council on Women in Technology, according to the Web site of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Ms. Fu, who says in her memoir she was “quietly deported” to the U.S. in 1984 for writing about female infanticide while still a college student, denies the accusations. But until now she hadn’t explained in public how she became an American.

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, she said, apparently for the first time, the reason she kept quiet was she was trying to protect her first husband, an American, whom she does not mention in her memoir. The marriage took place while she was living in California, she said.

“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later. Until now she had kept silent because of a “smear” campaign against her online, mostly by fellow Chinese who accuse her of lying, which extended to real-life harassment, she said: “They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.” She said the accusers, who are “angry” for reasons she doesn’t really understand, contacted U.S. immigration authorities to challenge her award and her citizenship, as well as shareholders of 3D Systems to warn them she was a “liar,” and not to buy Geomagic. Her second husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, whom she has since divorced, received many “hate emails,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt innocent people.”

If a first, unpublicized marriage might lay to rest one contentious issue, there are others. Some were the result of exaggeration or unclear communication with her ghost-writer, Los Angeles-based MeiMei Fox, she said.

In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely criticized account of the ‘‘period police,’’ the authorities who checked a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers – an invasion of the woman’s body.

Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but it didn’t get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she said, but the mistake went into print anyway.

In general, Ms. Fox may have ‘‘just made some searches on the Internet that maybe weren’t correct,’’ said Ms. Fu.

Chiefly the errors involved use of the words ‘‘all, never, any,’’ that generalized unacceptably, Ms. Fu said. And, ‘‘She doesn’t know China’s geography,’’ said Ms. Fu.

At the beginning of her memoir, Ms. Fu writes of being kidnapped by a Vietnamese-American on arrival in the U.S. state of New Mexico and locked in his apartment to care for his very young children, whose mother had left, in a bizarre incident. A spokeswoman at the Albuquerque Police Department’s Records Office, where the alleged kidnapping took place, said she could not locate such an incident in their records. Asked about it, Ms. Fu repeated that she did not press charges as, fresh from China, she was terrified of all police, “So I don’t know how they keep records, if there is no criminal charges or record.”

And in an email to me, she admitted she made mistakes about a magazine she said she helped edit, called Wugou, or “No Hook,” produced in 1979 by students at her college, then called the Jiangsu Teacher’s College (later it changed its name to Suzhou University, she said.) It was not that magazine but another one, “This Generation,” that was taken to a meeting in Beijing of student magazine writers from around the country, she wrote in the email. “A good case that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong,” she wrote.

But bigger questions about the scale of the online vitriol from parts of the Chinese and Chinese-American community remain. “I really haven’t known China for 20-something years, and it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote would generate so much anger,” she said. In the last years, “as China got stronger, nationalistic views got stronger,” she said, making a “civil conversation” about disagreements apparently harder.
Additional reporting by Cindy Hao in Seattle

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Bits Blog: Tech Predictions for 2013: It's All About Mobile

If there is one theme that will be the topic of digital business this year, it is mobile.

ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, published a report about what happened in 2012, and what to expect in 2013.

It shows that the effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.

The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.

Just as they compete on computers, Facebook and Google are dominant and at each other’s throats on phones.

Google’s map app for the iPhone, which had been the most used mobile app, lost its No. 1 spot to Facebook after Apple kicked Google’s maps off the iPhone in October. Now, Facebook reaches 76 percent of the smartphone market and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent using apps each month. The next five most used apps are Google’s, which account for 10 percent of time on apps.

As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.

The most visited Web sites are not so surprising: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Facebook continues to take up most of our time online.

But there were a few surprises from younger, smaller Web companies. Tumblr was No. 8 on the list of sites, ordered by time spent on them. And several Web sites were breakout hits last year, as measured by growth and visitor numbers: Spotify (music), Dropbox (online storage), Etsy (shopping), BuzzFeed (news), JustFab (shopping), SoundCloud (music) and BusinessInsider (news).

Search, one of the biggest and most reliable Web industries, is at a crossroads, comScore said. Even though the search market continues to be extraordinarily profitable, there is a desire for it to evolve and offer new services to users.

Here is some evidence: Searches on traditional search engines, dominated by Google, declined 3 percent last year, and the number of searches per searcher declined 7 percent. Yet searches on specialty sites, known as vertical search engines, like Amazon.com or Whitepages.com, climbed 8 percent.

Social search, based on what users’ friends like, has put Facebook and Google on a “collision course,” comScore said, particularly in searches for local businesses like restaurants.

In social networking, the visual Web, as comScore calls it, has transformed the landscape. Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, all of which emphasize images, each gained more than 10 million visitors last year.

Last year was also pivotal for online video, comScore said, as viewers increasingly seek the ability to watch video when and where they want. Watching TV shows online helped last year break viewing records, especially during the Olympics.

In the United States, 75 million people a day watch online video and stream 40 billion videos a month, and viewing is driven by YouTube.

There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.

Though e-commerce spending grew 13 percent last year, it was a disappointing holiday season online, largely because of economic pressures. Purchasing on mobile phones is beginning to make a dent in e-commerce, comScore said, with mobile shopping accounting for 11 percent of e-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 3 percent in the period two years earlier.

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Controlling Access to a Kindle Fire HD

Is there any way to keep my kid from roaming around through the videos on my Kindle Fire HD tablet?

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets include built-in parental controls for restricting access to specific apps, functions and content on the device. On the Kindle Fire HD, swipe your finger down on the screen to get to the settings area and tap More. Tap Parental Controls and then tap the On button. Select a password (one that will be needed to unlock the restrictions), and tap the Finish button. Select the apps and actions you want to block, like the Web browser, e-mail, video playback or the power to make purchases. Amazon has more information on parental controls here.

The newer Kindle Fire HD models also include Kindle FreeTime, an app that lets you select videos, apps and other specific content the child can view on the tablet. Instructions for setting up a child’s FreeTime profile are on Amazon’s site as well.

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IHT Rendezvous: Women Killed as 'Witches,' in Papua New Guinea, in 2013

BEIJING — “They’re going to cook the sanguma”, or witchcraft, “mama!”

This terrifying cry by Papua New Guinean children opens “It’s 2013, and They’re Burning ‘Witches’,” a long and eloquent report in The Global Mail, an Australia-based online news site.

It was published last week before news shot around the world on Tuesday that the police in Papua New Guinea, in another case, had charged two people with torturing and killing a 20-year-old mother, Kepari Leniata, whom they accused of being a witch. Ms. Leniata was “stripped, tortured with a hot iron rod, doused in gasoline and set alight on a pile of car tires and trash” earlier this month in front of a crowd of hundreds of people, including young children, The Associated Press reported.

Why?

“Leniata had been accused of sorcery by relatives of a 6-year-old boy who had died in a hospital. Ware and Watea are believed to be the boy’s mother and uncle, police said in a statement,” The A.P. reported.

The year 2013 or not, such violence against women is not uncommon in Papua New Guinea, where “witches” (in reality just women, often older ones) may be blamed when things go wrong, a reflection of the powerful belief in sorcery in the Pacific nation just north of Australia. A key reason for identifying a woman as a witch and attacking her is when a man, or child, dies unexpectedly.

But there may be other reasons. As the Australian international television station Australia Network reported, in a resource-rich country undergoing a boom, accusing a woman of being a witch is an easy way to take her land.

Dame Carol Kidu, a Papua New Guinean politician, told the station: “There are other things involved nowadays, like greed, acquisition of people’s properties and land, and all sorts of things might be all be tied up in all of this, using – killing the sorcerers as a reason to acquire land. So it needs to be investigated and we need to work out how we can deal with it. It is a very complex issue.”

The United Nations also found that accusations of sorcery can be used to kill women for a range of motives: “The U.N. Human Rights agency says they’ve seen an increase in these types of killings as well as torture and rape. They say the accusations are often used to deprive women of land and property,” U.N. radio reported recently.

What lies behind the ferocity? Traditional beliefs, alcohol and drug use among men, and uneven development in a country that is in the middle of a mining boom where, as The Global Mail wrote, “the wealth bypasses the vast majority.”

It writes: “enduring tradition widely resists the notion that natural causes, disease, accident or recklessness might be responsible for a death. Rather, bad magic is the certain culprit.”

The dead person if often a man; the culprit is a woman. Or, a “witch.”

“When people die, especially men, people start asking ‘Who’s behind it?’ not ‘What’s behind it?’” said Philip Gibbs, a longtime resident, anthropologist, sorcery specialist and Catholic priest who was quoted by The Global Mail.

But in its report, the news site was careful to point out that while many Papua New Guineans believe in sorcery to some degree, that does not mean they support the lynchings.

“In the words of the editor of the national daily Post Courier, Alexander Rheeney, city and country folk alike overwhelmingly ‘recoil in fear and disgust’ at lynch mobs pursuing payback, and at the kind of extremist cruelty that Sister Gaudentia was about to witness,” it wrote, referring to the “cooking” that the children were shouting about.

That’s Sister Gaudentia, a Swiss nun who tries to save “Angela,” a woman accused of witchcraft in the Global Mail article. The article includes powerful photos of accused “witches” (warning – they are graphic, showing machete injuries or healed, hacked-off limbs.)

Hearing the children shout that a witch was about to be cooked, Sister Gaudentia rushed after them. “Two days earlier, she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men.”

“Angela” was luckier than Ms. Leniata.

She had no male relatives to protect her (a common profile for accused “witches”) and was horribly tortured, but lived, the article says. A “sorcery survivor,” today she is in hiding with her small son.

“Those victims who lived to tell the tale owe their lives either to individual police members or to a strong church leader who intervened for them,” Mr. Gibbs, the anthropologist and priest, told the Global Mail.

“In effect it means that, if sufficiently motivated to act, the power of the police and civil authorities, or the power of the church, can be enough to defend a person who is otherwise powerless,” he said.

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