The lights in the Daily Prophet's editorial office were on by five in the morning.
When editor-in-chief Barnabas Cuffe walked in, rubbing his eyes, fourteen submission letters were already piled on his desk.
Three were from members of the Wizengamot.
Two were from retired professors.
One was from a senior healer at St. Mungo's.
Another eight were from ordinary readers, four of whom had used language unfit for any respectable publication.
Kufi threw those four into the wastebasket and opened the first formal submission.
Umbridge's name was printed at the top.
The title was "Academic bullying: when a seventy-year-old man becomes someone else's weapon."
Kufi read two lines further and bit his lower lip.
This was no longer a discussion about textbooks.
In the third paragraph, Umbridge wrote:
"When Mr. Tiberius Ogden sat his O.W.L.s in 1947, he received only an 'A' (a bare pass) in Defense Against Dark Magic.
Someone who barely passed in this field now seeks to define its teaching standards-that in itself is the greatest irony."
Kufi put down the letter.
He knew where that transcript had come from.
The archives of the Wizarding Examinations Authority.
Very few people had permission to access examination records from half a century ago.
Umbridge was one of them.
He opened the second letter. Rita Skeeter's handwriting.
The title was "Mr. Ogden's 1947."
Kufi stopped after the first paragraph.
Rita's article was even more vicious than Umbridge's.
She had not only dug up Ogden's O.W.L.s transcript, but also a record of how, during the autumn term of 1947, he had lost fifteen points for chasing an out-of-control Boggart down a corridor, deducted by Dumbledore, the Head of Gryffindor at the time.
"A wizard who couldn't even catch a Boggart," Rita wrote, "has suddenly become an arbiter of educational reform sixty