Education: Oddly Enough

Bung Inquiry: Some parents and soccer officials in South Korea have been charged with bribery after high-school matches were allegedly fixed to boost children's chances of getting into college. Reports said parents had given bribes of around pounds 5,000 each for matches to be fixed so their children would win. In South Korea, good results are a great help for students aiming to gain admission to prestigious colleges, and all 16 players had later been admitted.

Corruption on the buses: An alleged price-fixing cartel of 13 operators running school buses in Kingston upon Hull has been referred to the Restrictive Practices Court. The director general of fair trading has uncovered evidence that the operators secretly agreed on minimum prices at which they would tender to supply school bus services and on the routes which each operator would tender for.

Poison Ivy League: Brown University, in Rhode Island, has suspended a student charged with poisoning his former girlfriend and another student with radioactive iodine, university officials said. Providence police charged Cheng Gu, 24, a graduate student in pharmacology at the Ivy League school. Gu, who is on a student visa from China, told police he had taken a small quantity of radioactive iodine-125 from a university laboratory and used it to season a vegetable dish. Police said he gave the radioactive food to a student described as his former girlfriend. Her room-mate, a male undergraduate, also ate some of the food, police said. The poisoning was discovered when the girl set off a Geiger counter as she entered a laboratory.