Chinese Student Inquiry: Education officials in Japan have been inspecting a junior college in Sakata in a controversy involving the status of Chinese students.

Among other things, the college has been found to have accepted more than the allowable number of foreign students and to have failed to give some of scholarship money from the Association of International Education, Japan (AIEJ) to its students.

Recently, the Chinese Embassy inspected classes at the school, after Japanese immigration authorities searched iti in December to check on the status of about 200 Chinese students living in Tokyo and its vicinity to verify whether the students were attending classes.

In December last year, the college urged about 200 Chinese students registered for classes at its Tokyo campus to return to Sakata, following the closure of the Tokyo campus. But about 100 Chinese students are still living in the Tokyo area.

The two-year college caters mainly to students from China who apply for Japanese visas to study management.

An evolving argument: The Latest challenge to evolution's primacy in US biology teaching - the theory of "intelligent design", rather than old-style Biblical creationism - will get a hearing next month before the Ohio Board of Education, which is considering whether established science "censors" other views about the origins of life.

Supporters of intelligent design acknowledge that the Earth is billions of years old. They also accept that organisms adapt and change over time, but they dispute the idea that the complexity and diversity of terrestrial plants and animals could have happened through natural selection. An intelligent designer - perhaps God as depicted in Genesis - had to provide the original impetus, they contend.

An Ohio school board subcommittee favors inserting the intelligent-design view alongside evolution in the state's new teaching standards.