Adam Wheeler, 23, of Milton, Del., was admitted to Harvard and became a student in 2007 after he falsely claimed he had earned a perfect academic record at Phillips Academy in Andover and had studied for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prosecutors said Monday.

Ultimately, authorities said, Wheeler’s attempts to be an overachiever were his undoing: Harvard started to look into Wheeler’s background after he sought the school’s endorsement for Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships. A professor reviewing his application noticed similarities between Wheeler’s writing and that of a colleague, prosecutors said.

Wheeler was indicted on 20 offenses, including larceny, identity fraud and pretending to hold a degree. He was arrested Monday by Massachusetts authorities and scheduled for arraignment Tuesday in Middlesex Superior Court.

Wheeler, who was studying English, was trying to transfer to Yale and Brown when he got caught in the “web of lies and deceit,” Middlesex County District Attorney Gerry Leone said.

“This defendant’s actions cheated those who competed honestly and fairly for admissions and for the scholarships that this defendant fraudulently obtained,” Leone said.

A number listed to Adam Wheeler in Milton, Del., had been disconnected. Leone’s office did not know whether he had a lawyer.

In January, authorities say, Wheeler submitted transfer applications to Yale and Brown. In his applications, Wheeler said he was employed by McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility affiliated with Harvard, even though he was not, Leone said. His transfer application included faked recommendations from an employee at the hospital and from his former Harvard dean, Leone said.

Harvard released a statement saying it could not discuss individual cases because of federal privacy laws and referred all questions to the Middlesex District Attorney’s office.

Before attending Harvard, Wheeler was a student at Bowdoin College in Maine from 2005-07, but was suspended for academic dishonesty, authorities said.

A police report showed that the man failed field sobriety tests when he couldn’t walk in a straight line or recite the alphabet. Two breath analysis tests also showed that his blood-alcohol level was nearly four times the legal limit.

The man faces charges of DWI and careless driving. He was bonded out of the Sandoval County Jail a day after his arrest.

He said the teacher told Edgewood High School administrators that the students, all cheerleaders, asked her to take them to the bar in February. The teacher told school officials in an e-mail that she got permission from the parents of the 17- and 18-year-olds to bring them to the club. The teacher taught marketing at the school and previously served as a coach for the district’s eighth-grade cheerleaders.

The eight, from the wealthy eastern province of Zhejiang, got together in 2007 to plot how to help their children as “they knew their achievements were not ideal,” the official Legal Daily said.

One of the parents hired university students to provide answers which were sent to the children via wireless earphones while they were in the exam room, the report said.

But their ruse was discovered after police detected “abnormal radio signals” near the school, the newspaper said.

The parents were given jail terms ranging from six months to three years after being found guilty of illegally obtaining state secrets, it added, without saying what happened to their children.

China’s college entrance exams, or “gaokao,” are fiercely competitive tests.

Stories of cheating surface every year, despite stiff penalties. Students reportedly pay for leaked exam papers, smuggle in mobile phones and electronic dictionaries, or pay others to take the exam for them.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Sugita Katyal)

But the translation in Welsh didn’t work so well. “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated,” it said.

Swansea Council says the embarrassing error occurred when officials didn’t realize an e-mailed reply from a translator was a warning that he wasn’t available, not the wording to be used on the sign.

Road signs in Wales and in some parts of Scotland often carry messages in English and a second language, usually without a problem.

Swansea Council spokesman Patrick Fletcher said Friday the misleading sign in Swansea, southern Wales, is being taken down and replaced.

Hanukkah, Human Rights Day, winter break, the Islamic holy day Eid al-Adha, first day of winter and Kwanzaa all made the list. But no Christmas.

“It was absolutely an error of omission,” district spokeswoman Terren Roloff said. “In our efforts to be inclusive, we missed the obvious.”

The omission drew complaints from some parents that Christians are being overlooked in favor of other cultures and beliefs.

Greater Spokane Association of Evangelicals Executive Director John Tusant said the error surprised him.

“The stores have been decorated for the last month. How do you overlook that?” Tusant asked.

Hutton School parent Jane Harper noted the absence of Christmas but didn’t think the omission was meant as a message to Christians.

“Christmas is so dominant in our society. I don’t know that anyone should feel slighted,” Harper said.

Roloff said the district would not have included Hanukkah and Eid al-Adha if it had intended to avoid religious celebrations. She said her office has been fielding calls about the newsletter from concerned parents, and that most have been understanding about the mix-up.

Christmas had been added to the “important dates” section of the online version of the school district’s newsletter by Thursday afternoon.

The 12 had no martial arts experience but joined a team of genuine kung fu performers from a school in Henan province, also home to the 1,500-year-old temple, that was leaving for a tour of Canada, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

They had paid up to $90,000 each to a human smuggler, or “snakehead,” and two coaches from the martial arts school who often accompany students on trips abroad, Xinhua said.

The teenagers, ages 17 to 19, had a one-day training session at a hotel on June 24 to learn the basics of the art of Chinese lion dancing, Xinhua said.

The group was stopped less than a week later while trying to enter Hong Kong after border guards’ suspicions were aroused, but the report did not give any details.

Xinhua quoted a policeman in Changle, a city in eastern China’s Fujian province from which the alleged bogus kung fu masters originally came, as saying the Shaolin Temple had been an innocent victim of the conspirators.

“The Shaolin Temple had nothing to do with it,” Xinhua quoted the officer, identified by his surname, Wang, as saying.

The teens and the two coaches were detained and returned to Fujian for interrogation, the agency said. The snakehead was arrested Monday after six weeks on the run.

The Shaolin Temple has fought hard against those it sees as exploiting its name for martial arts schools, performances, movies and consumer products.

In recent years, it has set up a corporation, Henan Shaolin Temple Industrial Development Ltd., and trademarked the names “Shaolin” and “Shaolin Temple.”

“I have stopped going to school after many dead people walked out of their graves and came into my dreams, ordering me to reach school on time,” said six-year-old Raqib Ansari.

This week, hundreds of children at the school in the eastern state of Bihar, accompanied by their parents, marched to the office of a senior district official, asking for the school to be shifted away from the Muslim graveyard.

About 200 children study in the makeshift school set up several years ago after authorities refused to donate land for a school in Kohari village, 125 miles southwest of the state capital, Patna.

Some parents say their children’s sleep and health is being affected by dreams of ghosts.

“They used to play and study together and finish their lunch boxes while sitting on top of concrete graves but now the ghosts have come to haunt them at night and they are falling ill,” said one father, Riyazuddin Ansari.

“We have no choice as the nearest other school is at least four hours away,” he said by phone from Kohari.

There are more than 100 tombs in the graveyard but dozens of fresh graves — most of them shallow — have been dug in recent months, further crowding the burial ground.

Authorities in densely populated Bihar said they were trying to provide new land for the school.

“Maybe the dead are not enjoying the noise inside the graveyard any more, but we are looking into the matter,” said Ram Yash Singh, a village council official.

Martel, who wrote the novel “Life of Pi,” was upset that Harper had paid no attention during a recent parliamentary ceremony to honor Canadian artists.

Harper, whose Conservatives won the January 2006 election, is a rather wooden figure who has expressed little enthusiasm for the arts.

“What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares not a jot for the arts,” wrote Martel.

“But he must have moments of stillness … For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness.”

The first book Martel sent Harper was “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Those wishing to keep in touch with Martel’s campaign can log on to http://whatisstephenharperreading.ca.

No one in Harper’s press office was immediately available for comment.

“That is state law,” Godlewski said Monday. “The library is merely following what state law says.”

The Wisconsin attorney general’s office said in a Nov. 27 opinion that library surveillance videos fall under the state’s public library records confidentiality law. The law prevents libraries from releasing records that indicate a library user’s identity unless someone’s life or safety is at risk.

A library patron saw the April 2 incident and reported it to a reference librarian, who called police. But the suspect left before he was identified. He was described as 25 to 30 years old, 5 feet, 10 inches tall and about 200 pounds with short blond or brown hair.

Library Director Stephen Proces said he wants the suspect caught. He has shown the surveillance video to library employees and directed them to call police if they see the man enter the library again.

“We think that this guy has been here before doing something similar but not as graphic,” Proces said. “This may be someone who is going from library to library doing this.”

Police Chief Ray Appel said investigators would seek a court order to view the surveillance tapes.

But he also said the offense might amount to an ordinance violation, not a criminal charge handled by the district attorney’s office and heard by a circuit court judge. If that’s the case, it’s not clear whether a municipal court judge would have the authority to order the video released, Appel said.

“This is the first time we have ever run across this,” the chief said.

Alan Lee, the assistant attorney general who wrote the Nov. 27 opinion, said he would recommend the confidentiality law be amended to allow library staff to provide surveillance tapes to police when criminal activity is suspected or witnessed.

The book, entitled “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town”, measures 0.07 mm by 0.10 mm and was made using a focused gallium-ion beam to carve out spaces around each letter on pieces of crystalline silicon, according to Simon Fraser University.

That is smaller than the head of a pin, which is about 2 mm in size, according to the researchers

The book is tinier than two cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s smallest, a copy of the New Testament of the King James Bible, made in 2001, and a 2002 production of Anton Chekhov’s “Chameleon”, the researchers said.

Each of the “nanobooks” is made up of 30 microtablets. The story is described by the Vancouver university as a “fable about Teeny Ted’s victory in a turnip contest at the annual country fair.”

Someone after business hours used one of the five cable boxes in the Board of Education building to order the films, priced between $4.95 and $9.95.

The cable provider, Cablevision, has refunded the school district the money, and is helping to investigate the purchases.

School officials have since gotten rid of three of the cable boxes. A board official said the building had cable in case there was an emergency.

Four boys said spring-type clothespins were placed over their upper or lower lips for talking too much in class, Amanda-Clearcreek Primary School principal Mike Johnsen wrote in a letter to parents this week.

Ruth Ann Stoneburner, a retired school nurse who had worked as a substitute for several years, confirmed to Johnsen that she had used the clothespin discipline March 26, he said.

Stoneburner will not work again in the Amanda-Clearcreek district and was being reported to the state education department, Superintendent J.B. Dick said Wednesday.

Officials found out about the discipline after a parent complained. The students weren’t hurt, but the punishment isn’t condoned by the district, Dick said.

Stoneburner could not be reached for comment at phone listings under her last name in Amanda, which is about 25 miles southeast of Columbus.

The long-serving leader ordered officials at the Agency for Financial Control and Fighting Corruption investigate the incomes of students and school pupils with expensive cars and publish their findings, his Web site www.president.tj said.

The impoverished Central Asian state has announced frequent anti-corruption drives but to date the only senior official implicated in graft has been a former head of the state gas company who had announced that he planned to run for president.

Rakhmonov, in power since 1992, has in recent months taken to announcing eye-catching initiatives and orders.

He has criticised expensive wedding parties and announced that students should not drive themselves to school or carry mobile phones.

Rakhmonov also said he wanted to be known as Rakhmon to reflect his Persian roots and urged compatriots also to drop Russian-style endings from their names.

This week he demanded the British Museum return the Oxus treasure, an ancient Persian collection of silver and gold found on what is now Tajik territory.