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Diploma-mill owners are an elusive bunch. They flood e-mail boxes with offers of cheap college degrees, and collect payment through Web sites, then filter that money into overseas bank accounts. When the police try to shut one of the businesses down, the owners just set up shop elsewhere, often in a poor country with weak fraud laws. Unable to snuff out these illegal businesses, many states have changed their strategy: if you can't catch the dealers, go after the consumers. A handful, like Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey, have recently criminalized the use of fake degrees.

When the General Teaching Council for England was set up it faced an uphill struggle to keep teachers and unions on side. Three years on, John Crace asks: has it made a difference and is it adequately carrying out its function as an investigator of misconduct?

The Bush administration proposed guidelines last month that would let research institutions decide whether to restrict researchers' financial interests in studies involving human subjects, and whether such interests should be reported to the research volunteers.

A non-profit corporation that provides a high-speed computer network to colleges in New York State agreed last month to pay the federal government $1.4-million in a lawsuit alleging that it had misused a federal grant.

According to the Ministry of Education and Sport, at least 952 teachers are "ghosts" or irregularly kept on the payroll. Investigations reveal that some head teachers have allowed some teachers to remain on the payroll irregularly. Given an average salary of sh250,000 per month per teacher, government has been paying sh238m monthly to ghost teachers.