According to a news run by kansas.com,  the Nepalis students conspired to maintain their non-immigrant visas by making false statements that they possessed funds to pursue their study at K-State while supporting themselves and their dependants.

All nine students had obtained temporary possession of financial resources for the purpose of obtaining statements from financial institutions to support their claims that each personally had the needed funds in 2008.

The students temporarily obtained funds from fellow Nepalese students and deposited the funds in their bank accounts. After getting the notarized bank letter, they returned the funds to the other students.

The indicted students are Mahendra Thapa, 33; Khem Acharya, 41; Raj Kumar Dani, 37; Santosh Ghimire, 37; Lila Ballav Pandey, 41; Laxman Pokhrel, 37; Keshar Prasain, 38; Govind Paneru, 32; and Narayan Chapagain, 43.

If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison and a fine up to $250,000 on each count. The state department and homeland security participated in the investigation.

KATHMANDU: The ECAN Education Fair 2013 has kicked off in the capital on Thursday.

CPN-UML Chairman Jhalanath Khanal inaugurated the four-day fair organized by the Education Consultancies Association of Nepal (ECAN).

On the occasion, Khanal said the Nepal needs a new education system to retain the skilled human resource at home and utilize their minds for nation building process.

Similarly, President of ECAN Rajendra Baral said Nepal could become an educational hub if we were able to identify new areas of studies.

Country Director of British Council Brendan McSharry also lauded the effective of ECAN on supporting students in their quest of quality education. The exhibition organized at Bhrikuti Mandap will last for four days.

OXON HILL, Md: After years of heart breakingly close calls, Arvind Mahankali conquered his nemesis, German, to become the champion speller in the English language.

The 13-year-old from Bayside Hills, N.Y., correctly spelled “knaidel,” a word for a small mass of leavened dough, to win the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night. The bee tested brain power, composure and, for the first time, knowledge ofvocabulary.

Arvind finished in third place in both 2011 and 2012, and both times, he was eliminated on German-derived words. This time, he got one German word in the finals, and the winning word was from German-derived Yiddish, eliciting groans and laughter from the crowd. He spelled both with ease.

“The German curse has turned into a German blessing,” he said.

Arvind outlasted 11 other finalists, all but one of whom had been to the National Spelling Bee before, in nearly 2 ½ hours of tense, grueling competition that was televised nationally. In one round, all nine participants spelled their words correctly.

When he was announced as the winner, Arvind looked upward at the confetti falling upon him and cracked his knuckles, his signature gesture during his bee appearances. He’ll take home $30,000 in cash and prizes along with a huge cup-shaped trophy. The skinny teen, clad in a white polo shirt and wire-rimmed glasses pushed down his nose, was joined on stage at the Washington-area hall by his parents and his beaming younger brother.

An aspiring physicist who admires Albert Einstein, Arvind said he would spend more time studying physics this summer now that he’s “retired” from the spelling bee.

Arvind becomes the sixth consecutive Indian-American winner and the 11th in the past 15 years, a run that began in 1999 when Nupur Lala captured the title in 1999 and was later featured in the documentary “Spellbound.”

Arvind’s family is originally from Hyderabad in southern India, and relatives who live there were watching live on television.

“At home, my dad used to chant Telegu poems from forward to backward and backward to forward, that kind of thing,” said Arvind’s father, Srinivas. “So language affinity, we value language a lot. And I love language, I love English.”

Pranav Sivakumar, who like Arvind rarely appeared flustered onstage, finished second. The 13-year-old from Tower Lakes, Ill., was tripped up by “cyanophycean,” a word for a blue-green alga. Sriram Hathwar, 13, of Painted Post, N.Y., finished third, and Amber Born, 14, of Marblehead, Mass., was fourth.

The field was whittled down from 42 semifinalists Thursday afternoon, with spellers advancing based on a formula that combined their scores from a computerized spelling and vocabulary test with their performance in two onstage rounds.

The vocabulary test was new. Some of the spellers liked it, some didn’t, and many were in-between, praising the concept but wondering why it wasn’t announced at the beginning of the school year instead of seven weeks before the national bee.

“It was kind of a different challenge,” said Vismaya Kharkar, 14, of Bountiful, Utah, who finished tied for 5th place. “I’ve been focusing my studying on the spelling for years and years.”

There were two multiple-choice vocabulary tests — one in the preliminaries and one in the semifinals — and they were administered in a quiet room away from the glare of the onstage parts of the bee. The finals were the same as always: no vocabulary, just spellers trying to avoid the doomsday bell.

There was a huge groan from the crowd when Arvind got his first German-derived word, “dehnstufe,” an Indo-European long-grade vowel.

Milking the moment, he asked, “Can I have the language of origin?” before throwing his hands in the air with a wry smile.

“I had begun to be a little wary of German words, but this year I prepared German words and I studied them, so when I got German words this year, I wasn’t worried,” Arvind said.

He appeared to have more trouble with “galere,” a word for a group of people having a marked common quality or relationship. He asked for the etymology twice — French and old Catalan — shifted his body back and forth and stroked his chin before getting it right with seconds to spare.

Amber, an aspiring comedy writer and crowd favorite, bowed out on “hallali,” a huntsman’s bugle call. She said, “I know, I know,” when the clock told her time was running out, and she knew she had missed it, saying “That’s not right” as she finished her effort.

The bee’s growing popularity is reflected in an ESPN broadcast that gets more sophisticated each year. In the semifinals, Amber got to watch herself featured on a televised promo that also aired on the jumbo screen inside the auditorium.

She then approached the microphone and, referring to herself, deadpanned: “She seemed nice.”

Vanya Shivashankar, at 11 the youngest of the finalists, fell short in her bid to become the first sibling of a previous winner to triumph. Her sister, Kavya, won in 2009. Vanya finished tied for 5th after misspelling “zenaida,” which means a type of pigeon.

LONDON: King Edward VIII may be best known for giving up the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, but it wasn’t the first time his love affairs posed a threat to the British monarchy.

A new book by British barrister and former judge Andrew Rose unearths a little-known affair with a French courtesan 20 years before Edward’s abdication, which ended in a rigged trial at the behest of the British establishment trying to protect a future king’s reputation.

“The Prince, The Princess, and The Perfect Murder” details how the then-Prince of Wales’s first great love, French courtesan Maggie Meller, blackmailed him to avoid the gallows after murdering her playboy Egyptian prince husband.

Meller was acquitted in a high profile trial at London’s Old Bailey in 1923 despite the evidence stacked against her.

Rose said the acquittal was a shock but his research has now revealed an extraordinary story involving the murder trial, a secret cache of vanished letters and a cover-up to save the reputation of the future king.

Six years before her trial, Meller had an affair with the British prince. She used evidence from that relationship to force the royal household to lean on the establishment in an effort to get her off the hook and cover up the scandal, Rose told Reuters.

“This affair had been carefully airbrushed from history so the connection between the murder and the Prince of Wales was never drawn,” Rose told Reuters.

“The royal household took steps to make sure that the prince’s name did not come out in the trial to protect the reputation of the future king. It is amazing that she got away with it.”

Rose’s book, published by Coronet this week forms the basis of a TV documentary, “Edward VIII’s Murderous Mistress”, on Britain’s Channel 4 later this month.

The latest book was a follow-on work from Rose’s book about the trial, “Scandal at the Savoy”, published in 1991.

He was intrigued by Marguerite Alibert, better known as Meller, who, dressed in a Chanel gown, shot her second husband, Egyptian Prince Fahmy Bey, at London’s Savoy Hotel in 1923.

COVER UP FOR THE PRINCE

At the time her past reputation as a gold digger was brushed off and the focus was on her claim that she acted in self-defence to protect herself from her abusive husband.

But after his book was released, Meller’s grandson contacted Rose, informing him of her affair with the prince, love letters between the two, and a memoir she wrote in 1934.

Rose said it took several years to trace the relationship, accessing unpublished documents in royal archives and private collections but also finding a trail of destroyed documents.

Rose said the prince’s involvement came as a surprise but was in character as Edward, who abdicated in 1936 after less than a year on the throne, was a well-known womaniser.

“He was emotionally immature and feckless in his private life … although he had enormous charm,” said Rose.

“But you can be approachable and amusing and also neurotic, self-centred and unreliable. He spent his time chasing woman, had a string of love affairs and was always susceptible particularly to powerful women.”

Rose said the prince’s protectors were quick to move once Meller was arrested, negotiating with her to return the prince’s letters that she had stored in Cairo.

The crucial part of the deal, however, was that she would not mention the prince in court and she stuck to that.

Her promiscuous past was never mentioned in court and the trial instead focused on the violent nature and perverted sexual tastes of her husband.

“Really this was a show trial,” said Rose, “The authorities wanted Marguerite to be acquitted. A murder conviction would have been catastrophic for the Crown.”

Meller was released and moved back to France where she lived the rest of her life in Paris, dying wealthy in 1971.

“This story really does show another side to Edward and how unsuitable he always was to be king,” said Rose.

Some 7.5 million students of schools and colleges across the country have been prevented from their right to education due to the private schools’ owners.

The APIN called for the strike protesting the torching of school bus of Goldengate College by the students of All Nepal National Independent Students’ Union-Revolutionary.

Recently, the Goldengate College and All Nepal National Independent Students’ Union-Revolutionary are at the loggerheads.

The UCPN (Maoist) aligned students’ union has also called for an educational strike on Monday saying that the CEO Ramesh Silwal of the Goldengate College manhandled the student of union in the college and misbehaved with them.

BEIJING: U.S. universities have responded to China’s exploding demand for American higher education with branch campuses and aggressive recruiting. Now, some are trying to boost their brands by casting photos and other snippets of campus life out into the confounding sea of Chinese social media.

How confounding? Consider the mystery of the Chinese Yalezombies.

That’s “zombies” as in “zombie followers” on Sina Weibo — the hugely popular “weibo,” or microblogging, site that’s roughly akin to Twitter and has attracted more than 500 million followers since debuting in 2009. A common feature on Chinese social media, these zombie accounts could represent actual users who lurk inactively online. But often they’re fake, mass-produced accounts that mindlessly follow (hence the name “zombie”) and artificially boost another account’s follower numbers — and thus prestige.

Since its debut in December, Yale’s new Sina Weibo account — sharing photos and other assorted items from its Ivy-covered Connecticut campus — has exploded in popularity, apparently far faster than any other U.S. institution’s.

While other prominent universities have patiently accumulated at most a few thousand followers in more than a year of operation, Yale’s been adding nearly that many daily, and has passed 140,000. The only other foreign university even remotely close to that figure is, oddly, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. Yale’s Weibo account is ranked 30th in popularity among educational institutions overall, better even than several well-known domestic institutions like Nanjing and Zhejiang universities.

True, Ivy League Yale does have a famous name, longtime ties to China (it graduated the first Chinese person to earn a degree from a U.S. college in 1854) and 1,000-plus Chinese students and scholars currently on campus. That likely explains some of the growth. But Yale also appears to have attracted a mysteriously large battalion of walking dead accounts, with pages and pages of followers that rarely if ever post themselves and have few if any followers. Analytic software also points to some geographic oddities that could also raise suspicions of fake accounts, and many followers have disabled the feature allowing them to receive private messages.

Whence these zombie Yalies? After inquiries from The Associated Press, a Yale spokesman acknowledged some of the followers could be fake, but says that’s not Yale’s doing. He says the university isn’t buying followers, which can be purchased for a few cents each online.

“We don’t do it, we don’t promote it, we don’t encourage it, we don’t like it,” university spokesman Michael Morand said, adding: “Not to be cheeky about it, but it’s sort of like ‘Newsflash: Spam is inherent on the Internet.'”

Zinch, the marketing company that works with hundreds of overseas institutions in China and runs Yale’s Sina Weibo feed, also denies purchasing followers. It too says it’s mystified by Yale’s growth.

Sina, the company that operates Sina Weibo, has promoted Yale on its campus page and recommended it to new users, spokesman Mao Taotao said. But that wouldn’t explain why Yale has so many inactive followers. And he denied Sina adds followers to any account.

“To provide netizens with a clean online environment, Sina Weibo eliminates rubbish users in a timely manner,” he said in a written statement.

Another possibility: Companies that specialize in selling zombie followers may be signing their zombies up to follow Yale and other accounts to make them appear more real, said Cao Di, an analyst for the Shanghai-based Internet consulting firm iResearch.

In short, the bottom of the zombie Yalie mystery may be unreachable. And the whole matter could fairly be called a harmless curiosity.

Still, it offers a glimpse of just how swampy the new landscape of Chinese social media can be, and highlights some risks for overseas universities and companies. Accusations of inflated Twitter accounts have embarrassed politicians and corporations. In academia, concerns have been raised on many campuses — including Yale — about the dangers as universities expand their reach into foreign cultures.

Yale could lose face in China if it’s believed to be artificially inflating its numbers there, said Jason Lane, a State University of New York at Albany expert on internationalization efforts by U.S. universities. But more broadly, he said, the issue highlights how U.S. universities risk losing control of their brands and reputations in unfamiliar environments. Those risks are compounded by outsourcing the communications work to companies like Zinch or other local experts due to language barriers.

“Given the criticality of the Chinese market to the international dimensions of these institutions, I think it’s even more alarming that you’re releasing control of this aspect of your brand,” Lane said. “Part of oversight is knowing what they’re saying but it’s also a cultural issue of not really knowing how it’s playing.”

“This is part of the learning curve,” he added. “There are bound to be some hiccups along the way.”