The European Court of Justice said this week that rules to restrict tax breaks on charitable donations made by residents of European Union countries breach the principles of free movement of capital and are unlawful, reports The Financial Times.

Some countries had previously restricted the tax breaks that donors would traditionally receive for charitable donations if those donations were made outside the donor’s country of residence. These laws had been put in place to increase domestic spending and because “governments are often concerned about increased risk of tax avoidance and the difficulty of scrutinizing foreign charities,” reports the newspaper.

See The Chronicle’s article on efforts to break down barriers to giving among European countries.

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Angel Food Ministries, a charity with headquarters in Good Hope, Ga., that sells discount groceries, paid almost $2.5-million in compensation in 2006 to the family that founded and operates the group, reports the York Daily Record, in Pennsylvania.

The group’s chief executive officer, Wesley Joseph Wingo, received a pay increase from $69,598 in 2005 to $588,529 in 2006. His family also borrowed money from the charity, owing more than $1-million in loans by the end of 2007, and the numbers are raising questions among charity watchdogs.

A spokesman for the group said that salaries were appropriate for a charity of its size and that the compensation and loans were intended to reduce personal debt the Wingo family incurred when it founded the organization.

More than two dozen trucks containing food and other goods intended for people in Gaza were stranded at the Egyptian border yesterday, reports the Associated Press. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency said aid shipments are hitting bottlenecks on Gaza’s borders with both Israel and Egypt, but Egyptian officials will not explain why trucks have had trouble entering Gaza through the country’s Rafah border crossing.

Egypt and Israel effectively sealed their borders with Gaza in 2007 after the militant Palestinian group Hamas seized control of the area.

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An Illinois hospital system this week agreed to refund money to patients who were needy but had been charged for their care, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Advocate Health Care, which operates eight hospitals in and around Chicago, said it would also explain its policy on providing free care more clearly.

The announcement comes as part of an effort to settle a lawsuit against the hospital chain. A judge must still approve the settlement.

Thirteen men who said they were abused as students attending Briscoe Memorial School in Kent, Wash., have reached a $7-million settlement with the Seattle Roman Catholic Archdiocese, which owned the school, and the Congregation of Christian Brothers, the religious order that ran it, reports The Seattle Times.

Several advocates and nonprofit developers of low-cost housing are opposed to plans by David A. Paterson, governor of New York, to use some surplus money from the Battery Park City Authority to shore up the state’s budget deficit, instead of using all of it to pay for low-priced and moderately priced housing in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg had intended, reports The New York Times.

The surplus was the main source of financing for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, created in 2007. Jeffrey Gordon, a spokesman for the state budget director, said the governor’s office does not intend to take surplus money away from the city but said the budget proposal entailed raising a total of $540-million by letting the authority issue up to $500-million in bonds. The other $40-million would come from the Battery Park City Authority surplus, and the state and...

Officials of Allegheny Valley School, in Pennsylvania, will be watching the Super Bowl especially carefully on Sunday because a victory for the Pittsburgh Steelers could provide a significant increase in aid to the organization, reports The New York Times.

The nonprofit group, which operates several schools around the state to serve people with mental disabilities, stands to make money because of a gift it received in 1996 from a Pittsburgh broadcaster.

Myron Cope left the organization the trademark to the “terrible towel,” which he created to honor the team in 1975. The school serves his son, Danny.

Hundreds of thousands of the towels are sold to football fans each year, and the school gets $7 for every towel sold. If the Steelers win the Super Bowl contest against the Arizona Cardinals, sales of the towels are expected to soar. The last time the Steelers won, in 2005, the...

Harvard’s endowment losses of $8-billion “might be only the tip of the iceberg of illiquid investments,” writes Edward Jay Epstein, a journalist and author, in a column for online magazine The Big Money.

Harvard’s money managers, writes Mr. Epstein, pursued an aggressive, nontraditional strategy that included hedge funds and other illiquid investments that made the money more difficult to recover once the economy collapsed.

“As late as June 2008, the fund kept almost no reserve of cash or Treasury bills and allocated a mere 6 percent of its money to fixed-interest bonds. It also borrowed more than $1-billion to amplify the returns on its less conventional investments. So by the time the bubble burst in the fall of 2008, only a small fraction of the endowment-fund investment was even under the jurisdiction of the SEC,” he writes.

Nearly 150 foundations were hurt by the investment scandal involving Bernard Madoff, according to a report cited in Give and Take, The Chronicle’s roundup of the best blog posts about the nonprofit world.

Plus:

• Why charity workers are too afraid to talk about efforts that fail

• Notable books on social entrepreneurship

In a revised guide for taxpayers, the Internal Revenue Service explains how volunteers can deal with mileage deductions, handle transfers from individual retirement accounts to charities, and many other issues, reports Government and Politics Watch, The Chronicle’s online column.