More than 70 percent of the camps in Haiti that house 1.3 million survivors of the January earthquake lack oversight and put many Haitians at risk of rape, gang violence, and other dangers, according to a new study whose results were summarized by the Associated Press.

The report was produced by Refugees International, a nonprofit in Washington.

Officials from the advocacy group said researchers visiting Haiti found a lack of coordination among international aid groups working in the country. The officials also criticized the Untied Nations’ Haiti operations for not doing more to protect the earthquake survivors.

Martin Nesirky, a United Nations spokesman, said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is aware of the report but had no immediate comments.

Meanwhile, an investigation by the Associated Press found that none of the $1.15-billion the United States pledged for rebuilding has...

The Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General has opened an investigation into the Hershey School, the country’s largest residential school for needy children, because of a series of land deals connected to the institution, the Philadelphia Inquirer writes.

Among other business deals, trustees of the school allegedly spent $17-million on a golf course and clubhouse and bought the 18-acre Pumpkin World USA, a roadside market, for $7.5-million. The school then leased Pumpkin World back to the owners.

The investigation may focus on why the school is spending such large amounts of money on things like golf courses when its deed of trust stipulates that its money be used solely for the care and education of the school’s students. The deed was signed more than 100 years ago by the school’s founder, Milton S. Hershey, who started the chocolate company that bears his name.

Leroy S....

Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, N.C., has received a $10-million pledge from Mike Farrell, a real estate investor, and his wife, Mary, for a new building for the university’s business school, according to BusinessWeek.

Mr. Farrell is chief executive of Annaly Capital Management, a residential mortgage real-estate investment trust. Their son graduated from the institution in the spring.

Illinois is ranked first among states in late payments to charities that are struggling amid already shrinking government funds, according to a new report by the Urban Institute, writes the Chicago Tribune.

While many charities across the county have frozen salaries and cut programs, almost 41 percent of human-service groups reported late payments from state, federal, and local government sources in 2009, and in Illinois, that number climbed to 72 percent.

In Illinois, 31 percent of nonprofit groups said they cut services and programs last year.

Laurel O'Sullivan, vice president of Donors Forum, in Chicago, said many human-service groups are struggling because of the Illinois’s financial woes. "The Land of Lincoln has really become the land of late payments," said Ms. O'Sullivan.

Read about the state-budget woes facing charities in Illinois in this article from The Chronicle's...

A cancer charity has charged that Pepsi Refresh, a nonprofit fund-raising contest conducted by the soda company, has been infiltrated by groups with a political agenda, The New York Times reports.
 
Arms Wide Open Childhood Cancer Foundation has been competing in the contest to win $250,000 from Pepsi and says a group of 16 organizations called the Progressive Slate that have also been competing in the contest are actually political groups and therefore violate the contest’s rules.

An official associated with Progressive Slate said the accusations from Arms Wide Open had no merit. A spokesman for Pepsi, Peter Land, said  “We evaluated each idea solely on the basis of the merits, and each met our guidelines, which state that an idea cannot support or endorse any political candidate or party.”

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A charity started by Christine O'Donnell, who is running as a Republican to represent Delaware in the Senate, could lose its tax-exempt status because it did not file tax forms for the past three years, according to the Associated Press.

The charity, called Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth, is on a list of thousands of small nonprofits that are in danger of losing their tax-exempt status because they have not filed returns.

Cleta Mitchell, an lawyer representing Ms. O'Donnell’s campaign, said the mistake is not unusual among small charities, most of which operate with few resources and small staffs. "It's not any big deal. I'm dealing with this for all kinds of clients right now," said Ms. Mitchell.

A misprinted phone number cereal boxes meant to lead consumers to a phone number where they can donate to charity connects them instead to a phone-sex business, ESPN reports.

The phone number was printed on boxes of cereal that bore the name and image of the Cincinnati Bengals football player Chad Ochocinco.

The phone number was printed on the boxes to connect callers to Feed the Children, a charity that benefits from sales of the cereal. But because the box has the wrong toll-free prefix, callers hoping to donate to the charity instead hear a sultry woman's voice making suggestive comments and then requesting the caller's credit-card number.

Apologizing to the public for the mixup on his popular Twitter page yesterday, Mr. Ochocinco wrote, "Awe man I'm bummed about the cereal number mixup on the cereal, trying to do good and got messed up, of all numbers why that one!!! Sorry."

The Indianapolis Museum of Art on Monday fired 33 security officers and 23 gallery attendants and is replacing them with 14 reserve police officers and 100 college students, according to the Indianapolis Star. Museum officials say the move is part of a new effort to upgrade security and customer service and is expected to save the institution $600,000 annually.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis Symphony is reporting an increase in ticket sales and a decrease in its deficit, a major turnaround in its finances after years of losses, writes the St. Louis Business Journal. The symphony’s operating deficit was cut 11 percent, to $2.6-million, the smallest in five years.

William Patterson, a 48-year-old San Francisco philanthropist who helped raise $500-million for the California Academy of Sciences, died Friday of a brain tumor, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mr. Patterson, who led the organization’s capital campaign and was chairman of its board, was a partner in a small investment firm called SPO Partners. He also served on the board of several other California nonprofits including the Bay Area Discovery Museum, the Marin Community Foundation, and the Stanford Business School Trust.

Consumer watchdog groups, state attorneys general, and some nonprofits agree that the deals charities make with the companies they hire to raise money are misleading to donors, who often do not realize that most of their donations are going to the-fund raising firm rather than the charity, writes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The newspaper recently reviewed about 500 such agreements between the companies and nonprofit groups and found that in half of the cases, the fund-raising firms, which conduct most of their appeals for donations through telemarketing and direct mail, pocketed at least 70 percent of the donations.

However, states cannot do much about the agreements because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that fund-raising cannot be tightly regulated, given constitutional protections on free speech, according to another Post-Dispatch article. Meanwhile, many nonprofit officials say...