The official said that the White House is still determined that contraception will be available to women free.

NPR reports that the rule changes little, only that contraception would be available free. “The only truly novel part of the plan is the ‘no cost’ bit,” writes NPR’s Julie Rovner. Under the new rule, women would not have to pay a deductible or co-payment to receive prescription contraceptives.

Republicans have vowed to overturn the rule, which, has also been dividing the president’s own party, according to Bloomberg. The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have been preparing for battle over the issue for months, says The New York Times.

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said some Senate Democrats asked President Obama at a meeting Thursday to reconsider the rule, according to Bloomberg. Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, is co-sponsoring legislation to block the government from requiring insurers to cover contraception over a plan buyer’s religious or moral objections.

Critics say the mandate violates religious freedom and want a broader exemption than that in the current rule, which applies to churches and some faith schools but does not cover religiously affiliated hospitals, universities, and aid organizations. Supporters of the rule say covering contraception safeguards women’s health.

EWTN, a commercial Catholic television network, asked a court in Alabama on Thursday to block enforcement of the rule, reports MSNBC.

Ms. Handel, the former senior vice president for policy, called Planned Parenthood a “gigantic bully,” saying it used Komen as its “own personal punching bag.”

She acknowledged her part in the decision but says it was not politically motivated.

A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood said that “anti-choice outlets” first broke the news and that Komen followed up by making an announcement to hundreds of leaders of both charities. The media picked it up from there, she said.

Cetusa, based in California, supplied some 400 workers to a Hershey plant in Palmyra, Pa., last year using an element of the J-1 visa program designed to let foreign students earn money in America while traveling and practicing their English.

Cetusa participants, many from Turkey and Ukraine, staged a protest in Hershey, Pa., in August saying they were forced to work long hours for low pay, leaving little time or money for them to travel or get to know Americans. The State Department is reviewing the organization’s work in other exchange programs and is expected to announce new restrictions on what jobs J-1 students can hold while in the country.

The nonprofit group did not respond to the Inquirer’s calls for comment. Hershey has said it did not hire the students, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm, and that it has adopted a policy of not using J-1 visa holders at its plant.

Set to open this fall, the Children’s Aid College Prep Charter School—the first full-fledged academic institution developed by the Children’s Aid Society—is offering priority admissions to children who come from homeless or low-income families, suffer from disabilities, or are learning English.

With two months to go until the lottery to determine charter placements, Children’s Aid officials said they are not receiving enough applications for the school, which was announced in September. They said use of the word “weighted” in describing the school’s special lottery turned parents off and has been replaced by “preferences.”

“Reaction in the community was not great,” said Drema Brown, the charity’s vice president for education. “The reality is we are trying to create greater equality.”

The three-year gift will pay for faculty and graduate fellowships, equipment, and operational costs at Pitt’s Center for Energy and will supply a fund to encourage innovative research, the university said in announcing the pledge Thursday.

The center, established in 2008, studies energy delivery and efficiency, carbon management, and energy diversification. The school said the Mellon donation is one of the largest foundation gifts in its history but did not provide details.

In other education news, the founder of the firm behind Blackberry mobile devices has pledged $21-million to support the math and science departments at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, the Canadian Press reports.

Mike Lazaridis, who recently stepped down as co-chief executive of Research in Motion, and his wife, Ophelia, had already given more than $100-million to the school.

Waterloo’s Faculty of Science will receive $20-million to support two senior research chairs and expand an undergraduate laboratory and classroom building. The remaining $1-million will provide four-year scholarships for mathematics students.

The White House reaffirmed support for the rule, which it has characterized as part of broader efforts to focus on preventative care in the new health-care law, while signaling it was still seeking a compromise on the issue.

The administration and congressional Democrats have focused on contraceptive services as a women’s health issue, while Republicans and religious groups, particularly the Catholic Church, frame the rule as an effort to force faith groups to pay for care that violates their religious teaching.

The birth-control debate, along with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood flap and a California court’s rejection of the state’s gay-marriage ban, have brought the so-called culture wars to the forefront of election-year politics. Referring to the contraception rule in a speech from the House floor, Mr. Boehner said, “This attack by the federal government on religious freedom cannot stand.”

“The West turned against us because Egypt exercised its rights,” Kamal el-Ganzouri said at a news conference, referring to the probe of democracy-building groups Cairo accuses of operating without official sanction and meddling in Egyptian politics.

At another news conference Wednesday an investigative judge involved in the case detailed the charges, saying the suspects could face up to five years in prison and that more nonprofit groups could be raided in the coming days.

Cairo says 19 American employees of four U.S.-funded organizations, including the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, are among those charged. The State Department has said it believes the number is 16 and that fewer than half of them are in currently in Egypt.

In other Komen news, Reuters analyzed the charity’s financial statements and found that the charity spends about half as much proportionally on research into the causes and treatment of breast cancer as it did four years ago.

The foundation has increased its spending on science in absolute dollar terms, but at a far lower rate than the growth in its revenue, the news service found.

In the year ending March 31, Komen spent $63-million on research, about 15 percent of its overall expenditure, down from 17 percent each of the previous two years and 29 percent in fiscal 2008. The charity reported that 43 percent of its 2011 revenues went to education efforts.

The firestorm over Komen’s financial relationship with Planned Parenthood has increased scrutiny of how the cancer charity spends the hundreds of millions of dollars it raises annually. Critics in the science and activist communities have long argued that Komen focuses on advocacy and awareness at the expense of research.

The foundation receives a high rating from independent groups such as Charity Navigator for its financial performance. In a statement to Reuters, Komen spokeswoman Leslie Aun said the charity spends 83 percent of its money on mission programs and is “the only organization doing breast cancer on all these fronts—in research, global work, advocacy, and community work.”

A science and medicine correspondent for Forbes asserts that training more of its resources on developing cancer drugs would help Komen heal its bruised image. While Komen has poured tens of millions of dollars into research, its “impact has not been as big as it might have been,” Matthew Herber says.

Nancy Brinker, Komen’s founder, offered her first detailed comments since the foundation reinstated Planned Parenthood grants in a letter to Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn.

Read a Chronicle of Philanthropy article on the controversy’s fundraising impact on both orgnizations.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other food and beverage makers have joined with professional and advocacy groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Cancer Society on numerous nutrition and health efforts, with their logos and slogans often appearing on campaign Web sites.

Organizations working with the firms say collaborating with the industry and taking advantage of its broad reach and marketing skills are essential to tackling complex health problems such as childhood obesity and to persuading the companies to offer healthier products.

Critics contend that working with companies whose main business is selling products widely considered unhealthy compromises the mission and credibility of health groups.

The Ontario university will use $24-million of the gift from the Marta and Owen Boris Foundation to establish a center to speed commercial development of discoveries made by the school’s well-regarded Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute.

The remaining $6-million will finance a new clinic where patients with complex health problems can see multiple specialists in one visit.

Owen Boris was the founder of telecommunications firm Mountain Cablevision. He died in April 2011.