Pregnancy pact in doubt, mayor says

High-school counselors, teachers and families of the students the principal said made a pact to get pregnant and have babies together have no information to back the claim, the mayor said Sunday.

Mayor Carolyn Kirk plans to meet today with school, health and other local officials after Gloucester High School Principal Joseph Sullivan was quoted by Time magazine as saying the girls made such a pact.

Seventeen students became pregnant this year — four times the usual number. The girls are all 16 or younger, and nearly all of them sophomores.

Kirk said Sullivan has told city officials he can't remember his source of information.

"The high-school principal is the one who initially said it, and no one else has said it," Kirk said. "So, my position is that it has not been confirmed."

Denver

Disgraced pastor returns to Colorado

Ted Haggard, the evangelist forced out of his job after being caught up in a sex scandal involving a male prostitute, has left a "spiritual-restoration program" and no longer has any ties to the 14,000-member megachurch he founded, the new pastor said Sunday.

Under a 2006 severance deal, Haggard agreed to leave Colorado Springs and not talk about the scandal publicly. The deal expired at the end of 2007. New pastor Brady Boyd said Haggard, now free to live where he wanted, has returned to Colorado Springs.

New York

Donations steady, study shows

Americans gave to charities last year at about the same rate they did the previous year, holding steady on their donations in the face of a housing-market meltdown and a crisis in credit, a study released today showed.

Donations by Americans to charities remained at 2.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007, according to the yearly study from the philanthropy-tracking Giving USA Foundation.

The study shows charitable giving in 2007, measured as a percentage of GDP, matched giving levels in 2006 and from 2002 to 2004. Giving was boosted in 2005 by aid for victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma and the Asian tsunami.

After a strong start last year, stock-market trouble combined with the housing and credit downturns put a drag on charitable giving for the rest of the year.

Washington, D.C.

New clue found to Alzheimer's

Researchers have uncovered a new clue to the cause of Alzheimer's disease.

The brains of people with the memory-robbing form of dementia are cluttered with a plaque made up of beta-amyloid, a sticky protein. But there long has been a question whether this is a cause of the disease or a side effect. Also involved are tangles of a protein called tau; some scientists suspect this is the cause.

Now, researchers have caused Alzheimer's symptoms in rats by injecting them with a form of beta-amyloid. Injections with other forms did not cause illness, which may explain why some people have beta-amyloid plaque but do not show disease symptoms.

The findings by a team led by Dr. Ganesh Shankar and Dr. Dennis Selkoe of Harvard Medical School were reported in Sunday's online edition of the journal Nature Medicine.

Also

Airlines: Delta Air Lines is planning to become the first major U.S. carrier to offer its passengers the option of paying a $128 fee for speedier security lines at terminals in New York and Los Angeles.

Found: An autistic Minnesota man who disappeared a week ago from a camp for the disabled and who relies on medication after a kidney transplant was found alive in the Wisconsin woods Sunday, authorities said.

Fires: Hundreds of wildfires sparked by lightning flared Sunday across the heart of wine country and remote forests in Northern California.

Seattle Times news services