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• Governments, agencies begin worldwide relief effort for Philippine typhoon victims
• Foreign governments and agencies have announced a major relief effort to help victims of the Philippine typhoon. Here are some of the pledges they have made:
• UNITED NATIONS
• U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos has released $25 million from the U.N.'s emergency relief fund to provide emergency food assistance, supply emergency shelter materials and household items, assist with the provision of emergency health services, safe water supplies and sanitation facilities. The funding will also be used for critical protection, nutrition and emergency activities, the U.N. humanitarian office said.
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• CORYDON, Iowa (AP) -- The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America's push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.
• Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.
• It wasn't supposed to be this way.
• With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."
• But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.
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• WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new Associated Press investigation, which found that ethanol hasn't lived up to some of the government's clean-energy promises, is drawing a fierce response from the ethanol industry.
• In an unusual campaign, ethanol producers, corn growers and its lobbying and

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