Morning News Roundup (18 May)

• President Bush's top advisers have recommended a broad new approach to dealing with North Korea that would include beginning negotiations on a peace treaty, even while efforts to dismantle the country's nuclear program are still under way.
  
  The decision to consider a change may have been influenced in part by growing concerns about Iran's nuclear program. One senior Asian official who has been briefed on the administration's discussions about what to do next said, "There is a sense that they can't leave Korea out there as a model for what the Iranians hope to become — a nuclear state that can say no to outside pressure." [NYTimes]
  
  
• New Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi acknowledged the true impact of the Iraq war: “We consider the war and occupation in Iraq a grave error that hasn’t solved - but has complicated - the problem of security. … Terrorism has found a new base and new excuses for internal and external terrorist action.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Fighting intensifies in Afghanistan: “Heavy fighting involving several hundred Taliban fighters and Afghan and coalition forces in southern Afghanistan killed about a dozen police, a Canadian soldier and more than 30 militants.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Iraqi police say 12 people have been killed in attacks in the capital, while 15 members of the national martial arts team were kidnapped at gunpoint. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $100,000 in return for freeing the team, a member of Iraq's Olympic committee said. [BBC]
  
  
• Transport is the worst offender for releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and governments must do more to cut emissions from cars and trucks, the U.N.'s climate change chief said on Wednesday. Transport accounts for about a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide from fuel burnt on the roads by vehicles. Emissions of heat-trapping gases from transport in rich nations were 20 percent above 1990 levels in 2003 against a goal under the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol of a total 5 percent cut in all emissions by 2008-12. [Reuters/ENN]
  
  
• A group of scientists urged Congress on Wednesday to fund research for plug-in hybrid vehicles, touting the technology as another way to reduce the nation's dependence on oil through the help of a simple electrical socket. Plug-in hybrids combine hybrid technology -- which uses both gasoline and electric power -- with large batteries that can be plugged into a standard wall socket. [AP/ENN]
  
  
• Amen, George Will:

  An aggressively annoying new phrase in America's political lexicon is "values voters." It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.
  
  This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values and everyone else votes to . . . well, it is unclear what they supposedly think they are doing with their ballots.
  [...]
  Today's liberal agenda includes preservation, even expansion, of the welfare state in its current configuration in order to strengthen an egalitarian ethic of common provision. Liberals favor taxes and other measures to produce a more equal distribution of income. They may value equality indiscriminately, but they vote their values.

• Oh crap: The Rev. Pat Robertson says God has told him that storms and possibly a tsunami will hit America's coastline this year. "There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest," he said.
  
  
• Sixteen people were killed and more than one million people evacuated as Typhoon Chanchu swept through China's Guangdong and Fujian provinces Thursday. [AFP/TerraDaily]
  
  
• Former White House counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant, will be portrayed by Sean Penn in the Sony film of Clarke's "Against All Enemies." The book chronicles what happened inside the White House leading up to and through the 9/ll attacks. The film will be directed by Paul Haggis (of the Oscar-winning, Crash). [Raw Story]