JERUSALEM – The Israeli government will remove references to what the Palestinians call the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the country's education minister said Wednesday.
The reference to "al-naqba" or catastrophe, what the Palestinian's call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel's 1948 creation, was controversially inserted by a dovish education minister for the first time in 2007.
The phrase remains contentious six decades after Israel was founded.
"No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe," Education Minister Gideon Saar told Israel's parliament on Wednesday.
"What will you do to a teacher who addresses the class and begins to explain what happened to the family of a child who asks?" Ahmad Tibi, an Arab Israeli lawmaker, asked Saar in parliament.
Teachers will be free to discuss the personal and national tragedies that befell Palestinians during the war, said Saar, who represents the hardline governing Likud Party. But textbooks will be revised to remove the term, he added.
The decision applied to a third-grade textbook for Arab schoolchildren. Jewish textbooks make no mention of the term.
When former education minister Yuli Tamir introduced the term, some hardline Israelis accused her of making Israel look like it was apologizing for its own existence.
Tamir "is expressing a sort of political masochist spirit and ... a total lack of national pride," Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman said at the time. Lieberman is now Israel's foreign minister.
Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said Saar's decision showed insecurity.
"Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident. We need not be afraid of a word," Sarid said.
The 1948 war saw Arab nations invade the newly founded Jewish country after a United Nations decision to partition the British-controlled territory of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Jewish forces won, seizing territories beyond what the U.N. had alloted to it, while Egypt and Jordan took what was left of the territories the U.N. intended for a Palestinian state for themselves.
More than 700,000 Palestinians are thought to have fled or been expelled from areas that came under Israeli control.
Official Israeli histories of the country's establishment, especially those written for schoolchildren, have typically focused on the heroism of Israeli forces and glossed over the Palestinian flight, attributing the mass exile to voluntary escape if mentioning it at all.
In recent years, several Israeli historians have published books claiming that while many Palestinians did flee of their own accord, many others were forced from their homes as fighting raged and then never allowed back because the nascent Jewish state feared it would be swamped by refugees.
Palestinians demand the right to repatriate the surviving refugees and more than 4 million descendants to their original homes in Israel.
Israel rejects the demand, saying the refugees should receive compensation and be resettled where they now live or in a Palestinian state.
The Arabs who remained inside Israel now make up about 20 percent of the country's population of 7.3 million.

NEW YORK – Evil kids: Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em.
Well, actually, you can. Unless they kill you first.
Ever since Patty McCormack's sickeningly sweet murderess Rhoda Penmark in "The Bad Seed" in the mid-'50s, the horror movie subgenre featuring inherently wicked children has been scaring people no matter their age.
Now along comes "Orphan," starring Isabelle Fuhrman as Esther, who would be a formidable foe for Damien from "The Omen" movies, those shiny-eyed towheads from "Village of the Damned" or glowering little Billy from "The Twilight Zone," who controls everyone with his telepathic wishes.
Esther comes across as the near perfect child, with her politeness, painting and piano playing — until she smashes a bird's head with a rock and forces a nun to drive off a snowy road, just for starters.
The most recent film in the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," invokes the evil-child theme as well. It features flashbacks to the childhood of young Tom Riddle, who would go on to become the dark Lord Voldemort; even when Tom was a student at Hogwarts, it was obvious to his professors that he was powerful in a potentially dangerous way.
Evil-kid movies are revered enough that they've received the highest form of flattery: being sent up by other movies and TV shows, including "The Simpsons." And "Family Guy" offers up a regular character: matricidal little Stewie, who wanted to kill Lois for the longest time.
Besides their imitators, such films have their antecedents as well, Seton Hall University film professor Christopher Sharrett points out. All of them build on the "increasing disbelief in the idea of innocence," he says.
"You see the idea in `Angels with Dirty Faces,' the Dead End Kids, and in the postwar years, the teenpic or `juvenile delinquent' film of the Cold War that poses the teenager as internal threat to adult values," Sharrett explains.
Wheeler Winston Dixon, a University of Nebraska film professor who's written about evil children in film, says the enduring appeal of demon children in horror films is the fear of the unknown.
"Children are seen as `blank slates' to a degree, and also as essentially `unknowable,' because they live in a world very different from the adult world, in which fantasy and reality intermingle," he says. "Parents wonder what their children will become, and while they wish the best for them, they often feel as if they have no control over them. It is this essential lack of knowledge, and the fear that the children have a secret world which adults can't enter, which drives our fear of childhood as a separate domain."
Josh Heuman of Texas A&M University suggests that the movies play "on the dirty little secret that kids aren't sweet and innocent, and the anxiety that it provokes."
"They're little monsters, and not necessarily in the affectionate sense," Heuman says. "I'm thinking of my wonderful 2-year-old's outlandish force of will, and then the `It's a Good Life' episode of `The Twilight Zone.' Billy is hyperbole, but not unrealism or irony!"
Yes, even in real life, the little dickens can frighten you.
Dixon notes that Rhoda in "The Bad Seed" was the first mainstream demon child, but the trope really took off with the 1960 British science fiction film "Village of the Damned" and the sequel "Children of the Damned," in which a mysterious force impregnates all the women villagers simultaneously.
"They simply want to dominate adults, and destroy them if they thwart their plans," he says. "In a way, this can be seen as a reaction to the nascent rise of juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s — when American youth culture was first firmly established, along with the rise of rock 'n' roll, as a perceived threat to then normative postwar values."
Children were easier to control before the advent of television, which exposed them to "the secret playbook of the adult world," says Glenn Sparks, a professor of communication at Purdue University, citing a 1986 analysis by Joshua Meyrowitz in the book "No Sense of Place."
Before television, society was relatively well-defined by widely shared social boundaries, Meyrowitz argued. But when TV took hold in the 1950s, one of the medium's most profound effects was to break down those well-established boundaries.

The playbook was no longer effective.

"Orphan" screenwriter David Leslie Johnson says he loved the evil-child horror subgenre ever since he saw "The Bad Seed" — which did seem like a revelation in the mid-20th century.

"If you look at the other movies that were coming out at that time, it's like the movie came from outer space. There was nothing out there like it."

And it was so horrifying, that the filmmakers — forced somewhat by the Hollywood code that crime should never pay — gave it a deus ex machina ending so Rhoda doesn't get away with murder. (In the original book and Broadway play, she does.)

In many of these films, the father is absent or bamboozled by his precious prince or princess; it's left to the mother to come to the slow, horrifying realization about her offspring.

"Orphan" is similar: Vera Farmiga's character — troubled by alcoholism, a miscarriage and guilt over the near death of her deaf daughter — figures out there's something wrong with Esther. Peter Sarsgaard as the father doubts his wife because of her past unreliability and is quite taken in by his newly adopted child.

"There's just something really primal in that mother-child relationship," Johnson says, "so I felt like that was really the best relationship to exploit and corrupt, to take what should be the most natural bond in the world and turn them into enemies."

Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of film studies at North Carolina State University, has an explanation. Invoking "Rosemary's Baby," and the "Alien" franchise, she says: "In our culture, women in films are sexual or maternal. I wish we had moved beyond this dichotomy, but I can't say we have."

And then, Pramaggiore says, there's the "child as replica issue."

"They are born having inherited things from others and yet they are their own people," she says.

Johnson can relate to Pramaggiore's point. The screenwriter's wife is pregnant with their first child, and he's reading various books to prepare. The tomes impart a sense of mortality, he says, adding:

"It's a little bit of `Body Snatchers.' They look somewhat like you and even act a bit like you and eventually, they come to replace you."

Some time before 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), an enormous deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite near Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. The locals found that it was very useful for marking sheep. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could easily be sawn into sticks. This was and remains the only large scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form. Chemistry was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called plumbago (Latin for "lead ore"). The black core of pencils is still referred to as "lead," even though it never contained the element lead.

As well as simply being distinctive, the colour may have been inspired by the Austro-Hungarian flag; it was also suggestive of the Orient, at a time when the best-quality graphite came from Siberia. Other companies then copied the yellow colour so that their pencils would be associated with this high-quality brand, and chose brand names with explicit Oriental references, such as Mikado (renamed Mirado) and Mongol.

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BANGKOK – On her second trip to Asia as U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton is carrying a no-nonsense message about American intentions.
"The United States is back," she declared Tuesday upon arrival in the Thai capital.
By that she means the administration of President Barack Obama thinks it's time to show Asian nations that the United States is not distracted by its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and intends to broaden and deepen its partnerships in this region.
Clinton was trumpeting that line Wednesday in an appearance with a prominent TV personality before flying to a seaside resort at Phuket for two days of international meetings to discuss North Korea, Myanmar and a range of other regional issues.
Clinton says she would, as previously announced, sign ASEAN's seminal Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, a commitment to peacefully resolve regional disputes that has already been signed by more than a dozen countries outside the 10-nation bloc.
The U.S. signing will be by the executive authority of Obama and does not require congressional ratification, said a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the move publicly.
The administration of President George W. Bush had declined to sign the document; Obama sees it as a symbolic underscoring of the U.S. commitment to Asia.
On her arrival here Tuesday, Clinton reiterated Obama administration concerns that North Korea, already a threat to the U.S. and its neighbors with its history of illicit sales of missiles and nuclear technology, is now developing ties to Myanmar's military dictatorship.
Clinton held out the possibility of offering North Korea a new set of incentives to return to negotiating a dismantling of its nuclear program if it shows a "willingness to take a different path." But she admitted there is little immediate chance of that.
A Clinton aide said the United States and its allies are looking for a commitment by North Korea that would irreversibly end its nuclear weapons program. The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal U.S. government deliberations, said there is no sign that North Korea intends to make such a move, keeping the U.S. focus on enforcing expanded U.N. sanctions.
In her remarks about a possible Myanmar-North Korea connection, Clinton did not refer explicitly to a nuclear link but made clear that the ties are disconcerting.
"We know there are also growing concerns about military cooperation between North Korea and Burma which we take very seriously," she said at a news conference in the Thai capital.
"It would be destabilizing for the region, it would pose a direct threat to Burma's neighbors," she said, adding that as a treaty ally of Thailand, the United States takes the matter seriously.
Later, a senior administration official said that Washington is concerned about the possibility that North Korea could be cooperating with Myanmar on a nuclear weapons program, but he added that U.S. intelligence information on this is incomplete. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter.
The United States, in a joint effort with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, is attempting to use U.N. sanctions as leverage to compel North Korea to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. A major element of the international concern about North Korea is the prospect of nuclear proliferation, which could lead to a nuclear arms race in Asia and beyond.
Clinton spoke to reporters after meeting with Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva at the outset of a three-day visit to Thailand.
Clinton sharply criticized the military rulers of Myanmar for human rights abuses, "particularly violent actions that are attributed to the Burmese military concerning the mistreatment and abuse of young girls."
She said an Obama administration policy review on Myanmar is on hold pending the outcome of the trial of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is accused of violating the terms of her house arrest. The Noble Peace Prize laureate faces up to five years in prison if convicted, as expected.

In Washington, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to renew sanctions aimed at penalizing the the country's ruling junta. The resolution approving the reauthorization of the sanctions now goes to the Senate for consideration.

The resolution renews sanctions targeting imports from Myanmar and also maintains a ban on importing jade and other gems from Myanmar. The legislation was first enacted in 2003.