News Brief

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to make a one-day visit to Israel. U.S. officials said Thursday that Gates would fly to Tel Aviv on April 18 for strategic discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, and leave the next day. Gates will be the first U.S. defense secretary to visit Israel in eight years.

Jerusalem hopes the trip will help put to rest a 2005 dispute caused by Israel’s sale of advanced weaponry to China.

The Vatican ambassador to Israel will not attend a Yom Hashoah ceremony at Yad Vashem because of the museum’s description of the wartime pope. Monsignor Antonio Franco said Thursday that his decision to boycott the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony on Sunday was due to a caption at the museum saying Pope Pius XII “recognized” the Nazi regime and made no statement or action against the Holocaust. “I don’t intend to go to Yad Vashem if things remain the way they do,” Franco said, according to The Associated Press. Yad Vashem officials said this would mark the first time a foreign emissary deliberately skipped the memorial service, the AP reported. Foreign ambassadors to Israel or their representatives attend the Yom Hashoah ceremony. “We are shocked and disappointed that the Vatican’s delegate to Israel has chosen not to respect the memory of the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem spokeswoman Iris Rosenberg said. The Vatican, which is in the process of beatifying Pius XII, has insisted that he quietly helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied Rome. Critics say that Pius, sympathetic to Germany from his stint there in the 1930s, turned a blind eye to the genocide, and censure the Vatican for keeping sealed papers related to his pontificate.