Twilight star Kristen Stewart has paid her respects to victims of the Holocaust on a visit to Berlin.

The actress, 20, was accompanied by minders as she walked around the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Comprising nearly 3000 white concrete blocks, the memorial opened in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust.

Ms Stewart was in the German capital to promote the latest outing in the Twilight saga, Eclipse.

The film, in which the actress plays a teenager in love with brooding vampire Edward Cullen, opens in British cinemas on July 9.

Relations between Germany and Israel have been threatened following revelations that an alleged Mossad agent fraudulently applied for a German passport with a story of Nazi persecution.

Uri Brodsky, an Israeli suspected of involvement in the killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai, is said to have helped a Mossad agent obtain illegal German documentation through the use of false papers and a concocted story.

Mr Brodsky has been arrested in Warsaw on a Europe-wide arrest warrant issued by the German federal authorities and is awaiting extradition to Germany.

An anti-Israel display in Cologne, which features a cartoon of an Israeli eating a Palestinian child, does not incite racial hatred, the public prosecutor has ruled.

The image is part of a longstanding display put up in Cologne’s Cathedral Square by Walter Herrmann, named the “Wailing Wall”.

The display has now been removed from the square but Mr Herrmann has posted a sign that he plans to remount the “Wailing Wall” in June.

Many of the town’s councillors have appealed for the exhibition to be taken down.

Israeli president Shimon Peres has delivered a historic speech to the German Parliament for Holocaust Memorial Day.

Mr Peres visited Berlin to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

His visit has been tightly protected, with 3,000 German police officers on duty and road blocks in the centre of the German capital.

I stand here before you, as the President of the State of Israel, the home of the Jewish People.

While my heart is breaking at the memory of the atrocious past – my eyes envision a common future for a world that is young, a world free of all hatred.

A world in which the words "war" and "anti-Semitism" will be dead words.

In the Jewish tradition that accompanies us for thousands of years, there exists a prayer in Aramaic recited when mourning the dead, in memory of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters.

The Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, has given her backing to a new inquest into the suspicious death of Jewish student Jeremiah Duggan after years of campaigning by his family.

Mr Duggan, 22, was found dead on a highway near Wiesbaden, Germany in March 2003, while attending a youth event organised by the far-right LaRouche group.

The German police ruled his death a suicide but a British coroner rejected the verdict in November 2003 after the London Metropolitan Police testified that the LaRouche movement was a “political cult with sinister and dangerous connections”.