The President of the State, Reuven Rivlin, met today with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the President’s Residence. At the end of their meeting, the President accepted the Prime Minister’s request and granted him a two-week extension to the period of forming the government.
In the extension document, the President wrote: “After you presented me with the need to extend the period for the completion of the process of assembling the government, at your request, under section 8 of the Basic Law: The Government, I hereby extend the period allotted to you to fulfill the task of forming the government by fourteen days.”

Likud MK Michal Shir slammed US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Sunday, saying that “Arabs gave nothing to post-Holocaust Jews except wars and death.”
The MK was responding to comments Tlaib had made, saying she was happy that her Palestinian ancestors provided a “safe haven for Jews” after the Holocaust.
Suggesting that the US congresswoman should “open a history book once in a while,” Shir said Jews arriving in Israel had to face “repeated terror and rejection from the Arabs” and “had no choice but to defend themselves.” She also suggested Tlaib “thank the IDF” for protecting Muslim Israeli citizens from Hamas, ISIS, and Islamic Jihad “who are only waiting for a chance to put their hands on them.”

It is with great sadness that Matzav.com reports the petirah of Rafael Shmuel ben Fraydel Miriam, the young boy whose health struggles caught the attention and tugged at the heart of the entire Klal Yisrael.
Rafael Shmuel was born with his intestines outside of his body and required surgeries immediately after birth. Miraculously, Rafael Shmuel survived and spent several year being cherished by his family.
Unfortunately, Rafael Shmuel’s condition required correction through more surgeries and he returned to surgery last week accompanied by the tefillos of Klal Yisrael.

Google announced on Tuesday the eight startups selected for the first official cohort of its Tel Aviv accelerator program Google Startup Growth Lab. During the four-month program, startup executives will meet with experts from Google to receive training and support for scaling up and expanding to global markets.

Charmaine Yoest says President Trump declaring the opioid epidemic as a crisis set the tone for his administration.
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The Defense Department will reprogram an additional $1.5 billion originally designated for other U.S. military projects to help fund President Donald Trump’s border wall, acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan said Friday, a move immediately decried by Democrats as a way of side-stepping congressional oversight.
The reprogramming comes in addition to $1 billion the Pentagon pulled out of Army manpower accounts in March that allowed the administration to build another 80 miles of wall on the southern border.

Rav Yerachmiel Rabinowitz of Peshischa (1831)
Rav Moshe Mordechai Twersky of Trisk (1943)

Illinois Democrat Rep. Sean Casten weighs in on Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed plan to cap credit card interest rates.
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Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said Tuesday that senior White House advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were “an influence that has to be dealt with.”
Kelly, who was brought in to bring order to the West Wing and served for about 18 months before stepping down late last year, reportedly butted heads with the president’s daughter and son-in-law.
“Was it complicated to have the president’s family in the government at the time?” David Rubenstein of Bloomberg TV’s The David Rubenstein Show asked Kelly at the SALT Conference in Las Vegas.

Former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot warned US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy about the situation in the West Bank being “volatile and sensitive” ahead of the release of Washington’s peace plan, Channel 13 reported on Sunday.
Eisenkot reportedly met with Jason Greenblatt in the White House last week along with experts on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“The situation in the West Bank is sensitive and volatile,” Eisenkot reportedly told Greenblatt who has worked on the Middle East peace plan for nearly two years alongside Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.