Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Tuesday it has launched a four-month program in Israel to help startups grow globally using its experts and tools.
The Google Startup Growth Lab Programme has picked eight companies, after a pilot was completed in 2018.
“This is a program for startups that are beginning their growth period or have growth challenges,” Lior Noy, startup growth lead at Google, told Reuters.
The format, which provides industry insights to achieve growth in various geographies, is a first for Google, he added.
The eight firms include Guesty, a platform for short-term property management, and DayTwo, which provides personalized nutrition insights based on intestinal bacteria.

The tzibbur is asked to please be mispallel for Yehoshua Matisyahu ben Menucha Mina, a bochur in Lakewood who a struck by a vehicle in a hit and run and is now in critical condition.
May we hear besuros tovos.
{Matzav.com}

A French widower with no children left about $14.5 million to the state of Israel to assist families who lost loved ones serving in the military or to terrorism.
Nicolas Bauman died in 2009; most of the inheritance was transferred to Israel last week, Keren Kayemet L’Israel-Jewish National Fund announced on the eve of Yom Hazikaron, or Israel’s Memorial Day.
The fund for bereaved families established in Bauman’s will will operate for 10 years under the trustee management of the Ministry of Justice Administrator General and KKL-JNF.
Read more at Arutz Sheva.
{Matzav.com}

Last March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research vessel Ronald H. Brown was knocking around the waves in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when the crew spotted a surprise on the horizon.
It was bright orange and barrel-shaped, 10 feet long and seven feet wide, its sides splashed with stickers featuring French companies and organizations. Neither engine nor sail steered the object’s course. Rather, the barrel was completely at the mercy of the tossing ocean current, which very slowly was pushing it west.

Iran accused the United States on Tuesday of “psychological warfare” with the United States announcing on Sunday that it is sending an aircraft strike group to the Middle East amid “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Tehran.
Semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Tuesday that a spokesperson for Iran’s supreme national security council, Keyvan Khosravi, said “Bolton’s statement is a clumsy use of a burnt-out happening for psychological warfare.”

Rav Yosef Dov (Yoshe Ber) Soloveitchik of Brisk, the Beis Halevi, father of Rav Chaim Solevetchik. Yosef Dov (1820-1892) was born in Nisvizh, near Minsk, to Reb Yitzchak Zev Soloveitchik. Rav Yitzchak Zev was a grandson through his mother of Rav Chaim of Volozhin. Although Reb Yitzchak Zev was not a Rav he was known as a baki in Shas and Shulchan Aruch. By the time Yosef Dov was ten he knew Mesechtas Bava Kama, Bava Metzia, Bava Basra, Brachos, Gittin and Kiddushin by heart and was already writing his own chiddushim. When he was 11 his father brought him to Volozhin to learn under his uncle, Rav Itzeleh, the Rosh Yeshiva and son of Rav Chaim of Volozhin. After his marriage, his father-in-law supported him for thirteen years.

Russia called on European signatories to abide by the 2015 Iran nuclear deal hours after Tehran threatened to step up enrichment activity in reaction to world powers not upholding their part of the agreement.
After Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani notified the remaining signatories to the deal about Tehran’s plans to stop respecting the terms of the deal, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow.
“We will call on them, as we have done before, to concentrate on implementing everything that is enshrined in the JCPOA and approved by the UN Security Council,” Lavrov said in a joint press conference with Zarif on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Memorial Day Ceremony on Wednesday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spurned the possibility of Iran’s obtaining nuclear weapons following the announcement by the Islamic Republic just a few hours earlier that it would roll back some of its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal.
“This morning, on my way here, I heard that Iran intends to continue its nuclear program and we will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu declared at the ceremony for fallen soldiers, terror victims at Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem.
“The events of the past few days clearly demonstrate what our struggle is about, the attempt of those who seek to destroy our country, uproot us from our land,” he postured.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued Tuesday that President Donald Trump is trying to provoke Democrats into proceeding with impeachment, using some of her strongest language yet on the issue.
“Trump is goading us to impeach him,” she said at an event in New York City hosted by the Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs. “That’s what he’s doing. Every single day, he’s just like taunting, taunting, taunting because he knows that it would be very divisive in the country, but he doesn’t really care. He just wants to solidify his base.”