Bye Bye Bibi: Israel’s tough conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s held office for 12 years, is on the brink of being toppled by a former tech entrepreneur whose miniscule political party won only seven of the 120 seats in Parliament in recent elections. 

  After inconclusive elections, Naftali Bennett, 49, appears to be cobbling together a governing coalition that Netanyahu has been unable to put together. If Parliament ratifies the coalition in the next few days, Netanyahu is out.

  Bennett is reported to be even more right-wing than Netanyahu. He insists that there should never be a Palestinian state and that Israel should annex much of the occupied West Bank for settlements.

  Nevertheless, he has put together an odd coalition of eight political parties including social democrats, greens, and an Islamic party. David Leonhardt writes in The NY Times that, “It would be akin to Mitch McConnell abandoning Donald Trump to work with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chuck Schumer — and Ocasio-Cortez and Schumer saying yes.”

  Netanyahu described it as a “dangerous left-wing government.”

  Bennett, is a former ally of Netanyahu who entered parliament eight years ago and is largely unknown to world leaders. He is the independently wealthy son of American immigrants.

  Under the coalition agreement, if the government lasts a whole term, it would then be led from 2023 to 2025 by Yair Lapid, a centrist former television host popular among secular Israelis.

Shot and a Beer: President Biden is putting on a big push to get the rest of the country vaccinated against Covid-19. He declared June a “National Month of Action.”

  So far about 170 million Americans have been vaccinated, including about 52 percent of the adult population. The government is shooting for 70 percent.

  The President yesterday touted programs and rewards offered to get people to accept a shot. The NBA, NHL, and NASCAR are offering vaccines outside their arenas. Major League Baseball will be offering free tickets. Biden said, “And to top it off, Anheuser-Busch announced that beer is on them on July the 4th. That’s right, get a shot and have a beer.”

 Sport of Kings: Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit faces possible disqualification after confirmation of the horse’s positive drug test. It would be only the second horse in the 147-year history of the race to be disqualified for a failed drug test.

 The test confirmed a prohibited level of the drug betamethasone that is injected into joints to reduce pain and swelling. 

  Medina Spirit’s trainer Bob Baffert, a seven-time Derby winner, has already been banned from Churchill Downs and its related race tracks for two years, leaving him and his horses on the sidelines for 2022 and 2023.

 Bill Carstanjen, chief executive of Churchill Downs, said yesterday, “Mr. Baffert’s record of testing failures threatens public confidence in thoroughbred racing and the reputation of the Kentucky Derby.”

Listening In: The Justice Department under President Trump secretly seized the phone records of four NY Times reporters spanning four months in 2017 as part of a leak investigation, the Biden administration disclosed yesterday.

  It was the latest in a series of revelations about the Trump administration secretly obtaining reporters’ records in an effort to discover their sources. Last month, the Biden Justice Department disclosed that the Trump Justice Department also seized phone logs of reporters who work for The Washington Post and the phone and email logs for a CNN reporter.

Slam Dunk: Duke University’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, the all-time winningest coach in men’s Division I college ball, announced he’s retiring at the end of next season. “Coach K,” as he is known, has led his teams to five national championships in 41 seasons and won 1,170 games. 

The Spin Rack: A 12-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl who had escaped from a Florida juvenile home and broke into a house got into a shootout with Volusa County sheriff deputies. The kids had found a shotgun and an AK-47 in the house. The girl was wounded and reported to be fighting for her life. — A Tampa man who carried a Trump flag into the well of the Senate during the January 6^thinsurrection has pleaded guilty to one felony count of storming the Capitol to obstruct Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election. Paul Allard Hodgkins, 38, did not enter a cooperation deal with prosecutors and faces a possible prison sentence of 15 to 21 months. — The Russian cyber-attack group blamed for a ransomware attack on the country’s largest meat producer is known as “Pinchy Spider.”

Offline and Unhinged: Donald Trump’s new website that he used to spout his claims of election fraud has been abruptly shut down after less than a month in operation. Jason Miller, a senior aide to Trump, said the site “will not be returning” and “It was just auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on.”

  The NY Times reports that Trump is frustrated because the site was getting little traffic. He hates being ignored.

  The website called “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” was launched May 4^th, months after the former President had been banned from Facebook and Twitter. One his last posts was on Monday when Trump said, “Great work is being done in Georgia revealing the Election Fraud of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

  Trump just might think he won’t need a website because he’ll be back in the White House soon. NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted in reference to a QAnon conference in Dallas over the weekend that, “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information).”

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