Bill Clinton to receive award at Presidential Conference

Former US president Bill Clinton will attend the Presidential Conference in Jerusalem in June and receive a special award, President Shimon Peres’s office announced Monday.

Clinton will receive the President’s Award from Peres on June 19 at the morning plenary session of the conference, entitled Leadership That Makes a Difference.

Other speakers at the session include Israeli newscaster and journalist Dana Weiss; Quartet Middle East envoy and former British prime minister Tony Blair; and the last president of the former Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev is known for having initiated “perestroika,” the process of reforms within the Communist Party that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

Earlier this month, noted British physicist Stephen Hawking canceled his scheduled participation in the Peres conference, announcing that he was boycotting it for political reasons.