Ready to declare independence, the soon-to-be government of Israel found itself at an impasse: the religious Zionist leader Rabbi Yehudah Leib Maimon refused to sign a declaration that did not mention God, while the leader of the more extreme socialists refused to sign a declaration that did. David Ben-Gurion solved the problem by introducing into the text the ambiguous phrase “the Rock of Israel.” Meir Soloveichik comments on this controversy, and its American equivalent:

According to the Lebanese government, the explosion in its capital city on Tuesday that left over 100 dead and many more injured or homeless was caused by the accidental detonation of some 2,750 of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer often used for making bombs. (Less than one-thousandth of that amount was used by Timothy McVeigh to destroy the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.) Previously, police have discovered Hizballah warehouses in London and Germany storing many tons of the same explosive. Hussein Ibish comments: