Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered that a new foot bridge providing access to the Temple Mount for non-Muslims be dismantled. From the Jerusalem Post:

The Prime Minister’s Office ordered the dismantling of a foot bridge under construction from the Western Wall Plaza to the Temple Mount to supplement the  Mughrabi Bridge, government officials confirmed Wednesday.
The officials said that the move came at the request of the Jordanian government. According to the officials, the PMO has ultimate jurisdiction – because of the sensitivity of the area – for the site.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear at a press conference on August 6 that he had no intention of altering the status quo on the Temple Mount, a highly sensitive issue in Jordan and throughout the Muslim world.
“I want to make sure that everyone understands that Israel respects and will continue to respect the status quo on the Temple Mount,” he said. “We know that there are arrangements there, including the traditional role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and we are not about to change it.”
One government official said that the new footbridge to the Mughrabi Gate was a private initiative taken “without any coordination with the PMO, or permission.”  He said that the Jordanians made it clear that any change in the area created problems for them and asked that it be dismantled.

The article continues here. According to the Times of Israel, dismantling work began yesterday.

Access to the Temple Mount will apparently continue to be allowed via the temporary wooden bridge erected in 2004.

A new study explains why some Herodian stones in the Temple Mount of Jerusalem are well preserved after 2,000 years while others are eroding severely, creating concerns about the wall’s stability.

From a press release from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem:

Visitors to the Western Wall in Jerusalem can see that some of its stones are extremely eroded. This is good news for people placing prayer notes in the wall’s cracks and crevices, but presents a problem for engineers concerned about the structure’s stability.
The Western Wall is a remnant of the ancient wall that surrounded the courtyard of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. It is located in Jerusalem’s Old City at the foot of the Temple Mount.
To calculate the erosion in the different kinds of limestone that make up the Western Wall, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem used a laser scan to create an accurate three-dimensional computer model. The researchers are Dr. Simon Emmanuel, the Harry P. Kaufmann Senior Lecturer in Environmental Water Technology, and PhD student Mrs. Yael Levenson, at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Earth Sciences.
As reported in an article accepted for publication in the journal Geology, they found that stones made up of relatively large crystals were resistant to wear, so that they were almost unchanged in the 2000 years since they were originally put in place. By contrast, limestone with very small crystals (about one thousandth of a millimeter in size) eroded far more quickly.
In some cases, extreme erosion rates in fine-grained micritic limestone blocks were up to 100 times faster than the average rates estimated for the coarse-grained limestone blocks. In some places these stones had receded by tens of centimeters, potentially weakening the overall structure. 
To understand what causes the two types of rock to behave differently, the researchers collected samples from ancient quarries thought to have supplied the stones for the Second Temple. Using a powerful atomic force microscope, they were able to see how the rocks disintegrated when they came into contact with water. During the experiments on rocks made up of small crystals, tiny particles rapidly detached from the surface of the rock. These experiments simulated the way in which rain water interacts with limestone in nature.
Observed for the first time in Dr Emmanuel’s lab, this process of accelerated erosion can explain why some rocks are more weathered than others. While mechanical weathering is thought to act on blocks and chips of rock at the visible outcrop scale, the researchers showed for the first time that chemo-mechanical erosion extends down to the tiny micron scale. The findings could have important implications for regional and global carbonate weathering.
According to Dr. Emmanuel, “Understanding such weathering processes could help guide the development of effective preservation techniques. For example, it may be possible to develop materials that slow the rate of erosion by binding the tiny crystals in the rock together. Advanced engineering techniques like this should assist efforts to protect not only the Western Wall, but other cultural heritage sites in Israel and around the world.”
The research appears as “Carbonate weathering rates accelerated by micron-scale grain detachment,” in the journal Geology. The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation.

The story is also reported by the Jerusalem Post.

Last week we noted an article about the Temple Mount Sifting Project by Ilan Ben Zion in The Times of Israel. If you have any interest in the subject, you’ll want to read today’s response by the director of the project, Zachi Dvira. He counters charges made by three critics interviewed by Ben Zion.
Israel Finkelstein has never even visited the excavation. Yonathan Mizrachi said that the sifting project “doesn’t have any archaeological value” after he failed to get a job at the worthless project!

The only interviewee that spoke to-the-point and  is worthy of a response is Professor Marwan Abu-Khalaf, who claimed that the area from which the earth was removed was an Ottoman dump, and questioned our ability to glean information from soil without clear stratification. In our published articles we’ve already addressed these issues, including the well-known fact that the Ottoman finds come from a local dump – this being a good thing, since dumps provide the richest archaeological data from periods with no destruction phases.

And then there’s this:

Ben Zion gives an account of the contents of the introductory presentation given to visitors at the Sifting Project, and reports that there was no mention of the “Islam or Arabs, and solely emphasized the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount”. This is completely false. The reporter listened only to the beginning of the presentation, and then left due to a phone call.

I suspect that the problem, besides a certain amount of journalistic incompetence, is the desire for a story that generates lots of clicks, and for that you need controversy, not truth. I’ll keep that in mind before I recommend articles by this author in the future.

Read Dvira’s full response here.

HT: Joseph Lauer