Blog Heap of Links for the day 21 January 2016

A bomb attack has killed nine people including six police officers and injured 10 others near a road leading to the Egyptian pyramids in Cairo. …exploded as a team of officers raided an apartment in the suburb of Giza …building was booby-trapped and the device went off when they tried to defuse it. …blamed Thursday's blast in the Al-Haram district on the blacklisted Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement of ousted president Mohamed Morsi…

…Kim Koerber, a former Pearson executive who now works as a sales consultant for National Geographic – another Gates Foundation-funded Common Core publisher – tells the Project Veritas undercover journalist that “conservative voters are afraid of everything,” and proceeds to say why Common Core is important in her view.

She explains that those behind Common Core and the new AP U.S. History framework have attempted to minimize the Constitution and remove Christianity from the core concepts, while they also stress the importance of teaching about Islam… “People who say they want to teach the Constitution, only want to teach the part of the Constitution that they like,” she tells the journalist, who then asks her about the Second Amendment.

“But yet they don’t want to teach all of it,” she replies. “Damn the Second Amendment.”…

Federal employees with the Park Service brag about how they swindled two World War II veterans off the land for pennies on the dollar. And they all get a good laugh over it. …

’13 Hours’ Heroes Are Right Up Front, But We Are Meant to Notice the Shadow Characters. And there are plenty of shadow characters. If you don’t want to know who they are, kindly avert your eyes. There be spoilers. …

…Some 10,000 years ago a woman in the last stages of pregnancy met a terrible death, trussed like a captive animal and dumped into shallow water at the edge of a Kenyan lagoon. She died with at least 27 members of her tribe, all equally brutally murdered, in the earliest evidence of warfare between stone age hunter-gatherers.

The fossilised remains of the victims, still lying where they fell, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years ago, were found by a team of scientists from Cambridge University.…

A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon jet crashed over northwestern Arizona on Thursday morning. The condition of the pilot was not immediately known. …

Austria has decided to impose stringent border controls at the Spielfeld crossing from Slovenia, where would-be migrants will be thoroughly vetted and searched. It will also set a cap on the number of “refugees” that will be allowed into the country. However, Doctors Without Borders is critical of the EU’s tougher policing and attempts to deter migrants, saying that a better approach would be to expand legal immigration into Europe.

In other news, satellite imagery confirms that St Elijah’s Monastery, the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq, has been turned into rubble by the Islamic State.…

Your handy, dandy Trump vs. Cruz comparison chart! Presented without comment for your consideration. …

…Glenn Beck seeing his influence -yet again- limited to a very narrow audience, has begun to lash out in every direction. Hence, he’s going back to a traditional track record of highly unstable behavior.

Unfortunately for Ted Cruz, the Senator and presidential candidate has enmeshed himself with Beck to such a degree there is no way to escape him. …

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) reacted to the recent attacks from his Republican presidential opponent Donald Trump yesterday in an interview with talk radio host Mark Levin.

“I’m not going to respond in kind I am not going to attack Donald personally, I like him, I respect him, and I’m not going into the mud with personal insults and attacks.…