Blog Heap of Links for the day 20 January 2016

Security forces have ended a gun and bomb attack on a university in north-west Pakistan in which 19 people were killed and 17 injured. Four suspected attackers also died in a battle that lasted nearly three hours at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda. …

The Isis jihadist group has completely destroyed a 1,400-year-old Christian monastery in Iraq, the oldest of its kind in the country.

Satellite images released on Wednesday by the Associated Press showed just a pile of rubble where St Elijah's Monastery used to stand on a hill above Mosul, Isis's stronghold in Iraq.

The monastery had survived as a place of Christian worship for almost one-and-a-half millenia, predating Islam itself, and had only suffered superficial damage throughout the country's most recent conflicts.…

Ousted Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has a new Internet browser, and it’s nothing less than you’d expect from the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of the company behind FireFox.… aims to “fix the Web.” How? By blocking everything except the content you explicitly want. That means no ads, no cookies, nothing that you haven’t personally requested from the Internet.…

After five days without finding any survivors, the Coast Guard suspended its search for 12 Marines who were missing since Jan. 14 when their two CH-53 helicopters crashed off Oahu.…

A man in Sirte, the hometown of the late Libyan dictator Col. Moammar Qaddafi, was executed by the Islamic State for practicing black magic. According to a friend who managed to escape from Sirte, the man’s crime had been to treat patients with acupuncture and homeopathy.

In other news, Hillary Clinton has received the endorsement of the largest LGBT organization in the country in her run for president.…

…While Ted Cruz may be slippery on this issue or that — like most politicians — he is obviously and clearly a conservative. Unless you are willing to take Donald Trump at his word — and a great many are for reasons that baffle me — he’s not a conservative. Or if you think that’s too harsh, the case that he’s a conservative requires an enormous amount of subjective good will and credulousness. Even those who hate Ted Cruz readily concede he’s a conservative, because that’s an objective judgment. There’s nothing in the record that requires Trump’s critics to make the same concession.…

Bob Dole, who has endorsed Jeb Bush, has weighed in on the budding Ted Cruz v. Donald Trump contest in the early GOP primaries, and backed Trump in the strongest terms. According to the New York Times, Dole warned of “cataclysmic,” and “wholesale losses” if Cruz is nominated.…

Donald Trump said that Mr. Cruz’s scandals and judgement are “worse than Hillary, when you think about it.”…

I am sure there are a great many conservatives who were deeply disappointed with Sarah Palin’s screeching endorsement of Donald Trump yesterday. It was hard on the ears and harder on the heart. If anything, Palin and Trump made Mr. Cruz look more presidential.

I do question her motives, because Trump is many things, but he is not a conservative. He isn’t. And that was always Palin’s touchstone — true conservatism. Until now. …

Speaking at a campaign rally in the early voting state of New Hampshire, the real estate billionaire mogul and Republican frontrunner accused Cruz of hypocrisy and being bought and controlled by Wall Street.…

A new ad from the Anti-Trump Political Action Committee “Make America Awesome” warns voters that Donald Trump is a bad choice – citing his past political positions.…