If you watch the Fox Network or Fox News, you may know who Rupert Murdoch is. Do you know anything about the person whose picture appears to the left?

You should. He is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. He owns 7% of Newscorp, the company that owns the Fox Network and Fox News. He is Newscorp's second largest stockholder; Murdoch, of course, is the largest.

Alwaleed is a prince in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. You've heard of Saudi Arabia, right? That's the country that was home to Osama bin Laden, and 15 of the 19 airline hijackers in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

The same Newscorp contributed one million dollars to the Republican Governors Association in June, 2010. The means that Murdoch and Alwaleed effectively own the Republican Party; this was the largest-ever contribution the Republican Governors Association. Click here to view an explanation by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Why, then, are we hearing so much from Fox News and the Republican Party about the Cordoba Center, the proposed community centre at the former location of the Burlington Coat Factory in Lower Manhattan?

I'll answer that question shortly, but I'll ask one more question first; what sort of values are taught by television programs on the Fox Network such as "The Family Guy" and "Lone Star"? Christian values? American values? Conservative values? Of course not. Republican values? If you're talking about South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, maybe. If you're talking about former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig or former Florida Rep. Mark Foley (to give just two examples), probably not.

Getting back to my previous question, you wouldn't expect Murdoch and Alwaleed to care about the First Amendment to the Constitution of the US. Murdoch is Australian, and Alwaleed is a prince in a country where religious freedom is literally a foreign concept.

Alwaleed, however, certainly cares whether you continue to fill your car's tank with gasoline made from oil from Saudi Arabia. So do lots of Republicans, including the Bush family.

Other than that, however, you can take this to the bank: Murdoch and Alwaleed don't care about you. Neither do any of their employees; Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Crowley, Palin, Hannity, you name them. The only thing these people care about is themselves. They worship money. If you worship something else, they are laughing at you behind your back.

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This article was published on Progressive Alaska, a blog that I read several times a week. The author is Philip Munger, an Alaskan (don't forget, they're our neighbours) musician. I'm giving it a shout-out because I agree strongly with the points he makes:

A Planet-Wide Explosion of Religious Nutcases - The Human Race, Facing Possible Extinction, Reaches for Help in All the Wrong Places

Key excerpt: "Where has our sanity gone?

"If all this nuttery was happening in some kind of vacuum it would be bad enough. But here we are, facing a serious global environmental catastrophe reaching the point of no return, and all our large-scale information inputs are consumed with jibberish not much more advanced than what Aztec priests must have uttered to justify tearing the hearts out of their trophy victims.

"Why isn't memeorandum linking to the outcry about misinformation on the BP Gulf disaster, instead of the mosque bullshit?

"Why aren't more media stories directed toward the acidification of the oceans, which is approaching the point of irreversibility?"

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Article by Bob Mackin: Olympic bus bickering.

Choice quote: "VANOC declines comment on the quality of Games time bus service except to note that the suggestion that the transportation system was an unqualified success is a superficial analysis without knowledge of all of the facts."

VANOC contracted out transportation management to a company on Orlando, FL. This job could easily have been done by local people. Instead of managing transportation for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Gameday Management was managing transportation for the 2010 Super Bowl one week before the Olympics started.

The day after this article by Mackin was published, VANOC CEO John Furlong received the Order of BC. It's time to start asking who received kickbacks from Gameday Management.

Another story by Jeff Lee in the Vancouver Sun: U.S. bus companies claim Vanoc owes millions of dollars

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1. This mosque is not at Ground Zero. It is two blocks away.

2. This project, officially known as the Cordoba Initiative, is a lot more than a mosque. It will be 13 stories, and includes a performance-art center, a gym, and a swimming pool.

3. The person behind the Cordoba Initiative is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is the founder of the American Society for Muslim Advancement. He is the Imam of a mosque in Manhattan that is 12 blocks away from Ground Zero. The stated objective of the American Society for Muslim Advancement is to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together through programs in academia, policy, current affairs and culture.

4. Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, is Jewish and Republican, and he has no problem with this project. So why do you have a problem with it?

5. Iman Feisal has as much right to put up a religious centre on Manhattan as you have to put one of your churches in my neighborhood. If you have a problem with this concept, take it up with little Mormon boy Glenn Beck.

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Here is an account of several International Day Against Stoning events: Worldwide Protests in Support of Sakine Mohammadi Ashtiani and Against Stoning and Execution.

Mission Free Iran has made an entirely reasonable request to the United Nations: Stoning, Rape and Execution of Women is Bad Gender Policy; It is Time to Remove the Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women

Op-ed piece by Irwin Cotler, published in the Vancouver Sun: Iran is more than just a nuclear threat. Cotler is a former minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada. He makes a very strong case for an end to enabling the behavior of the Ahmadinejad regime.

Pakistan (allies of the U.S. and Canada in the war in Afghanistan) has sentenced a man and woman to death by stoning for adultery. Here's a story by Saeed Shah in The Guardian: Pakistani couple face death by stoning threat after conviction for adultery.

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I learned a couple of days ago that Sunday, July 11, is the International Day Against Stoning, and protests against this barbaric practice are taking place in at least Washington, DC, Beverly Hills, CA, London, and Sydney, Australia.

The obvious question that this raises for me is, why is it that in the Twenty-First Century, we have a need for such a thing as an "International Day Against Stoning"? Throwing rocks at human beings to put them to death, for "crimes" such as "illicit relations", is something that I learned about in Sunday School. It gave rise to one of Jesus' best known quotes, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

This was two thousand years ago. The creatures who don't have any problem with casting the first, second, or third stones now live in Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, and Nigeria.

I'll write about Pakistan first. I've recently read two books by Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools. I recommend both of them highly, especially Three Cups of Tea, but if you don't have time to read a book, you can watch this video of an interview of Mortenson by Bill Moyers of PBS. Mortenson's low-cost efforts to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan have done far more good than the billions of dollars spent on bombs in that part of the world.

Now, about Iran. In Bill Maher's film "Religulous", Maher points out, near the end when he's summing up, that religious fanatics are making the world a dangerous place, and it's time for us to stop enabling their behaviour. (If you're a religious fanatic, and you're reading this, it's you I'm talking about.) (Click here to watch "Religulous" in its entirety, but the good part is the last ten minutes.)

If you've been paying any attention at all to events in Iran over the past 30 years, you know that the country is governed by religious fanatics who call themselves Shiite Muslims. You know that Iran has a president who denies that the Holocaust happened. He went to New York City and claimed that there are no Gays among Iran's 74 million people. He wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons, but keeps lying about it.

Now, who is enabling Ahmadinejad's behaviour? Two people who are doing it are Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, and Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua. So, if you consider Chavez and Ortega to be friends of yours, it's time to find yourself some new friends.

One-half of Iran's government revenue (remember, this article is about the goverment of Iran that stones people for "illicit relations") comes from oil exports. These exports go to Japan, China, India, South Korea, Italy, Spain, Greece, France, and South Africa. If you drive a car, or ride a bus or plane in any of these countries, you're enabling the behaviour of the Iranian government.

If you live elsewhere, you can show your support for the International Day Against Stoning by placing a rock in a public place.

Story by Daphne Bramham in the Vancouver Sun: Public stoning the most repulsive form of capital punishment

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An old friend of mine died of cancer a couple of months ago, at the age of 57. Gail smoked Tareyton 100's for much of her adult life. She underwent chemotherapy a couple of years ago, and started smoking again when the treatments were complete. She wanted to live long enough to see her daughter graduate from medical school, and came up a couple of years short.

This tragic story will be repeated 5.4 million times this year.

In 1980, Terry Fox started a run across Canada to raise awareness about cancer. His effort was completed in 1985 by Steve Fonyo. Over $500 million has been raised for cancer research in Fox's name.

No research whatsoever was necessary to determine the cause of Gail's death, and we've all heard the saying, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Another old friend of mine, Errol Povah, is following in the steps of Fox and Fonyo to raise awareness about prevention.

Errol started the Journey for a Tobacco-Free World on World No Tobacco Day, May 31, 2010, in Victoria, BC. His plan is to run and walk at least as far as Montreal, where the Canadian branch of British American Tobacco has its corporate office. If time permits, he will continue to New York, the headquarters of Philip Morris International.

Errol is doing this to promote what is, for most people, a new idea: the same criteria that was applied to thalidomide and DDT should also be applied to cigarettes. The manufacture and sale of cigarettes should be banned, worldwide. And no, Errol did not come up with this idea as a response to those who say, “if cigarettes are so bad, why doesn't the government just outlaw them?”

The comparison to DDT is especially useful, because it was manufactured and exported by the US until 1985, 13 years after most uses of it were banned in the US. The effort by anti-tobacco activists to de-normalize cigarettes has been successful in most of Canada and the US, but on a global scale, tobacco consumption is increasing, and tobacco production has increased by nearly 30% in China over the past ten years. Unfortunately, Errol was unable to arrange to make his journey across China instead of Canada. Maybe next year, but for now, Errol is making an important point; those of us fortunate to live in Canada or the US can take a plane flight or eat a meal in a restaurant without having someone else's cigarette in our faces, and the tobacco industry's lobbyists (with the notable exception of Barbara McDougall) are no longer very welcome in Ottawa and Victoria. There are people in other parts of the world that are not so fortunate. Within the past three years, I have personally seen a seven-year old boy selling cigarettes in Nicaragua.

I met up with Errol on June 9, about 15 km. beyond Hope. That's an old joke; other than some predictable blisters on his feet, Errol is doing fine. If all goes well, he should arrive in Merritt, BC on June 11, and Kamloops, BC on June 13.

One more thing; you can help send me to Netroots Nation in Las Vegas at the end of July; click here, then click “click here to voice your support...”.

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