As part of an ongoing effort to protect life on the sea floor, several US Navy Warships were sunk today off the coasts of North Korea.

The US Chief of Naval Operations, Submarine Warfare division said that as part of its committment to wildlife preservation and conservation, the US Armed Forces had sunk several of its ballistic missile submarines in the East Sea, just off the continental shelf, and that several of its attack submarines were positioned and sunk somewhere in the Yellow Sea.

when in the course of building out the network, it becomes necessary for the network peers to disconnect from the permanent virtual circuits which have wired them together, and to assume among the inter-networked networks of the galaxy, the peer to peer networks to which the laws of exponential growth and bandwidth management entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of the users requires that they should declare the optimizations which impel them to the network reorganization and network usage paradigm shift.

 
we hold these tweets to be self-evident, that all packets are created equal, that they are endowed by the network administrator with certain permissions, that among these are timely packet propagation, hospitable peering arrangements and the pursuit of high bandwidth. -- that to secure these performance characteristics, protocols are instituted among the networks, deriving their performance from the consent of the users, -- that whenever any form of network protocol becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the users to alter or abolish it, and to install new client software, laying their requirements on such principles and organizing their network permissions in such a form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect continued utility of the network.

prudence, indeed, will dictate that liscense agreement models long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that the users are more disposed to suffer, while low bandwidth and spam are sufferable, than to right themselves by uninstalling the client software to which they are accustomed.

but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same monolithic design principles evince a client-server design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such abominations, and to provide client software for their future security. - such has been the patient sufference of these network users; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of network organization.

the history of the present application layer regime is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the network. to prove this, let facts be submitted to the network's users.

administrators have refused their assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the good of the network.

boards of directors have forbidden their administrators to implement liscense agreements of immediate and pressing importance, unless black hat operations have suspended their network access till their network policies should be changed; and when such denial of service is effected, they have utterly neglected to attend to the causes.

board chairs have refused to implement other peering arrangements for the accomodation of large groups of peer to peer software users, unless those users would relinquish the right of free exchange of digital media, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

board members have called together legal teams at places exotic, luxurious and distant from the depository of their liscense agreements, for the sole purpose of fatiguing the users into compliance with their measures.

network operators have sued the users repeatedly, for opposing with firmness their invasions on the rights of the network users.

they have refused for a long time, after such lawsuits, to acknowledge the repeated failure of their subpoenas to correctly identify the targets of their network probes; whereby blameless family members of network users have been exposed to great financial peril, the dangers of search and seizure from without,  and attendant convulsions from within.

they have endeavoured to prevent the growth of peer to peer client software, for the purpose of obstructing the population of the network from transending boundaries and borders, and raising the conditions of the license agreements of the internet service providers.

they have obstructed the administration of justice, by appealing with superior financial and legal means to the judiciary.

they have erected a multitude of mutually incompatible instant messaging software, and sent hither swarms of bots to harrass our users and eat out their bandwidth.

they have kept among us, in times of peace, internet explorer without the consent of the users and their elected governments, and affected network cohesiveness with pernicious browser insecurity.

they have affected to render the military networks independent of and superior in bandwidth to the civilian networks.

they have partially and inconsistently implemented the hypertext transport protocol and the hypertext markup language, and kept the ecma at arms length, thus frustrating the efforts of our front end designers.

they have combined with each other and with the riaa to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our purposes and unacknowledged by our black hats; giving their assent to their acts of frivilous lawsuits.

they have quartered large bodies of lawyers, bot herders and spammers among us:

for shaping our bandwidth with all parts of the world:

for imposing network levies and connection fees on us without our consent:

for transporting lawyers beyond seas to try us for pretended offences.

they have plundered our browser cookies, ravaged our click through ratios, and burnt our usernames onto their cds, and destroyed the lives of our users.

at every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. a network administrator whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be a peer on the internetwork.

nor have we been wanting in attentions to our network bretherin. we have warned them from time to time of attempts by their administrators to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. we have reminded them of the circumstances of our peering arrangements and distribution of network bandwidth. we have appealed to the securities and exchange commission and the federal trade commission, and we have conjured them by the ties of our anti-trust legislation and competition laws to disavow such usurpurations, which, would inevitably interrupt our network connections and endanger the backward compatibility of our protocols.

they too have been rejecting our packets. we must therefore acquiese in the necessity, which denounces our application layer, to hold them, as we hold the rest of the administrators, rogues and hosts of bot networks and other vermin.

we therefore, the representatives of ourselves, in general assembled upon the network, appealing to the programmers of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do in the name, and by the authority of the good network administrators of these networks, solemnly publish and declare, that these application layers are, and of right, ought to be peer to peer designs; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the client-server protocols, and that all packet exchange between them and the rest of the network is and ought to be totally dissolved.

that as free and ad-hoc network aggregations, we have full power to exchange digital media, to levy fair prices for such goods and services, to commerce, black hat and white hat programmers, establish peering arrangements and do all other acts and things which independent network users may of right do.

and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of independently routable packets, the gnu license agreement and the electronic frontier foundation , we mutually pledge unrestricted shared bandwidth, cross-platform instant messaging, and free exchange of digital media.

Afghanistan is more than the place where Osama bin Laden might be hiding. It's a place that originates  enormous amounts of dope, every year.
 
Most of that dope comes in the form of opium, papaver somniferum, the sleep producing flower, valued the world over for its somniferous properties, its superlative narcotic effect, and the ease with which it may be converted into cold hard cash.
 
Some people refer to Afghanistan as a failed narco-state, but those people are wrong.

Afghanistan may be thought of as a flourishing, enormously successful narco-state.  It is estimated to produce in excess of ninety percent of the world's supply of opium. That much opium is worth billions of dollars every year, even before its conversion to morphine, codeine and heroin.
 
Thefore, the war in Afghanistan may be thought of as either the Third or Fourth Opium War, depending on whether you count the French, British and American wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s AD.

 You may remember that the First and Second Opium Wars were conducted in the South China Sea, fought between the subjects of the soverign of Great Britain and the armies of the Qing Dynasty of China during the mid-1800s AD.

Through the prism of history, Opium Wars I and II are seen to have started because the Qing Dynasty wished to limit the trade of Chinese slaves and dope, and the operators of the British Empire violently disagreed.

The disagreement resulted in the capture and occupation of the island of Hong Kong by the British, and the capitulation to the opium and human trade by the Chinese. The occupation of Hong Kong continued well  into the 20th century, though the legal trade of opium there became a murkier proposition.

The war in Afghanistan did not begin as an opium war, but it may well end there. For all the Taliban's excesses, they succeded in limiting the production of opium during their time in government, by promoting terror in the local population.

In contrast, the production of opium has increased every year since Osama bin Laden allegedly engineered the destruction of the World Trade Center, promoted terror in the local population, and caused the latest invasion of Afghanistan.

A 2007 Ispos-Reid survey in Canada suggests that eight in ten Canadians were likely to support the legalization of the opium trade in Afghanistan. Canada's Armed Forces already support the opium trade in Afghanistan, by looking the other way while the poppies grow.

Canada, you might recall is a renouned producer of dope, chiefly marijuana, valued the world over for its superlative psychoactive properties and the ease with which it may be converted into cold hard cash.

Yet no one considers Canada to be a failed narco-state, except perhaps those who operate the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

The Canadian forces in Afghanistan want to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans, all of them whether they are insurgents or not. And the Taliban want to win the hearts and minds of the Canadian public, whether they support the Canadian Armed Forces activities there or not.

Since support for the opium trade is one of the few uniting elements of this violent drama, there may yet be light at the end of this tunnel of death that is the Afghanistan quagmire.

Twenty-six thousand people have been arrested on fraud charges in connection to a debit card scheme at a local bank.

After receiving a tip in November 2008, Toronto investigators began surveillance at the bank, where the suspects were collecting personal data from victims, then manufacturing debit cards based on the data, said Det. Mush Stang, spokesperson for Durham police.

Twelve men and three women were identified as the masterminds of the scheme, which saw millions of Canadians bilked at bank machines, convenience stores and restaurants across the country.

At bail hearings for the fifteen principal accused, the additional twenty-six thousand were identified.

In January, police received information that the group was still engaging in fraud-related activities.

A warrant was executed at The Waterfront Ballroom in Vancouver, where police found and dismantled a debit card lab masquerading as an annual general meeting.

Thousands of debit cards, $8,740,000 cash and numerous safes were seized.

As the investigation continued, more suspects were identified.

Two of the suspects still at large were arrested Feb 25 in the Bahamas. Police seized several more safes from bank branches across the country. A warrant was then executed at Commerce Court in Toronto where billions in assets and cash was recovered.

Each of the accused faces several fraud-related charges stemming from the investigation dubbed "Project Money-Lender"