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Other People’s Wars, was released yesterday and investigates New Zealand’s role in the “war on terror”.

The book claims that after the September 11 attacks, the Security Intelligence Service aligned its focus with US interests, concentrating on people like Ahmed Zaoui while oblivious to the Mossad operation.

Elisha Cara and Uriel Kelman were trying to obtain false passports, which Mossad agents have used to enter other countries and carry out missions, including assassinations.

Mr Hager’s book says the Mossad mission was exactly what the SIS should have been investigating, but it was uncovered by an immigration official in 2004.

The Government at the time won a secret settlement, according to Mr Hager’s sources.

“The most important part of the settlement was that the Israeli Government had returned several illegally obtained passports that had been obtained by Cara and his colleagues,” the book says.

In a Category 4 torrent of official communications during the approach and aftermath of Hurricane Irene, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has repeatedly used the phrase “federal family” when describing the Obama administration’s response to the storm.

The Obama administration didn’t invent the phrase but has taken it to new heights.

“Under the direction of President Obama and Secretary Janet Napolitano, the entire federal family is leaning forward to support our state, tribal and territorial partners along the East Coast,” a FEMA news release declared Friday as Irene churned toward landfall.

The G-word — “government” — has been nearly banished, with FEMA instead referring to federal, state and local “partners” as well as “offices” and “personnel.”

“’Government’ is such a dirty word right now,” says Florida State University communication professor Davis Houck. “Part of what the federal government does and any elected official does is change the terms of the language game into terms that are favorable to them.”

“Family” can evoke favorable thoughts of motherhood and security. But it can also conjure images of Big Brother and organized crime.

According to the book, military decisions are often made without reference to the wishes of the elected government. “People assume that politicians make decisions, but often they’re busy, ill-informed or actively excluded.…The worst decisions were made by senior officials and military officers, often without [the ministers’] knowledge.”—senior NZ government official.

A legal notice sent to all internet providers (ISPs) by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, seen by the Guardian, orders the ISPs to inform authorities if any of their customers are using virtual private networks (VPNs) to browse the web.

Virtual private networks allow internet users to connect to the web undetected, meaning that they can access banned websites and send emails without fear of government interception.

We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom has just been released by the Missouri-based publisher Really Big Coloring Books, which says it is “designed to be a tool that parents can use to help teach children about the facts surrounding 9/11”. Showing scenes from 9/11 for children to colour in and telling the story of the attacks and the subsequent hunt for Osama bin Laden, “the book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth”, according to its publisher, which says that it has sold out of its first print run of 10,000 copies.

Before it returned four days later, the plane also touched down in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates and Ireland. As these unusual flights happened, U.S. officials took custody of an Indonesian terrorist, Riduan Isamuddin, who had been captured in Thailand and would spend the next three years being shuttled among secret prisons operated by the CIA.

The Gulfstream IV’s itinerary, as well as the $339,228.05 price tag for the journey, are among the details of shadowy CIA flights that have emerged in a small Upstate New York courthouse in a billing dispute between contractors. The court documents offer a rare glimpse of the costs and operations of the controversial rendition program.

For all the secrecy that once surrounded the CIA’s program, a significant part of its operation was entrusted to very small aviation companies whose previous experience involved flying sports teams across the country.

The August 2003 flights — and dozens of others to locations such as Bucharest, Romania; Baku, Azerbaijan; Cairo; Djibouti; Islamabad, Pakistan; and Tripoli, Libya — were organized by Sportsflight, a one-man aircraft brokerage business on Long Island. It secured a plane from Richmor Aviation, based near the Columbia County Airport in Hudson, N.Y. Richmor eventually sued Sportsflight for breach of contract. In the process, the costs and itineraries of numerous CIA flights became part of the court record.

In other cases, the government has invoked the “state secrets” privilege to shut down litigation over the CIA program, but the case in Columbia County proceeded uninterrupted in an almost empty courtroom. There were only two witnesses at the bench trial: Richmor President Mahlon Richards and the owner of Sportsflight, Donald Moss.

That dream has now received a boost after researchers used a powerful laser to produce water droplets in the air, a step that could ultimately help trigger rainfall.

While nothing can produce a downpour from dry air, the technique, called laser-assisted water condensation, might allow some control over where and when rain falls if the atmosphere is sufficiently humid.

Researchers demonstrated the technique in field tests after hauling a mobile laser laboratory the size of a small garage to the banks of the Rhône near lake Geneva in Switzerland.

Records from 133 hours of firings revealed that intense pulses of laser light created nitric acid particles in the air that behaved like atmospheric glue, binding water molecules together into droplets and preventing them from re-evaporating.

Within seconds, these grew into stable drops a few thousandths of a millimetre in diameter: too small to fall as rain, but large enough to encourage the scientists to press on with the work.

“We have not yet generated raindrops – they are too small and too light to fall as rain. To get rain, we will need particles a hundred times the size, so they are heavy enough to fall,” said Jérôme Kasparian, a physicist at the University of Geneva. A report on the tests appears in the journal Nature Communications.

With improvements, shooting lasers into the sky could either help trigger or prevent showers. One possibility might be to create water droplets in air masses drifting towards mountains. The air would cool as it rose over these, causing the water droplets to grow and eventually fall.

An alternative might be to stave off an immediate downpour by creating so many tiny droplets in the air that none grew large enough to fall. “Maybe one day this could be a way to attenuate the monsoon or reduce flooding in certain areas,” Kasparian said.

But today, Hexi Baoyin and pals at Tsinghua University in Beijing offer a different take. The question they ask is how to place an asteroid in orbit around the Earth.

Their conclusion is a little surprising. They say it’s relatively straightforward to nudge a small asteroid in our direction. They’ve even discovered a number of candidates nearby that we might want to bring as little closer.

…

A particularly good candidate is a 10-meter object called 2008EA9 which will pass within a million kilometres or so of Earth in 2049. 2008EA9 has a very similar orbital velocity as Earth’s. Baoyin and co calculate that it could be fired into Earth orbit by changing its velocity by 410 metres per second. That’s tiny.