Month: October 2016

Enlarge (credit: Ulrich Baumgarten / Getty Images News)

The federal public defenders for Harold Martin, the former National Security Agency contractor accused of stealing a large amount of highly classified data and documents, asked the judge to release their client on bail in a late Thursday evening court filing.

Earlier on Thursday, prosecutors told US Magistrate Judge Beth P. Gesner that Martin is a flight risk and should be kept in custody. In their own filing, the government argued that Martin, who held top-secret clearance while he was a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton, is a flight risk. The feds noted that they would be seeking to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. (Martin was fired from his job and was stripped of his clearance once his criminal prosecution surfaced.)

In the three-page response, Martin’s lawyers, James Wyda and Deborah Boardman, argued that Martin “does not pose a serious risk of flight.” They note that in a slew of similar cases, including those that involved Gen. David Petraeus and former high-level NSA official Thomas Drake, the accused was not detained pending trial.

Enlarge / NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found the apparent crash site of the Schiaparelli lander. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS )

NASA's sharp-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found the site where Europe's Schiaparelli lander crashed into the red planet on Wednesday. The orbiting spacecraft's Context Camera compared images of the Meridiani Planum area near the equator; they were taken on May 29, 2016 and October 20, 2016. The camera found evidence of both the lander and its parachute.

In the image taken Thursday, a larger dark spot, estimated to measure about 15 by 40 meters, appears to show where the lander struck the surface and exposed darker ground below. Lending further credence to the likelihood of this being Schiaparelli's final resting place is that his site is located about 5.4km west of the center of the European Space Agency's intended landing target. The spacecraft's heat shield, jettisoned before landing, probably would not have made such a large impact. A smaller, bright spot near the lower edge of the enlarged image is likely the lander's parachute.

With the location of the crash landing now pinpointed, the NASA orbiter can aim its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (the most powerful camera ever sent beyond low-Earth orbit) to capture detailed images of the location. This could further help ESA understand the sequence of events that led to a loss of communication from the lander.

Enlarge / Watch out! This version of Big G has a huge mouth that opens into three jaws and shoots LASERS. (credit: Toho Studios)

Shin Godzilla came out in the States last week under the name Godzilla Resurgence, and it's the strangest Godzilla movie in a very long time. Not since Godzilla vs. Hedorah (aka the Smog Monster) have we seen such a relentlessly and bizarrely political film in this franchise. What's more, we've never seen a complete reboot of the entire series from Toho studios. Yet here we have both, plus a Godzilla monster who is totally unlike its predecessors (it evolves like Pokémon!). The best part is that this new movie works, giving us a whole new perspective on the Big G, along with a whopping dose of Japanese anxiety about the country's relationship with the US.

Like any respectable Godzilla movie, Shin Godzilla is divided between insane kaiju destruction that gets progressively more spectacular, and mundane human drama as Japan tries to protect its cities. The premise is that nobody has ever encountered a giant monster before, so the government is absolutely flummoxed when broiling hot steam starts erupting from the ocean off the coast. At first, the Prime Minister and his top officials dismiss it as some kind of natural disaster. Once an enormous tentacle (actually, the Big G's tail) rises out of the water and starts waving around, however, Japan's calcified bureaucracy begins to crack. Citizens are posting pictures of the monster on social media, and a young cabinet secretary named Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) is the only politician who is willing to stand up for the truth. There's a giant, unidentified biological organism on the prowl, and it's about to come ashore.

When Godzilla finally does hit the shoreline, there's a major shock in store for fans—the creature looks nothing like the terrifying toothface we have known. Instead it's a bloated, wiggly, bug-eyed beast who can't even walk upright. Sure, it's big enough to leave a considerable trail of destruction and radioactivity in its wake. But it looks almost like a joke version of the Big G, made even more unfamiliar by the use of CGI enhancements. What doesn't feel like a joke are all the scenes of coastal destruction and death as the nuclear-powered kaiju worms its way through the urban landscape. These are deliberate evocations of the Fukushima disaster, echoing a long tradition in Godzilla films of recreating nuclear horrors and other disasters that Japan has endured.

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