gun

The government in Havana has claimed that the 10 people on board the speedboat had planned to unleash terrorism in Cuba.

The government of Cuba has announced that a fifth person died as a consequence of a fatal shootout last month involving a Florida-flagged speedboat that allegedly opened fire on soldiers off the island nation’s north coast.

The island’s Ministry of Interior said late on Thursday in a statement that Roberto Alvarez Avila died on March 4 as a result of his injuries.

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It added that the remaining injured detainees “continue to receive specialised medical care according to their health status”.

On February 26, authorities in Cuba said that Cuban soldiers confronted a speedboat carrying 10 people as the vessel approached the island and opened fire on the troops.

They said the passengers were armed Cubans living in the United States who were trying to infiltrate the island and “unleash terrorism”. Cuba said its soldiers killed four people and wounded six others.

“The statements made by the detainees themselves, together with a series of investigative procedures, reinforce the evidence against them,” the Cuban Interior Ministry said in its statement.

It added that “new elements are being obtained that establish the involvement of other individuals based in the US”.

Earlier this week, Cuba said it had filed terrorism charges against six suspects who were on the speedboat. The government also unveiled items it claimed to have found on the boat, including a dozen high-powered weapons, more than 12,800 pieces of ammunition and 11 pistols.

Cuban authorities have provided few details about the shooting, but they said the boat was roughly 1.6 kilometres (1 mile) northeast of Cayo Falcones, off the country’s north coast.

They also provided the boat’s registration number, but The Associated Press news agency was unable to readily verify the details because boat registrations are not public in the state of Florida.

The shooting threatened to increase tensions between US President Donald Trump and Cuban authorities.

The island’s economy was, until recently, largely kept economically afloat by Venezuela’s oil, which is now in doubt after a US military operation abducted and deposed former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday urged the Supreme Court to limit the reach of the 2nd Amendment and deny gun rights to “habitual” users of drugs, including marijuana.

But most of the justices sounded skeptical. They questioned whether marijuana users are so dangerous they should not have firearms.

They noted too that President Trump signed a recent executive order to reclassify marijuana as lesser controlled substance.

“Why is this a test case?,” asked Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

Federal laws on “controlled substances” and the 2nd Amendment created a conflict between gun rights and illegal drugs, but Gorsuch said marijuana users are not seen as a particular danger to the public.

“This is an odd case to have chosen” to resolve this legal dispute, he said.

Most of the justices said they were wary of ruling broadly to decide the legal status of other addictive drugs.

At issue was a provision of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which forbids gun possession by any person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”

The Justice Department says about 300 people per year are charged with a crime under this provision. They include Hunter Biden, the former president’s son, who was charged and convicted of lying about his drug addiction when he applied for a handgun permit.

The case brought together civil libertarians and gun rights advocates, who said millions of Americans could face criminal charges if the government’s view is upheld.

Deputy Solicitor Gen. Sarah Harris, representing the administration, said the court should uphold the law to deny guns to habitual users of unlawful drugs.

“Congress decided it is dangerous to mix firearms with controlled substances,” she said.

But Erin Murphy, a Washington attorney, said gun owners have not been notice that having a handgun at home could lead to a criminal prosecution if they sometimes use marijuana.

She said the court should hand down a “narrow” decision that spares her client.

Ali Hemani, a Texas man, was investigated by the FBI in 2020 for his family’s suspected ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist group.

When the FBI obtained a warrant to search his home, agents found a Glock pistol and 60 grams of marijuana as well as 4.7 grams of cocaine in his mother’s room. Hemani said he used marijuana about every other day.

He was charged with illegal gun possession because he was an unlawful drug user.

But citing the 2nd Amendment, a federal judge and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the charges on the grounds that he was not under the influence of drugs at the time of his arrest.

Appealing, the Trump administration said the Supreme Court should uphold the 1968 law and deny guns to those who are “habitual users” of illegal drugs.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said this prosecution “falls well within Congress’s authority to temporarily disarm categories of dangerous persons — here, habitual drug users.”

From the nation’s founding, “habitual drunkards” could be prohibited from having guns and that historic principle supports denying guns to habitual drug users.

The American Civil Liberties Union defended Hemani said the government’s view threatens to broadly extend the reach of the criminal law.

“Like tens of millions of Americans, Ali Hemani owned a handgun for self-defense, keeping it safely secured at home. Like many of those same Americans, he also consumed marijuana a few days a week,” they said in their brief.

“According to the government, those two facts alone sufficed to make him an ‘unlawful user’ of a controlled substance who could face criminal penalties.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett listen as President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union last Tuesday. Photo by Annabelle Gordon/UPI | License Photo

March 1 (UPI) — The Supreme Court will determine whether people who regularly smoke marijuana will be allowed to own guns.

In United States v. Hemani, which goes before the Supreme Court on Monday, the Trump administration will attempt to uphold their prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani, who lives in Texas.

In 2022, FBI officials found that Hemani, who is a dual citizen in the United States and Pakistan, owned a pistol while in possession of marijuana and cocaine.

When Hemani said that he engaged in marijuana use approximately every other day, he was indicted, facing up to 15 years behind bars, but the charge was dismissed.

The 1968 law he allegedly violated was meant to disarm people who used drugs.

An appeals court stated that there was not enough “tradition of gun regulation” to “support disarming a sober person based solely on past substance usage,” USA Today reported.

“I think what the court is being asked to decide, and I would imagine the reason it took the case, is to give some more guidance about what kinds of people can be disarmed without violating the Second Amendment,” said Joseph Blocher, one of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, CBS News reported.

Fundamentally, that’s what this case is about,” Blocher said.

CAMERON, N.C. — The 21-year-old North Carolina man who drove through a gate at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort with a shotgun before he was shot and killed worked as a golf course groundskeeper and liked to sketch.

Austin Tucker Martin rarely, if ever, talked about politics, seemed afraid of guns, and came from a family of Trump supporters, according to Braeden Fields, a cousin who said the two grew up together.

“I wouldn’t believe he would do something like this. It’s mind-blowing,” Fields said. “He wouldn’t even hurt an ant. He doesn’t even know how to use a gun.”

Martin drove into the secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago early Sunday and raised a shotgun at two Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy who then opened fire “to neutralize the threat,” said Sheriff Ric Bradshaw.

Trump, who often spends weekends at the Palm Beach, Fla., resort, was at the White House at the time.

Investigators have not identified a motive. Trump faced two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign, including one just a few miles from Mar-a-Lago when a man was spotted aiming a rifle through shrubbery while Trump was golfing.

Following Sunday’s incident, Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said investigators believed Martin bought his shotgun while driving to Florida. Authorities said his family had recently reported him missing.

Martin was from central North Carolina, where guns and hunting are a part of life, his cousin said. But whenever they’d go hunting or target shooting, Martin would never pick up a gun, Fields told the Associated Press on Sunday.

He lived with his mother in a modest modular house down a rutted sandy road near the town of Cameron. No one answered the door Monday, and the large police presence from the day before was gone.

Martin’s sister was killed in a car accident a few years ago, and he has an older brother who’s in the military, Fields said.

For the last three years, Martin had worked as a groundskeeper at Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club.

“It’s tragic. I feel for his family,” said Kelly Miller, president of the course in nearby Southern Pines. “It’s just unfortunate what transpired. It was totally unexpected.”

Martin last year started a business to sell pen drawings he made, according to state records. A website matching the company name features illustrations of golf courses, buildings and ancient Roman architecture.

Politics didn’t seem to be among his interests, his cousin said

“We are big Trump supporters, all of us. Everybody,” Fields said, but his cousin was “real quiet, never really talked about anything.”

Breed writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Michelle L. Price in Washington, Ali Swenson in New York, Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed to this report.

“That’s my pot dealer!” exclaimed Michelle Phillips in a crowded movie theater in 1977. Months earlier, the Mamas & the Papas singer had only known Harrison Ford as a stoner-carpenter with a few bit parts to his credit. Now he was Han Solo in “Star Wars,” directed by a young upstart, George Lucas. Clearly the world was changing.

How much, though? Conventional wisdom about the Hollywood renaissance of the ‘60s and ‘70s suggests that starting with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Easy Rider,” a batch of emerging auteurs shook the studios out of a rut and transformed American film. There’s plenty of truth to that: Francis Ford Coppola’s shift in 10 years from a director-for-hire on an old-hat musical, “Finian’s Rainbow,” to the auteur behind “Apocalypse Now” is just one of the era’s most remarkable achievements.

A pair of new books, though, suggest that the overall shift was only so modest, ultimately shoring up not just the old-school studio system but the social norms the interlopers were supposed to be upending.

Paul Fischer’s lively history of the new wave of California directors, “The Last Kings of Hollywood,” concentrates on Lucas, Coppola and Steven Spielberg. (New York contemporaries like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma are present but relatively off-screen.) Fischer has a gift for highlighting the ways that moments that we now accept as inevitable were often the product of dumb luck, pyrrhic victories and tough decisions. Coppola made “The Godfather” out of financial desperation, averse to adapting a mob novel; Spielberg’s “Jaws” was beset with mishaps, from a foolhardy attempt to train a real shark to its malfunctioning mechanical one; only when Lucas learned that the rights to Flash Gordon were unavailable did he pursue a space-opera concept all his own.

Their brashness and can-do spirit were worth cheering for: As the trio delivered films that broke box office records — ”The Godfather,” “American Graffiti,” “Jaws” and more — there were reasons to believe that big-budget films could operate outside the studio system. Lucas in particular was driven as much by resentment of the old as passion for the new. He never forgot how Warner Bros. manhandled his debut feature, “THX 1138” and was driven to muscle “Graffiti” into existence to spite the suits who said he couldn’t. In 1969, Coppola and Lucas launched their own studio, American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, with a passel of scripts in progress (including “Apocalypse Now” and “The Conversation”) and a $300,000 investment from Warner Bros. But Coppola wasn’t much of a businessman, and he had an easier time putting the office’s fancy espresso machine to work than the suite of state-of-the-art editing bays: “He ran his business like he ran a film set — on vibes,” Fischer writes.

A decade later, both Coppola and Zoetrope would declare bankruptcy, and he would split with Lucas, who’d used the success of “Star Wars” to cut his own path as a Hollywood kingmaker via his own production company, Lucasfilm. It allowed him to indulge his love of classic cliffhanger serials, and he tapped Spielberg to direct “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” But Fischer frames Lucas’ career arc as a disappointment, despite all those dollar figures — Lucas wanted to return to artsier “THX”-style fare, but needed cash flow. “If George was ever going to be independent from Hollywood, he thought he wouldn’t get there by making abstract mood poems,” Fischer writes. By the ‘80s, with two “Star Wars” sequels done, Lucas was out of the mood-poem business entirely.

While “Last Kings” focuses exclusively on directors’ relationship to movie economics, Kirk Ellis’ “They Kill People” considers “Bonnie and Clyde” and the New Hollywood from a variety of angles — filmmaking, the social turmoil of the ‘60s, America’s complex relationship with outlaws in general and guns in particular. It’s a meaty yet accessible book that captures the lightning-in-a-bottle nature of the generation’s ur-text, capturing the unlikely nature of its creation and the somewhat dodgy nature of its legacy.

“Bonnie” was such a provocation — nakedly, almost giddily violent — that its studio, Warner Bros, all but willed it not to exist. It was given a shoestring budget, was mocked by studio chief Jack Warner (who sarcastically referred to director Arthur Penn and producer-star Warren Beatty as “the geniuses”), and initially released largely in Southern drive-ins. “They figured the redneck kids would like the guns,” Penn said.

Everybody liked the guns. A few scolding critics lamented the film’s violence, especially its then-shocking bloody finale, but Beatty and co-star Faye Dunaway were deeply seductive onscreen. (Ellis notes that the two are always the best-dressed characters in the film.) And its outlaw sensibility resonated with young audiences in the late‘60s. Moreover, writes Ellis (a historical-drama screenwriter best known for “John Adams”), it represented the culmination of decades of American culture that equated American gun culture with freedom — a notion that would’ve baffled the founding fathers, who dwelled little on gun-rights matters in the Federalist Papers and other constitutional drafting documents, but gained traction thanks to gun manufacturers. “In the printed legend of American history, guns and freedom have become synonymous,” Ellis writes, but it was a new legend — stoked in part by “Bonnie and Clyde” — not America’s origin story.

It’d be a mistake to reduce the New Hollywood to the filmmakers highlighted by these two books — though, focused as they are on white men, they echo the way women and people of color were largely shut out of the system, or relegated to more marginal blaxploitation work. Artists looking to operate outside the system have plenty of inspiration to draw from in the ‘70s. Yet the books also expose how commerce does what it always does — take provocations and sand the edges off of them, then look for ways to make them profitable. In the early ‘80s, a decade after Coppola and company stormed the barricades, Paramount chief Michael Eisner shared a fresh and contradictory vision, such as it was: “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”

It would take another decade — and auteurs on the East Coast — to launch another attack on that sensibility, via films like “Do the Right Thing” and “sex, lies, and videotape.” They would help usher in the Miramax era — but that’s another story, with its own problematic twists.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

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What looks to be a new 155mm naval gun has been installed on a Chinese weapons trials ship. This is larger than any gun currently found on People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warships. The weapon could offer a boost in naval gunfire support capability to aid in future amphibious operations, as well as additional firepower for use against enemy ships and aerial threats, including possibly incoming missiles.

A picture showing what appears to be a Type 910 test vessel with a very large caliber gun mounted in a turret on the bow began circulating online yesterday, but it is unknown when exactly it was taken. The location is readily identifiable as Liaoning Shipyard, also known as Dalian Liaoning South Shipyard. This yard, which is situated adjacent to the PLAN’s Lushun Naval Base, has been involved in other advanced naval developments in the past, including the testing of a stealthy Chinese corvette or light frigate.

Though it is a relatively low-quality image, what is visible of the weapon and its turret aligns with what has emerged in the past year or so about a new 155mm naval gun under development in China.

Specific details about the 155mm gun remain limited, but a picture of a data plate that previously appeared online indicates that it weighs 21,800 kilograms (roughly 48,060 pounds) and is capable of firing guided projectiles. There have also been reports that the Inner Mongolia Northern Heavy Industries Group division of the state-run China North Industries Group Corporation (NORINCO) has been responsible for the design. NORINCO is a heavy industrial conglomerate involved in a wide variety of military and commercial enterprises, including the development and production of ground-based 155mm howitzers and other large caliber guns.

The largest caliber gun in active PLAN service today is a single-barrel 130mm (roughly 5-inch) type known variously as the H/PJ-38 and the H/PJ-45. The design was reverse-engineered from the Soviet-era AK-130, a twin-barrel weapon. The H/PJ-38 / H/PJ-45 first appeared on the Type 052D destroyer in the early 2000s and is also now found on newer Type 055 destroyers.

Though the maximum range of the H/PJ-38 / H/PJ-45 is unclear, the AK-130 is said to have a maximum range of around 14 miles (23 kilometers). One would expect, then, that the new 155mm naval gun would have greater reach.

The larger 155mm caliber could also open the door to more novel ammunition types in line with other developments globally. The U.S. Army, for instance, has been actively pursuing ramjet-powered 155mm rounds for ground-based howitzers in recent years. The Army, as well as the U.S. Navy, have also been supporting work on a 155mm gun-launched glide munition from General Atomics called the Long Range Maneuvering Projectile (LRMP). Hypervelocity projectiles that could be fired from howitzers on the ground and naval guns on ships, and be used to engage land, sea, and aerial targets, have been another area of active development in the United States.

Long-Range Maneuvering Projectile

Other known 155mm naval gun developments elsewhere in the world have historically focused primarily on meeting requirements for naval gunfire support for amphibious operations. China has uniquely relevant needs to be able to bombard targets ashore, especially in the context of any future intervention against Taiwan, as well as operations in the hotly contested South China Sea and other littorals it may seek to control.

The PLAN has been making other major investments in recent years to expand its amphibious warfare capabilities, overall. This has included the construction of the new supersized Type 076 amphibious assault ship Sichuan, as well as the continued expansion of its fleet of smaller Type 075s. China has also been acquiring a fleet of barges with jack-up legs that could be used to establish temporary piers after beachheads are secured.

Chinese PLA Navy’s First Type 076 Amphibious Assault Ship “Sichuan” Conducts First Sea Trial

1/x New lengthy & detailed footage (2nd & 3rd videos) of the 🇨🇳Chinese Shuiqiao-type landing barges (self-propelled amphibious landing platform utility vessels) during some trials with civilian cars
(via wb/齐天的孙猴子) pic.twitter.com/ajphn4m0mu

— Jesus Roman (@jesusfroman) June 15, 2025

A long-range naval gun capable of firing hypervelocity projectiles, as well as other ammunition types, could offer new cost and flexibility advantages over missiles in certain scenarios against other types of targets, as well. The U.S. military has previously demonstrated the ability of a 155mm howitzer to down incoming subsonic cruise missiles when firing hypervelocity rounds that could cost $100,000 or less when produced at scale.

At the same time, the reach of any gun is still likely to be relatively short in the context of modern naval warfare, which is dominated today by missiles, another area where the PLAN has been making major investments. As such, there are still questions about the utility of a new longer-ranged gun in any naval context, given what it might take to get a ship armed with one within range of relevant targets. TWZ explored exactly these issues in detail when U.S. President Donald Trump made his first comments about plans for a new class of “battleships” for the U.S. Navy last year.

This is all reflective of a larger debate over the value, or lack thereof, of naval gunfire support globally. This played a notably central role in the development of the Zumwalt class stealth destroyers for the U.S. Navy. A pair of 155mm guns that would sit fully concealed with their turrets when not in use, and that would fire long-range guided rounds, was central to the original Zumwalt design. The Navy subsequently balked at the cost of the Long-Range Land Attack Projectiles (LRLAP), the unit price of which was pegged at approximately $800,000. That, in turn, threw the future of the guns into limbo. The U.S. Navy is now refitting its Zumwalt class ships with new vertical launch system cells for hypersonic missiles in place of the guns.

BAE Systems – 155mm Advanced Gun System (AGS) Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) [480p]

The Trump class “battleship” design that has now emerged does feature an electromagnetic railgun, as well as multiple 5-inch guns, but also various types of missiles and laser directed energy weapons. The U.S. Navy had shelved previous work on railguns in the early 2020s, despite having seen promising progress, due to significant technological impediments.

China has also been developing railguns for naval use. A prototype design mounted in a large turret emerged on a PLAN ship in 2018, but the current status of that program is unclear. It is possible that Chinese work now on a traditional 155mm naval gun could be, at least in part, a hedge against issues with the railgun effort.

Other countries are also pursuing railguns for naval use, with Japan notably having now conducted multiple at-sea tests of a prototype design, as you can read more about here.

How the development of the new Chinese 155mm naval gun proceeds is still to be seen, but the project does look to be advancing now toward at least initial at-sea testing.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com