By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith for a closed-door interview later this month even though he had earlier volunteered to appear for an open hearing about his prosecutions of President Donald Trump.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the committee’s Republican chairman, directed Smith in a letter dated Wednesday to appear for a private deposition on Dec. 17 as part of the panel’s investigations into the prosecutor’s work.

“Due to your service as Special Counsel, the Committee believes that you possess information that is vital to its oversight of this matter,” Jordan wrote. He also asked Smith to produce records to the committee in addition to his testimony.

A lawyer for Smith, Peter Koski, said in a statement that Smith had offered nearly six weeks ago to appear before the committee in an open hearing but would nonetheless appear as requested for the deposition.

“We are disappointed that offer was rejected, and that the American people will be denied the opportunity to hear directly from Jack on these topics,” Koski said. “Jack looks forward to meeting with the committee later this month to discuss his work and clarify the various misconceptions about his investigation.”

Smith was appointed in 2022 to oversee the Justice Department investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Smith’s team filed charges in both investigations.

Smith abandoned the cases after Trump was elected to the White House again last year, citing Justice Department legal opinions that prohibit the indictment of a sitting president.

Republicans who control Congress have sought interviews with members of Smith’s team and in recent weeks have seized on revelations that the team, as part of its investigation, had analyzed the phone records of select GOP lawmakers from on and around Jan. 6, 2021, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to halt the certification of the Republican president’s election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

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Smith’s legal team has noted that the records that investigators obtained did not include the contents of the conversations but instead merely captured incoming and outgoing call numbers, the times the calls were placed and how long they lasted.

“Mr. Smith’s actions as Special Counsel were consistent with the decisions of a prosecutor who has devoted his career to following the facts and the law, without fear or favor and without regard for the political consequences,” Smith’s lawyers wrote to lawmakers in October.

“His investigative decisions were similarly motivated, and the subpoena for toll records was entirely proper, lawful, and consistent with established Department of Justice policy. While Mr. Smith’s prosecutions of President Trump have predictably been politicized by others, politics never influenced his decision making,” they added.

Follow the AP’s coverage of former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith at https://apnews.com/hub/jack-smith.

U.S. President Donald Trump has called Somali immigrants living in the United States “garbage” and wants them to leave, claiming without evidence that “they contribute nothing.”

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The crude language came Tuesday after a person familiar with the planning said federal authorities were preparing an immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota primarily focusing on Somali immigrants living unlawfully in the United States. Almost 58% of the Somalis in Minnesota were born in the U.S. And of the foreign-born Somalis there, 87% are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Here’s a look at Somalia, which is also one of the countries where the Trump administration this week paused all immigration applications. The country’s prime minister, asked at a public event Wednesday about Trump’s statements, did not comment.

Over three decades of war

Somalis have been fleeing the Horn of Africa nation for decades, ever since the fall of dictator Siad Barre led to clashes between warlords, wider civil war and the rise of the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group.

The widespread insecurity has sent millions of Somalis fleeing within the country or into neighboring ones. Many waited for years in remote refugee camps in places like Kenya before a chance to immigrate to the U.S. or elsewhere. Many others remain in those camps.

Inside Somalia, the current threat remains primarily from al-Shabab, which holds some rural areas and periodically targets the capital, Mogadishu, with devastating attacks. A truck bombing in the heart of Mogadishu in 2017 killed well over 100 people. Another in 2019 killed dozens more. Targets have also included the presidential palace and hotels.

For decades, there was no U.S. Embassy in Somalia because of the insecurity. The embassy returned in 2019, locating itself in a highly fortified seaside compound around the Mogadishu airport where other diplomatic or humanitarian offices are found.

FILE – A woman and a child hold hands as they walk down a street in the predominantly Somali neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis on Thursday, May 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski, File)

Somalia’s fragile federal government in recent years has been involved in what its president has called “total war” against al-Shabab. But the extremist group remains resilient amid the country’s complex clan dynamics, with some arms coming in from the Middle East via the Gulf of Aden.

The overall instability in Somalia helped to create the phenomenon of Somali pirates, who earlier this month hijacked a commercial vessel on the Indian Ocean for the first time in a year and a half, raising fears about a resurgence.

For many, a struggle to survive

While Mogadishu has shown some signs of a revival, often driven by Somali returnees bringing investment and ideas, much of the country’s population of about 19 million faces grim circumstances. The widespread insecurity has long limited rebuilding and investment.

Somalia continues to have one of the world’s weakest health care systems, according to the World Health Organization and other partners. And now longtime donors like the United States and Britain have been pulling back, especially with the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development this year.

A catch of tuna lies on the ground in Mogadishu, Somalia Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)

The Associated Press recently visited rare public hospitals remaining in Mogadishu that some Somalis must trek for days to reach for care. Many rural areas have little assistance. The ones under the control of al-Shabab may have none.

A harsh and changing climate

As Africa stands to suffer the most from climate change, Somalia is one of the most visible examples.

Droughts periodically kill thousands of people along with the camels and other livestock that help keep communities and economies alive. Floods rip through river valleys. Indian Ocean cyclones roar onto the coastline, the longest in Africa. From time to time, locusts devour landscapes’ vegetation.

“In Somalia, climate change and conflict are increasingly intertwined,” the International Crisis Group has noted, pointing out that al-Shabab’s fighters use access to water as another means to “tax” residents in vulnerable communities. In some cases during the most recent yearslong drought, al-Shabab destroyed water infrastructure, infuriating communities.

HONG KONG (AP) — The death toll of Hong Kong’s high-rise apartment blaze rose to 159 on Wednesday, as authorities arrested six people on suspicion of deactivating some fire alarms during maintenance work at the housing complex.

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The youngest person who died in the fire was a 1-year-old, police said. The oldest was 97.

Police said they have completed a search for bodies inside all seven of the eight high-rise residential towers ravaged in the fire that first broke out a week ago and took more than 40 hours to be extinguished. About 30 people were still reported missing.

“We have not finished our work yet,” Commissioner of Police Joe Chow told reporters, adding that officials found suspected human bones in different apartments and would attempt DNA testing to identify them.

Officials will also continue to search through piles of fallen bamboo scaffolding to check if any remains or bodies were buried there, he said.

The deadly blaze broke out at Wang Fuk Court, in the northern suburban district of Tai Po, which was undergoing a monthslong renovation project with buildings covered by bamboo scaffolding and green netting.

The city’s anti-corruption body and police said Tuesday that they had arrested 15 people, including directors at construction companies, as authorities probe corruption and negligence in relation to the renovation work.

Police said Wednesday that six others, from a fire service installation contractor, were arrested. They were believed to have deactivated some fire alarms at the housing complex during the renovation works, according to police, and were suspected of making false statements to the fire services department.

Residents at Wang Fuk Court and officials have previously said that some fire alarms in the buildings failed to sound when the blaze broke out, though it was not immediately clear how widespread that problem was within the complex.

Authorities also pointed to substandard plastic nylon netting covering scaffoldings erected outside the towers at Wang Fuk Court, and foam boards installed on windows, for contributing to the fire’s rapid spread to seven of the eight buildings at the complex.

On Wednesday, government officials ordered the removal of all external scaffolding nets from up to hundreds of buildings across the city that are undergoing major renovation or maintenance work. The materials will need to be tested before they are allowed to be installed again.

The removal was triggered by initial findings at two housing complexes in the territory where fire safety inspection reports for scaffolding nets were suspected to have been falsified, said Chris Tang, Hong Kong’s Secretary for Security. Police are investigating the companies that they believe could have provided the test reports, including the Binzhou Inspection and Testing Center in China.

The initial cause of the fire was still under investigation.

Nineteen bodies among the 159 were still unidentified, police said. Ten migrants who worked as domestic helpers at the housing complex, including nine from Indonesia and one from the Philippines, as well as one firefighter, were among those killed.

By JEFFREY COLLINS

A deadly UPS cargo plane crash in Kentucky stemmed from corporate choices that favored profits over safety, according to a lawyer who filed two wrongful death lawsuits Wednesday, which allege the company kept flying older aircraft without increasing maintenance beyond what’s regularly scheduled.

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Federal officials said last month’s fiery crash of the MD-11 jet happened during takeoff after the engine on the left wing detached and flew off. Cracks were found where the engine connected to the wing, according to the National Transportation Safety Board report.

The cracks show the now-grounded MD-11s, which average more than 30 years old, are too dangerous for package delivery companies to keep in the air, said Robert Clifford, a lawyer who has represented victims in plane crashes for more than 45 years.

The plane that crashed “was old, tired and should have been never taken out of mothballs,” Clifford said. Saving money by keeping older planes in the air and not increasing the number of inspections “is putting profits over safety,” Clifford added.

UPS and GE, which made the plane’s engines and is also being sued, said in a statements that safety is a top priority as they assist the federal investigation, and extended their heartfelt sympathies to the families of those killed. They said they do not comment on pending lawsuits.

The suit by Clifford Law Offices of Chicago and Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers are names Boeing, which acquired the original manufacturer of the plane McDonell Douglas, and VT San Antonio Aerospace, Inc., which inspected and maintained the plane. The two companies did not immediately respond to email and phone messages seeking comment.

The crash killed 3 pilots and 11 people on the ground

Clifford and other lawyers filed the wrongful death suits in state court on behalf of the families of Angela Anderson, 45, who was shopping at a business by the airport and Trinadette “Trina” Chavez, 37, who was working at Grade A Auto Parts. Both died in the fire caused by the 38,000 gallons (144,00 liters) of jet fuel on board the plane as it headed for Hawaii, the attorneys wrote in court papers.

The three pilots and 11 others on the ground were killed in the Nov. 4 crash near Muhammad Ali International Airport.

The legal battles stemming from the crash are likely just beginning. UPS was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed last month accusing it of negligence and wanton conduct. The crash “acted like a bomb” and the plaintiffs had their lives and businesses “turned upside down” as a result, the suit said.

Plane had just finished six weeks of extensive maintenance

The plane that crashed underwent more than six weeks of extensive maintenance that ended on Oct. 18. Crews repaired significant structural issues, including a crack in the center wing fuel tank and corrosion on structural components. Some of the parts involved in attaching the engine to the wing were also lubricated during the work that VT San Antonio performed, according to the lawsuits.

The engine mount hadn’t undergone a detailed inspection since 2021. And the plane wasn’t due for another detailed inspection of that part for another 7,000 takeoffs and landings

When Clifford saw the video of the Nov. 4 crash, his mind immediately went back to the 1979 crash of an American Airlines DC-10 which killed 273 people. The DC-10 was the predecessor of the MD-11.

The left engine fell off in the 1979 crash too. But back then, a forklift driver damaged the engine mounts. In this year’s crash, it appears to be a function of age.

“When you extend the life of the plane, it keeps it in service. It saves money. It saves downtime. It saves maintenance and inspection costs but there is an exponential increase in the risk of fatigue fractures and that’s what you got here,” Clifford said.

Federal investigators ground all similar planes

Federal investigators grounded all MD-11s used by UPS, FedEx and Western Global after the crash for inspections and repairs, but the Federal Aviation Administration hasn’t said what will be required.

UPS announced last week it didn’t expect the MD-11s to be back in the sky until at least after the holiday season.

The 109 remaining MD-11 airliners, averaging more than 30 years old, are exclusively used to haul cargo for package delivery companies. MD-11s make up about 9% of the UPS airline fleet and 4% of FedEx’s fleet.

If massive repairs or overhauls are ordered, experts said package delivery companies may find replacing them the better option.

Associated Press reporter Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this report.