By DANICA KIRKA

LONDON (AP) — Prince Andrew’s damaged reputation and desperate need for cash are again causing headaches for King Charles III after a court released more documents on Friday showing how Andrew’s problems led him to become entangled with a suspected Chinese spy.

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The Special Immigration Appeals Commission released the witness statement of Dominic Hampshire, a senior aide to Andrew who helped arrange meetings between the prince and the suspected spy, Chinese businessman Tengbo Yang. Yang was eventually authorized to operate on Andrew’s behalf as he sought Chinese investors for an initiative called the Eurasia Fund.

Andrew, also known as the Duke of York, needed to find other ways to support himself after he was forced to give up all royal duties following a disastrous interview with the BBC in 2019, Hampshire said in the statement. Andrew gave the interview to address concerns about his links to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but it backfired when he failed to explain his continued contact with Epstein or show sympathy for his victims.

“After the Newsnight interview and in the following few months, it was clear that the duke’s reputation was irrecoverable,” Hampshire said in a 10-page statement dated May 25, 2024. “It was very clear internally within the royal household that we would have to look at options for the duke’s future away from royal duties,” he added.

Andrew’s vulnerability

British authorities worried that Andrew’s situation left him vulnerable to manipulation by Yang, who they believe was working on behalf of the United Front Work Department, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party that is used to influence foreign entities. Yang denies the allegations.

The British government barred Yang from entering the country in 2023 as a threat to national security. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission upheld that decision in December 2024.

Hampshire, who gave evidence on Yang’s behalf, said the king was briefed on Andrew’s initiatives.

“I have had two meetings with the Duke and His Majesty to discuss what the Duke can do moving forwards in a way that is acceptable to His Majesty,” Hampshire said. “It is also of note that, amongst other topics, the Eurasia Fund and (an investor) were discussed on both occasions with His Majesty.”

Buckingham Palace said on Friday that the king met with Andrew and his adviser to hear “outline proposals” for independent funding. Yang was never mentioned.

Andrew, one of the king’s younger brothers, has been repeatedly criticized for his links to wealthy foreigners, raising concerns that those individuals were trying to buy access to the royal family.

Hampshire’s statement was initially kept private, but the commission released it after appeals by news organizations that argued it was in the public interest.

Hampshire, who left Andrew’s service in 2022, said he sought to keep his statement out of the public domain to protect confidential communications with the security services and Buckingham Palace.

What the duke says

Andrew previously said he accepted government advice and ceased all contact with the Chinese national as soon as the concerns were raised.

“The Duke met the individual through official channels with nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed,” his office said in December. “He is unable to comment further on matters relating to national security.”

British intelligence chiefs have become increasingly concerned about China’s efforts to influence U.K. government policy.

In 2022, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, known as MI5, warned politicians that a British-Chinese lawyer had been seeking to improperly influence members of Parliament for years. A parliamentary researcher was arrested in 2023 on suspicion of providing sensitive information to China.

Yang, 51, worked as a junior civil servant in China before he came to the U.K. as a student in 2002. He earned a master’s degree in public administration and public policy at the University of York before starting a business that advises U.K.-based companies on their operations in China.

He was granted the right to live and work in the U.K. for an indefinite period in 2013. Although he didn’t make Britain his permanent home, Yang told authorities that he spent one to two weeks a month in the country and considered it his “second home.”

Yang was stopped while entering the U.K. on Nov. 6, 2021, and ordered to surrender his mobile phone and other digital devices on which authorities found a letter from Hampshire and other documents that highlighted his close relationship with Andrew.

“I also hope that it is clear to you where you sit with my principal and indeed his family,” Hampshire said in excerpts from the letter released previously. “You should never underestimate the strength of that relationship. Outside of his closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.”

In the witness statement released on Friday, Hampshire characterized those comments as “artistic license.”

“As is regularly the case in some communications, there was significant artistic license in ‘blowing smoke’ and stroking his ego to maintain (Yang’s) support of the duke,” Hampshire said.

Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/royalty

By MARCIA DUNN

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Four space tourists who orbited the north and south poles returned to Earth on Friday, splashing down in the Pacific to end their privately funded polar tour.

Bitcoin investor Chun Wang chartered a SpaceX flight for himself and three others in a Dragon capsule that was outfitted with a domed window that provided 360-degree views of the polar caps and everything in between. Wang declined to say how much he paid for the 3 1/2-day trip.

The quartet, who rocketed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Monday night, returned off the Southern California coast. It was the first human spaceflight to circle the globe above the poles and the first Pacific splashdown for a space crew in 50 years.

The Chinese-born Wang, now a citizen of Malta, invited Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian polar guide Eric Philips, all of whom shared stunning vistas during their voyage.

“It is so epic because it is another kind of desert, so it just goes on and on and on all the way,” Rogge said in a video posted by Wang on X while gazing down from orbit.

Mikkelsen packed the capsule with camera equipment and spent much of her time behind the lens.

All four suffered from space motion sickness after reaching orbit, according to Wang. But by the time they woke up on day two, they felt fine and cranked open the window cover right above the South Pole, he said via X.

Besides documenting the poles from 270 miles up, Wang and his crew took the first medical X-rays in space as part of a test and conducted two dozen other science experiments. They named their trip Fram2 after the Norwegian sailing ship that carried explorers to the poles more than a century ago. A bit of the original ship’s wooden deck accompanied the crew to space.

Their medical tests continued at splashdown. All four got out of the capsule on their own, heaving bags of equipment so researchers could see how steady returning space crews are on their feet. They pumped their fists in jubilation.

SpaceX said its decision to switch splashdown sites from Florida beginning with this flight was based on safety. The company said Pacific splashdowns will ensure that any surviving pieces of the trunk — jettisoned near flight’s end — falls into the ocean.

The last people to return from space to the Pacific were the three NASA astronauts assigned to the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the legal community pose “a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself,” according to a court filing submitted Friday by more than 500 law firms.

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The brief represents the most organized pushback to date against a series of White House executive orders that have sought to punish some of the country’s most elite firms and to extract concessions from them. Some of the targeted firms have sued to halt enforcement of the orders, while others have struck deals with the White House either to avert an order or to have it rescinded.

The filing was submitted as part of a lawsuit filed by Perkins Coie, which is among the firms that have challenged the orders in court. The order against that firm and others demands that security clearances of its lawyers be suspended, that federal contracts be terminated and that employee access to federal buildings be restricted.

The firm won a court order temporarily blocking enforcement of several provisions of the executive order, but its court case is still pending.

On Friday, more than 500 firms and law offices from around the country signed onto a brief urging a judge to permanently block the order. The firms, in their filing, call the order a “grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself.”

“The looming threat posed by the Executive Order at issue in this case and the others like it is not lost on anyone practicing law in this country today: any controversial representation challenging actions of the current administration (or even causes it disfavors) now brings with it the risk of devastating retaliation,” the brief argues.

It adds: “Whatever short-term advantage an administration may gain from exercising power in this way, the rule of law cannot long endure in the climate of fear that such actions create. Our adversarial system depends upon zealous advocates litigating each side of a case with equal vigor; that is how impartial judges arrive at just, informed decisions that vindicate the rule of law.”

Last month, Paul Weiss became the first firm to cut a deal with the White House, agreeing to dedicate $40 million in pro bono legal services to causes championed by the Trump administration and to ensure merit-based hiring instead of relying on diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its employment practices. In exchange, the White House rescinded an executive order issued days earlier.

Since then, the law firms of Millbank and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom have reached similar agreements to avoid being hit with an executive order.

Several of the targeted firms have been subject to orders, in part, because of their prior or current associations with lawyers who either investigated Trump or are among the president’s perceived adversaries.

By STEPHEN GROVES

WASHINGTON (AP) — As stock markets tumble in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, Republicans in Congress were watching with unease and talking of clawing back their power to levy tariffs — but almost none seemed ready to turn their words into action.

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How Trump’s latest tariffs could affect your wallet

The Republican president is upending longstanding GOP principles like support for free trade, yet despite clear misgivings and a Constitutional mandate to decide tariffs, most lawmakers were not ready to cross Trump. Instead, they were focusing all their attention on advancing the president’s ” big, beautiful bill ” of tax breaks and spending cuts, even as tariffs — in essence, import taxes — threatened to raise consumer prices across the board and push the global economy into a recession.

As the fallout from Trump’s announcement reverberated around global markets, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has made it clear he is no fan of tariffs, told reporters that he would give Trump “the benefit of the doubt” in hopes that the announcement was just a scare tactic to prod foreign leaders into negotiating better trade deals with the U.S.

“The president is a dealmaker if nothing else, and he’s going to continue to deal country by country with each of them,” said Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who is no. 2 in GOP Senate leadership. He added that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had told Senate Republicans this week that the tariffs announced by Trump would be a “high level mark with the ultimate goal of getting them reduced” unless other countries retaliate.

But countries like China are already retaliating with tariffs of their own, and while the president has signaled he is open to negotiations, he was mostly sounding a defiant tone Friday, saying on social media that “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE” while claiming that foreign investors were lining up to invest in U.S. industries. He was on the golf course Friday near his Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida.

Congress, however, was jittery.

A handful of Republicans have rebuked Trump’s strategy as a foolhardy path that will burden U.S. households. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the longtime Senate leader who was the standard-bearer for past generations of Republicans, released a lengthy statement saying, “As I have always warned, tariffs are bad policy, and trade wars with our partners hurt working people most.”

McConnell and three other Republicans joined with Democrats this week to help pass a resolution that would nullify Trump’s tariffs on Canada, sending a rebuke to the president just hours after his “Liberation Day” announcement. But House Speaker Mike Johnson quickly indicated he has no interest in giving the resolution a vote.

Lawmakers’ struggle to act showed the divide among Republicans on trade policy, with a mostly younger group of Republicans fiercely backing Trump’s strategy. Rather than heed traditional free trade doctrine, they argue for “America First” protectionism and hope it will revive U.S. manufacturing.

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said that workers in his home state of Missouri were “absolutely thrilled” with the tariffs. “We’ve been losing jobs left and right. Farmers want to see a fair deal for our products, both in Canada and in Mexico and from the (European Union),” he added.

For their part, Democrats slammed Trump’s tariffs as a reckless maneuver meant to do nothing more than raise funds for the tax breaks Trump and Republicans are trying to pass.

“Why would he raise the costs on American families by $5,000, as it’s estimated? Simply because his very wealthy billionaire friends want a greater tax break,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor speech Friday.

Other Democrats challenged more Republicans to stand up to Trump. “If they truly believe in capitalism, they need to put their votes where capitalism is and that is that competition works, our world relationships work,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., at a news conference.

“Donald Trump is taking us backwards to the Great Depression,” she added.

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who holds libertarian economic views, has been highly critical of the tariffs, warning they create the same economic problems that exacerbated the Great Depression. He is calling for Congress to reject Trump’s plans with legislation that would require congressional approval for taxes on imports.

Other Republicans were looking for roundabout ways to check the president’s power on trade policy. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a senior Republican from Iowa, introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday that would require presidents to justify new tariffs to Congress. Lawmakers would then have to approve the tariffs within 60 days, or they would expire.

Although Grassley emphasized that he had long been working on the idea, the timing of the bill was notable. It gave Republicans a chance to talk about their distaste for import taxes and raised the prospect of Congress clawing back some of its power over tariffs. The Constitution gives Congress the responsibility of setting taxes and tariffs, but over the last century, lawmakers have ceded much of their power over import taxes to the president.

A handful of Republicans said they were favorable to Grassley’s proposal, though the idea of directly defying Trump seemed to squelch potential for quick action.

“I don’t want to do it in a politically charged environment,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican. “But I absolutely agree. This was set up by the Founding Fathers to be Congress’s role. And, I think we’re way past the point of what the Founding Fathers ever wanted to have happen.”

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz seized on the hesitation from Republicans, saying on social media Friday that the Senate would overwhelmingly repeal or constrain tariff authority “if every Senator voted their conscience and their state’s interest.”

“Mostly everyone hates this, they are just too afraid of the Mad King at the moment,” Schatz added.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, also predicted the bill would never pass “because of the voting requirements in the Senate.”

But he was still taking to social media to offer a folksy bit of advice: “Tariffs are like whiskey: A little whiskey, under the right circumstances, can be refreshing — but too much whiskey, under the wrong circumstances, can make you drunk as a goat.”

Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed