Ex-OpenAI worker accused of bugging conference room planned to flee to Saudi Arabia, prosecutors say

One of the defendants accused of allowing more than a dozen of their surrogate children to suffer abuse inside an Arcadia “house of horrors” previously fled the country to dodge a child abuse investigation, a prosecutor said in court Friday. Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. MacKenzie Teymouri also told a judge Friday that Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, kept their more than 20 children trapped inside the Arcadia mansion for years, almost never letting them see sunlight. During a search of the home last week, police also found the cremated remains of another surrogate child that had been mailed to the house; the baby died shortly after birth in Florida, Teymouri said. The defendants never opened the box, according to Teymouri, who said Xuan and Zhang were “indifferent” to the well-being of their children. The Friday afternoon hearing was sparked by Xuan’s and Zhang’s attorneys’ attempts to have their clients released on their own recognizance. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Caroline Lugo instead ordered them held in lieu of $20 million bail. Teymouri filed a motion last week seeking to have the couple held on $100 million bail, citing their extreme wealth.

PROVIDENCE — A man accused of sexually assaulting a child in Rhode Island was taken into custody in Italy earlier this month after he failed to show up to his trial in July, according to prosecutors. Ferdinando Comparone, 33, of Cranston, R. I., was taken into custody in Italy on Oct. 7, Special Assistant Attorney General Jillian Dubois wrote in a recent court filing. Comparone faces two counts of first-degree child molestation for an alleged assault on a child 14 years old or younger in Providence sometime between June 2015 and September 2016, when Comparone would have been either 22 or 23 years old, according to an indictment filed against him. According to Dubois, Comparone failed to appear for his trial date on July 8, after he fled the United States on Dec. 23, 2025. Records show Comparone had turned over his passport to the court in December 2022. Comparone was initially charged by Rhode Island State Police in December 2022, indicted by a grand jury in May 2023, and pleaded not guilty the following month, records show. He was later released on $400,000 surety bail, Dubois wrote.

PARIS (AP) — Paris returned to calm on Tuesday after its first quiet night since a weekend marred by France’s most destructive rioting in years, as authorities imposed curfews in several cities in an effort to prevent another round of rioting and looting. At least 2,400 people were arrested after rioters in cities across France on Saturday clashed with police, set cars on fire, stormed public buildings and engulfed a historic city hall in flames, during nationwide protests against rising living costs and poor conditions in schools. On Sunday evening, small groups set fire to trash bins, bicycles and other objects in the streets and looted businesses in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other cities. In the capital, a curfew ran from 11 p.m. on Monday to 6 a.m. Tuesday, and a police helicopter circled over Place de la République overnight, a central point in the weekend clashes, sweeping the square with a searchlight to check that the order was being respected.

The Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable informs the public that Highway 25, including the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel, will be closed toward Montreal during this weekend.…

Seven years ago, in the pages of The New Yorker, Haruki Murakami published an essay so odd, so vulnerable, so personal that it burrowed into my psyche and changed the way I view a favorite author forever. That essay, “Abandoning a Cat,” has since been expanded into a slim, small, beautiful hardcover book that will appear in the U. S. this month. If you’re considering buying the book for a cat lover in your life, however, think again. An anecdote involving a cat that Murakami and his father abandoned is merely a portal onto a painful and perplexing history: personal, familial, cultural, national, and ultimately universal. The story that emerges is quietly devastating, all the more powerful for the restraint and epistemological humility with which Murakami presents it. “Abandoning a Cat” begins with deceptively casual ease: “Of course I have lots of memories of my father. It’s only natural.” Soon, however, the potentially comforting abundance of memory turns cold comfort: these visions of the past are often fragmentary, lack context, or impossible to interpret. The memory of abandoning the cat is epitomizing.