BANGKOK (AP) — Laos has a new prime minister after the communist country’s National Assembly elected veteran diplomat Saleumxay Kommasith to the post, state-run media reported Tuesday.
Saleumxay, who turns 58 on Oct. 31, was elected on Monday in the Laotian capital Vientiane in a unanimous vote of 158 lawmakers who were present, the state news agency KPL said.
He is a member of the Politburo of the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party and had previously served as deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Saleumxay succeeded Sonexay Siphandone, who in turn was elected the National Assembly president.
Saleumxay studied at Russia’s Moscow State Institute of International Relations and Australia’s Monash University before serving in a series of foreign ministry posts overseeing relations with Australia, the United States, the Americas, and Europe. He also served in the Lao Mission to the United Nations in New York and can speak English, Russian, and French.
His Western-oriented career is unusual for Laos, a small land-locked and impoverished country whose leaders generally have virtually no international profile aside from links with fraternal neighboring communist governments in Vietnam and China.
In a speech to the assembly after his election, Saleumxay said his government would give immediate attention to food production, infrastructure recovery, mineral management, major investment projects, tourism, revenue collection, and monetary stability, KPL reported.
A 2026 country report for Laos issued by Germany’s Bertelsmann Stiftung says the Southeast Asian nation’s economy is weak and faces challenges from overborrowing, debt obligations, a lack of reserves and currency depreciation. “The one-party state still shows no inclination toward multiparty reform,” it noted.
Laos played a major role during the Vietnam War, not only as a battleground between a royalist government and communist rebels, but also for hosting part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which carried supplies from communist North Vietnam to battle in the south. It consequently suffered some of the heaviest bombing per capita in history by the U.S. Air Force.
In December 1975, the communist Pathet Lao prevailed against the U.S.-backed royalist forces and took power, as did fraternal communist forces earlier that year in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Laos continues to maintain close relations with Vietnam, whose prime minister will pay a visit on Thursday. China has increasing influence, able to exercise its huge economic muscle in cementing economic and trade cooperation. As a landlocked nation, Laos is very reliant on its neighbors, also including Thailand, for trade as well as investment. Its leading export is electricity, produced by hydropower dams.
A visitor takes photos by the Victory Monument in Patuxay Park in Vientiane, Laos, on July 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Anton L. Delgado)
FILE - People on a boat move in Mekong river in front of construction site of Luang Prabang hydroelectric dam in Luang Prabang, Laos, Sunday, Jan. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit, File)
Motorists drive past a government building in Vientiane, Laos, on July 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Anton L. Delgado)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A wealthy couple in suburban Los Angeles recruited women across the country to serve as surrogates, promising them that they were just looking for another child to grow their family.
Instead, prosecutors say, the couple used several surrogates at the same time, amassed a brood of 21 children — some as young as 2 months — and raised them in a “house of horrors” where they suffered daily beatings at the hands of cruel nannies as the couple watched and laughed from a network of surveillance cameras.
Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, were arrested Tuesday at their home in Arcadia, a city about 13 miles (20 kilometers) northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
The couple face several counts of child abuse as well as conspiracy to commit child abuse, accessory after the fact and dissuading a witness, according to Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman.
“This case is unprecedented. It is horrific,” he said during a morning news conference. “The physical abuse, beating and punishment that these very young children received is despicable.”
Prosecutors were seeking $100 million bail for the couple because of the serious nature of the charges and because they are flight risks, Hochman said. They were scheduled to be arraigned at the Pasadena courthouse later in the day.
Fifteen children were removed from the opulent home last year after an allegation of abuse, and another six living elsewhere were also located. They ranged in age from 2 months to 13 years, with most between 1 and 3. Police believe Zhang gave birth to one or two of the children, while the rest were carried and delivered by surrogates.
Hochman said the couple set up an agency, Mark Surrogacy, that they operated from home and used to hire surrogates throughout the U.S. But prosecutors said the couple misled the women, telling some that they could not conceive and others that they only had one child and wanted one more to complete their family.
“The house could only be described as a house of horrors for these incredible young children,” Hochman said.
Zhang and Xuan were first arrested in May 2025 after a hospital reported that their 2-month-old infant had a traumatic head injury, the result of being violently shaken by a nanny, according to Arcadia police.
Police did not file charges at the time, saying they needed to complete the investigation.
Hochman said the couple set up three rooms they called learning centers, where the children spent several hours a day sitting at desks under the supervision of nannies.
Through an extensive surveillance system including motion-activated cameras, the couple watched as the nannies physically abused the children, including daily beatings, he said.
In one video, Xuan is shown entering a room and telling a nanny to strike a child harder, Hochman said, and in another he joins the nanny in hitting the child.
The nannies were allegedly told “not to leave any physical marks on the children,” and when police arrived to investigate in May 2025, the children were told to deny they had been beaten.
After examining the surveillance video, police issued an arrest warrant for Chunmei Li, the nanny seen hurting the 2-month-old infant, but she could not be found.
Hochman said “there will be a reckoning” for the defendants, one of whom faces more than 17 years in prison if convicted.
When asked about the couple’s motivation, Hochman said that was part of the investigation, as was the parentage of each child.
Mitchell Krems, Xuan’s attorney, previously told ABC7 that Xuan’s goal was to raise children who become productive adults.
“The reason he has all these children is because he wants them to contribute to society. He is not a man who is self-indulgent,” Krems said. “Some who are wealthy might spend on jewelry or cars, but he is actually spending his resources to help his children become educated so that they can be the philosophers, the physicians, the researchers and the inventors that help society.”
Krems did not immediately respond Tuesday to an email seeking comment.
Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman agrees to carry and deliver a child for another person or couple, often after an embryo transfer.
There is no comprehensive federal law regulating surrogacy, leaving most rules to the states.
California is considered a “surrogacy-friendly state” because it has clear laws governing the process. Both sides are required to have lawyers, and there must be a written, notarized contract before an embryo transfer takes place.
Investigators have said they were looking into whether the couple misled surrogates around the country and at least eight women came forward to say they were aggressively pursued to serve as surrogates.
The women, many of them first-time surrogates, said they were given misleading or incomplete information about the couple’s family situation and intentions.
At least one, Kayla Elliott, is now trying to get custody of a baby she birthed for the couple.
Marcelo reported from New York.
FILE - An aerial view shows the home of Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan on July 16, 2025, in Arcadia, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
