Midday Roundup: Trespassing teen tops One World Trade Center

Sneak attack. A 16-year-old boy snuck past a sleeping guard in the middle of the night and climbed a ladder to the spire of One World Trade Center at the site of the 9/11 attacks, authorities said Thursday. The teen, who reportedly took pictures from the top of the building, which is still under construction, was arrested at 6 a.m. Sunday and charged with misdemeanor criminal trespassing. According to a criminal complaint, the teen told police: “I walked around the construction site and figured out how to access the Freedom Tower rooftop. I found a way up through the scaffolding, climbed onto the 6th floor, and took the elevator up to the 88th floor. I then took the staircase up to 104th (floor). I went to the rooftop and climbed the ladder all the way to the antenna.” The teen got onto the site of the nearly completed tower through a 1-foot opening in a fence, authorities said. The youngster faces fines and a possible sentence of 15 days to three months in jail.

Stashed. Police on Wednesday uncovered a house just outside Houston where 100 people from Mexico and Central America were being held, possibly against their will. The people, presumed to have entered the country illegally, were found during a search for a 24-year-old woman and her two children, a 7-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, whom relatives reported missing late Tuesday. Many of the people in the home were dressed only in undergarments, and they were sitting in filthy conditions, and surrounded by trash bags full of old clothing, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department said. Authorities have arrested five men in the apparent human-smuggling operation. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials took the people in the home into custody, and they will be questioned and fed. The people were primarily from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, he said.

Payback. Con Edison utility has paid 87 survivors and residents displaced by the fatal building explosion last week in New York City. The utility says it began making the compensation payments last Thursday, a day after the blast. This week, federal investigators found a leak in the gas main near one of the two East Harlem apartment buildings that were leveled. Eight people were killed and more than 60 were injured. Con Ed spokesman Robert McGee declined to provide the average amount paid for each person who was injured or lost his or her home. The payments were made after meetings with the victims.

Floating clues. The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is concentrating on two objects in that could be debris from plane wreckage. The objects, found by satellite, both have an indistinct, whitish appearance and are floating or just underneath the surface in deep waters southwest of Australia. The objects could be unrelated to the plane, possibly debris from ships, though the larger object is longer than a container. The remoteness of the search area means planes must fly long hours just to get there, so the time spent searching is limited. Four search planes flew over the area Thursday, but weather hampered visibility. A Norwegian merchant ship will use radar to search the area overnight, and its crew will use binoculars and their own eyesight to scan the waters Friday. Australia’s HMAS Success and a second merchant ship are en route.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.