Former Nissan Motor Company chief Carlos Ghosn said Tuesday he had traveled to Lebanon to escape what he called “injustice and political persecution” in Japan where he faces multiple charges of financial misconduct.

“I am now in Lebanon and will no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant, and basic human rights are denied, in flagrant disregard of Japan’s legal obligations under international law and treaties it is bound to uphold,” he said.

Ghosn has been arrested several times since first being detained in November 2018, but was free on bail. The conditions of his latest release required him to remain in Japan, and his statement Tuesday did not explain how he left.

Ghosn holds French, Brazilian and Lebanese citizenship.  His lawyer Junichiro Hironaka told reporters Tuesday that his legal team was still in possession of all Ghosn’s passports, and he said he was surprised to learn of Ghosn’s departure.

Ghosn has denied the charges against him.

Among the allegations are accusations he conspired to understate his Nissan income by about 50 percent between 2010 and 2015, and that a Nissan subsidiary diverted $2.5 million out of $5 million from an Oman dealership to a Ghosn-owned investment company for his private use.

Ghosn was credited for steering Nissan from the brink of bankruptcy to becoming one of the world top-selling automakers. He engineered a three-way alliance with one-time domestic rival Mitsubishi Motors and French-based Renault.

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Volunteers are working around the clock preparing flower-decked floats for the annual Rose Parade, a New Year’s Day tradition. Hundreds of thousands of people line the parade route in Pasadena, California, on Wednesday, and millions more will watch on television.  Mike O’Sullivan reports on the preparations.

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A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit from a former White House official who had challenged a congressional subpoena in the impeachment inquiry involving President Donald Trump.

Charles Kupperman, a former deputy national security adviser, sued in October after being subpoenaed by House Democrats to testify in their impeachment investigation into Trump’s interactions with Ukraine. He had asked a judge to decide whether he had to comply with that subpoena from Congress or with a conflicting directive from the White House that he not testify.

Both the House of Representatives, which withdrew the subpoena, and the Justice Department, which had said it would not prosecute Kupperman for contempt of Congress for failing to appear, had asked the court to dismiss the case as moot.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon agreed Monday in throwing out the case. He noted that the House had stated explicitly that it would not reissue a subpoena to Kupperman and had not mentioned him by name in an impeachment article this month that accused Trump of obstructing Congress and its investigation.

“This conduct is of course entirely consistent with the repeated representations that counsel for the House has made to this Court,” Leon wrote. “The House clearly has no intention of pursuing Kupperman, and his claims are thus moot.”

The lawsuit was closely watched since it was a rare challenge of a congressional subpoena in the impeachment inquiry and because of the potential implications it carried for another witness whose testimony has been highly sought by Democrats: former national security adviser John Bolton.

Kupperman and Bolton have the same lawyer. Bolton was not subpoenaed by the House but, as a senior adviser to the president on matters of national security, had similar arguments at his disposal. Senate Democrats have identified Bolton as among the current and former Trump administration officials they would like to hear from in a trial.

Charles Cooper, a lawyer for Bolton and Kupperman, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Though Leon said he did not need to resolve Kupperman’s case now, he acknowledged that the conflict could potentially resurface.

“Have no doubt though, should the winds of political fortune shift and the House were to reissue a subpoena to Dr. Kupperman, he will face the same conflicting directives that precipitated this suit,” Leon wrote.

“If so, he will undoubtedly be right back before this Court seeking a solution to a Constitutional dilemma that has long-standing political consequences: balancing Congress’s well-established power to investigate with a President’s need to have a small group of national security advisors who have some form of immunity from compelled congressional testimony,” Leon wrote.
 

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Chinese pastor Wang Yi, founder of Early Rain Covenant Church, has been sentenced to nine years in prison on the charges of inciting state subversion and illegal business operation, a court in Sichuan in southwest China said on Monday.

One year after his incommunicado detention and a recent secret trial, Wang has also been deprived of his political rights for three years with 50,000 yuan ($7,157) of his personal property being confiscated, the announcement on the court’s website added.

The court, however, gave no details of its so-called “open” trial, which Wang allegedly faced last week.

Religious rights activists called Wang’s verdict the harshest in a decade, which paints a bleak picture of China’s government-led persecution of religious groups under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Wang was among dozens of the church’s followers and leaders including his wife detained by police in December 2018 although most were subsequently released.

The 46-year-old pastor is also a productive writer, social activist and formerly a legal scholar at Chengdu University before he took up the pastorate.

According to Bob Fu, founder of China Aid, a Texas, U.S.-based Christian human rights group which promotes religious freedom and rule of law in China, Wang’s sentence is the longest against an ethnic Chinese house church leader in a decade, prior to which, Uyghur house church leader Alimujiang Yimiti from Xinjiang was given a 15-year sentence in 2008.

“This demonstrates President Xi’s regime is determined to be the enemy of the universal values and the religious freedom,” Fu said.

“It shows the regime is very afraid of pastor Wang Yi’s national and international impact based on his reformed evangelic movement,” he added.

Under Xi, China has intensified its crackdown on unsupervised religious followers be it Christians, Muslims or even Buddhists.

In the past few years, authorities there have not only jailed pastors, but also closed churches and taken down thousands of crosses and, in some places, there is a push to ensure that anyone under the age of 18 cannot attend church or be under the influence of religion – what Fu called the worst religious persecution since the Cultural Revolution.

China is officially atheist, but says it allows religious freedom.

And Wang’s church is one of China’s best-known unregistered Protestant “house” churches, deemed illegal under Chinese laws, which require all places of worship to register and submit to government oversight.

In other words, criminal charges against Wang can apply to all other unregistered church leaders and goers, which observers say is sending another chilling effect on Chinese religious believers

“He [Wang] is a martyr who suffers the persecution… The chilling effect was there because many people will be deterred, not to speak up. But those who really are fighting hard for their own faith, for their own religion, will not bend,” said Sang Pu, a commentator in Hong Kong.

Sang said that many church goers are finding new places or new ways to worship in spite of the Chinese government’s crackdown.

Analysts have long argued that China’s Communist Party will have a hard time suppressing Christians in China as Yang Feggang of Purdue University once estimated that the country’s population of Christians has unstoppably grown ten-fold from six millions in 1980 to more than 67 million in 2010.

Yang estimated that China will turn out to have the world’s largest population of more than 247 million Christians in 2030.

Rights activists, in addition, denounced Wang’s trial, saying that the pastor has been deprived of due legal proceedings and representation.

They said that Wang likely stood trial secretly on December 26th when no one from his family was notified or present at the court.

His former lawyer Zhang Peihong, originally hired by Wang’s parents to represent him, had been replaced by two government-appointed lawyers in November.

“Those who do evil will be in trouble. You’re not keeping a criminal behind bars. Instead, you’re crowning a righteous man!” Zhang posted Monday on Facebook, which is banned in China, apparently writing about Wang’s case.

Since June, Wang’s wife Jiang Rong has been out on “bail” after being detained alongside her husband during the initial raid on the church.

But both she, their son and Wang’s parents are still under close surveillance by state security police, according to Fu.

“Jiang Rong is staying in a public security-arranged apartment and their 13-year-old son is not allowed even to have freedom to meet with his own mom and grandparents,” Fu said, adding that “every day, he has to take a police car to go to school and being picked up by the police. No freedom at all.”

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A court in Sudan on Monday sentenced 27 members of the country’s security forces to death for torturing and killing a detained protester during the uprising against Sudan’s longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir earlier this year.

The death of protester Ahmed al-Khair, a school teacher, while in detention in February was a key point — and a symbol — in the uprising that eventually led to the military’s ouster of al-Bashir. Monday’s convictions and sentences, which can be appealed, were the first connected to the killings of protesters in the revolt.

Last December, the first rally was held in Sudan to protest the soaring cost of bread, marking the beginning of a pro-democracy movement that convulsed the large African country. That led, in April, to the toppling by the military of al-Bashir, and ultimately to the creation of a joint military-civilian Sovereign Council that has committed to rebuilding the country and promises elections in three years.

The anniversary of that protest this month drew teeming crowds to the streets in several cities and towns across the country, with people singing, dancing and carrying flags. A train packed with exuberant demonstrators, clapping and chanting, arrived in the northern city of Atbara, the birthplace of the uprising, from the capital, Khartoum.

Monday’s verdict in the trial of the security forces took place in a court in Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city, where dozens of protesters had gathered outside the courtroom, demanding justice for al-Khair.

Al-Khair was detained on Jan. 31 in the eastern province of Kassala and was reported dead two days later. His body was taken to a local hospital where his family said it was covered in bruises. At the time, police denied any police wrongdoing and blamed his death on an “illness,” without providing any details.

The court, however, said on Monday that the teacher was beaten and tortured while in detention. The 27 sentenced were policemen who were working in the jail where al-Khair was held or intelligence agents in the region.

Also this month, a court in Khartoum convicted al-Bashir of money laundering and corruption, sentencing him to two years in a minimum security lockup. The image of the former dictator in a defendant’s cage sent a strong message, on live TV for all of Sudan.

The deposed ruler is under indictment by the International Criminal Court on far more serious charges of war crimes and genocide linked to his brutal suppression of the insurgency in the western province of Darfur in the early 2000s. The military has refused to extradite him to stand trial in The Hague.

Amnesty International and other rights groups have called on the new government to hold security forces accountable for killing scores of people in their efforts to stifle protests against military rule, especially those behind a deadly crackdown on a huge sit-in outside the military headquarters in Khartoum last June.

Since last December, nearly 200 protesters have been killed in Sudan. The government recently appointed independent judges to oversee investigations into the killings, a major achievement for the protest movement.

Sudan is under heavy international and regional pressure to reform. With the economy on the brink, the new government has made it a mission to get Sudan removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism so that it can attract badly needed foreign aid.

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Police in Turkey detained at least 124 people suspected of links to the Islamic State group, the state-run news agency reported Monday, in an apparent sweep against the militant group ahead of New Year celebrations.

At least 33 foreign nationals were detained in the capital Ankara in a joint operation by anti-terrorism police and the national intelligence agency, according to the Anadolu Agency.  In Istanbul, police raided 31 houses, detaining 24 suspects, including four foreign nationals.

Police conducted simultaneous, pre-dawn raids in the city of Batman, in southeast Turkey, where 22 suspects were detained, it said in a separate report. Raids were also conducted in the cities of Adana, Kayseri, Samsun and Bursa where 45 people, including six foreign nationals were detained.

Anadolu said the IS suspects apprehended in Ankara were from Iraq, Syria and Morocco. Police were searching for some 17 other suspects, the report said.

The country was hit by a wave of attacks in 2015 and 2016 blamed on IS and Kurdish militants that killed over 300 people.

The IS group also claimed responsibility for an attack at an Istanbul nightclub during New Year celebrations in the early hours of 2017. The attack killed 39 people, most of them foreigners.

Meanwhile, Turkey deported a total of 778 IS or other jihadists back to their home countries in 2019, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said Sunday.

Turkey has stepped up its efforts to expel foreign fighters back to their countries of origin in recent months, accusing many European countries of not taking responsibility for their nationals and saying Turkey was “not a hotel” for foreign fighters.

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The U.S. carried out military strikes in Iraq and Syria targeting a militia blamed for an attack that killed an American contractor, a Defense Department spokesman said Sunday.

U.S. forces conducted “precision defensive strikes” against five sites of Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades, an Iran-backed Iraqi militia, spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement.

The U.S. blames the militia for a rocket barrage Friday that killed a U.S. defense contractor at a military compound near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq.

Officials said attackers fired as many as 30 rockets in Friday’s assault.

The Defense Department gave no details immediately on how the strikes were conducted. It said the U.S. hit three of the militia’s sites in Iraq and two in Syria, including weapon caches and the militia’s command and control bases.

Hoffman said the U.S. strikes will weaken the group’s ability to carry out future attacks on Americans and their Iraqi government allies.

Iraq’s Hezbollah Brigades, a separate force from the Lebanese group Hezbollah, operate under the umbrella of the state-sanctioned militias known collectively as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Many of them are supported by Iran.

A senior member of the Popular Mobilization Forces, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said at at least 12 fighters with the Hezbollah Brigades had died in U.S. strikes along the Iraq and Syria border. His account could not immediately be independently confirmed.

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White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien said Sunday he did not want to speculate about North Korea and its threat of “Christmas gift,” but added the U.S. would be “very disappointed” if Pyongyang tested a long-range or nuclear missile.

During an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” O’Brien said the country would take appropriate action as a leading military and economic power if North Korea went ahead with such a test.

O’Brien added Washington has many “tools in its tool kit” to respond.

“We’ll reserve judgment but the United States will take action as we do in these situations,” he said. “If Kim Jong Un takes that approach we’ll be extraordinarily disappointed and we’ll demonstrate that disappointment.”

North Korea had warned of a “Christmas gift” if the U.S. didn’t meet an end of year deadline to soften its stance on nuclear talks that have been stalled since February

U.S.  officials  have been on alert for a potential long-range missile test since the North Korean warning.  

Though Christmas holiday has passed and North Korea did not deliver the so-called “Christmas gift” to the United States,  U.S.-North Korea tensions appear far from resolved.

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No North Korean ‘Christmas Gift’ Yet, But Deadline Looms

No ICBM launches or other provocations on Christmas from North Korea

North Korea’s nuclear program was the “most difficult challenge in the world” when President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, O’Brien told ABC News.

He also suggested that Trump’s strategy of “face-to-face” diplomacy may have forced North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to reconsider.

Talks about North Korea’s denuclearization have been largely deadlocked since a second summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi collapsed at the start of this year.

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The Kremlin says Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a telephone conversation initiated by the Russian side, has thanked U.S. President Donald Trump “for information transmitted via the special services that helped prevent the commission of terrorist acts in Russia.”

There was no immediate confirmation from the U.S. side.

The call also reportedly included discussion of “a set of issues of mutual interest,” according to the official Kremlin website.

Both leaders, Putin’s office said, agreed “to continue bilateral cooperation in the fight against terrorism.”

No other details were provided.

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The Australian government announced Sunday that it would compensate volunteer firefighters in the state of New South Wales (NSW), as the country’s intense bushfire season rages on. 

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said payments of up to A$6,000 would be available for eligible firefighters who had spent more than 10 days in the field this fire season. 

“I know that our volunteer firefighters in NSW are doing it tough, especially in rural and regional areas,” Morrison said in a statement. “The early and prolonged nature of this fire season has made a call beyond what is typically made on our volunteer firefighters.” 

The conservative leader has previously said compensation for volunteers was not a priority, but he has faced increasing political pressure as widespread fires continue to burn. 

On Tuesday, he announced government workers could receive additional paid leave for volunteering. 

While there are different rules across Australia’s states, volunteers tend to negotiate time off directly with their employers. 

Eight fatalities

Bushfires have destroyed more than 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres) in five states since September, and eight deaths have been linked to the blazes. 

Cooler conditions in many areas during Christmas week helped contain some blazes, but the fire risk has increased in parts of the country in the final few days of 2019. 

On Sunday, organizers of a major music festival in the state of Victoria canceled the event, citing extreme weather conditions expected Monday. 

“After consultation with local and regional fire authorities and other emergency stakeholders, it is clear that we have no other option,” the organizers wrote on Facebook. 

The event was meant to run until New Year’s Eve, and 9,000 people were already camping at the site when the announcement was made. 

A total fire ban is in place for all of Victoria on Monday because of forecast high temperatures and strong winds creating an “extreme” fire risk across most of the state. 

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Austria’s Greens, who are in coalition talks with conservatives led by Sebastian Kurz, on Saturday summoned a meeting of their party’s top decision-making body next week to sign off on a deal, indicating an agreement is close. 

The Greens’ Federal Congress, comprising various groups within the party, including its national, local and European lawmakers, must sign off on any coalition deal, and it requires a week’s notice to meet. 

The meeting has been called for January 4 and invitations were sent shortly before midnight, a Greens spokeswoman said. Although a deal has not yet been struck between the Greens and Kurz’s People’s Party (OVP), which won the last parliamentary election on September 29, calling the meeting indicates the Greens believe an agreement will be reached before then. 

Kurz said on Friday as talks resumed after a short Christmas break that he aimed to have a government sworn in by “early to mid-January.” In contrast to the Greens, Kurz can sign off on the deal himself on behalf of his party. 

Given the difficulty in keeping the deal confidential once it is put to the more than 250 members of the Federal Congress, the details are likely to be announced before it meets. Media reports said presentation was likely to happen on January 2 or January 3. 

Few details have emerged so far, but Greens leader Werner Kogler has said he wants an investment package in environmental measures, and Kurz has said his priorities include continuing his hard line on illegal immigration and keeping a balanced budget. 

There have also been reports the deal includes large investments in expanding Austria’s rail network. 

A deal would bring Kurz back to power as chancellor after his coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) collapsed in May over a video sting that felled FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache. A provisional government of civil servants is in place for the time being until a coalition is formed. 

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