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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