The disgraced former chairman of Nissan is expected to speak to journalists in Beirut on Wednesday, more than a week after his dramatic escape from Japan ahead of his trial for alleged financial misconduct.
The highly anticipated news conference by Carlos Ghosn will be first public appearance since he smuggled himself from Tokyo to Beirut, arriving in the Lebanese capital where he grew up and is regarded by many as a national hero.
Dozens of local and international journalists are expected to attend. Lebanese authorities have not made any comments about the news conference and it was not immediately clear whether they intend to summon him for questioning.
Ghosn’s daring and improbable escape has perplexed and embarrassed Japanese authorities after he skipped bail and managed to flee the country despite supposedly rigorous surveillance.
Media reports have said that he left his residence alone, met two men at a Tokyo hotel, and then took a bullet train to Osaka before boarding a private jet hidden inside a case for musical equipment. He flew to Istanbul and was then transferred onto another plane bound for Beirut, where he arrived Dec. 30.

Journalists are seen near a car entering the garage of a house believed to belong to former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn in Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 2, 2020.Lebanese authorities have said Ghosn entered the country on a legal passport, casting doubt on the possibility they would hand him over to Japan. Lebanon last week received an Interpol-issued wanted notice – a non-binding request to law enforcement agencies worldwide that they locate and provisionally arrest a fugitive.
Lebanon and Japan do not have an extradition treaty, and the Interpol notice does not require Lebanon to arrest him.
Ghosn, who is Lebanese and also holds French and Brazilian passports, was expected to go on trial in Tokyo in April. In statements, he has said he fled to avoid “political persecution” by a “rigged Japanese justice system.” He also said that he alone organized his departure from Japan and that his wife, Carole, played no role.
On Tuesday, Tokyo prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant for Carole Ghosn on suspicion of perjury. That charge is not related to his escape. Lebanon’s justice minister said Tuesday that Lebanon has not received any request related to that warrant.
Japanese justice officials acknowledge that it’s unclear whether the Ghosns can be brought back to Japan to face charges.
Ghosn’s former employer, Nissan Motor Co., said it was still pursuing legal action against him despite his escape, adding that Ghosn engaged in serious misconduct while leading the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance. Ghosn denies all the charges.

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Elton John and Chris Hemsworth are among the celebrities donating big bucks to help aid the efforts for the engulfing wildfires in Australia.
Hemsworth, the Australian actor, took to social media on Monday to share that he will donate $1 million and asked his plethora of followers to show support as well. He said that “every penny counts.”
So far, the wildfires have scorched an area twice the size of the U.S. state of Maryland. The blazes have killed 25 people and destroyed 2,000 homes. The fires, fueled by drought and the country’s hottest and driest year on record, have been raging since September, months earlier than is typical for Australia’s annual wildfire season.
“Like you, I want to support the fight against the bushfires here in Australia,” he said in a video on Twitter. “Hopefully you guys can chip in too. Every penny counts so whatever you can muster up is greatly appreciated. In my bio I’ve added links to support the fire fighters, organizations (sic) and charities who are working flat out to provide support and relief during this devastating and challenging time.”
John announced during his Farewell Yellow Brick Road concert in Sydney, Australia, that he will also donate $1 million. The singer said he wanted to bring attention to the devastation that wildfires have caused, saying it has reached a “biblical scale.”
Hemworth and John joins a growing list of celebrities who have pledged to donate toward relief efforts including Nicole Kidman, Pink and Keith Urban.
“I am totally devastated watching what is happening in Australia right now with the horrific bushfires,” Pink wrote in a recent social media post. “I am pledging a donation of $500,000 directly to the local fire services that are battling so hard on the frontlines. My heart goes out to our friends and family in Oz.”
At the Golden Globes on Sunday, Phoebe Waller-Bridge said she would auction off her Globe outfit and have the proceeds go to firefighter relief.
Russell Crowe wasn’t at the Globes to accept his trophy for best actor in a limited series or TV movie for playing for playing former Fox CEO Roger Ailes in the Showtime miniseries “The Loudest Voice.” Instead, the actor was in Australia trying to protect his home from the wildfires, sending a speech read by Jennifer Aniston.
“Make no mistake, the tragedy unfolding in Australia is climate change-based,” Crowe’s statement read. “We need to act based on science, move our global workforce to renewable energy and respect our planet for the unique and amazing place it is. That way, we all have a future.”

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The escalation between the United States and Iran over the killing of an Iranian commander now has sparked deep concerns about prospects for the peace process in Afghanistan, with officials and experts warning that Iran could collaborate with the Taliban to thwart American efforts in the war-torn country.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Iran Tuesday of attempting to build proxy networks in Afghanistan, asserting that Iran is trying to coordinate with the Taliban and its offshoot, the Haqqani network.
“Iran has refused to join the regional and international consensus for peace, and is, in fact, actively working to undermine the peace process by continuing its long global effort to support militant groups there,” Pompeo said during his opening remarks at a rare State Department news conference.
The top U.S. diplomat warned that the “Taliban’s entanglement in Iran’s dirty work will only harm the Afghanistan peace process.”
VOA reached out to Afghan officials who declined to comment on Pompeo’s statement, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
Experts in both Kabul and Washington concur that Iran is likely to increase its outreach to the Taliban as part of its effort to retaliate against the U.S. for targeting Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) in an airstrike last week.

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“Tehran has a sky-high incentive to scale up arms support to the Taliban that enables the insurgents to push back against U.S. forces. It would be a relatively risk-free Iranian reprisal against the U.S.,” said Michael Kugelman, director for the Asia Program at the Wilson Center in Washington.
Kugelman said Iran has a long history of aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan. A recent high-profile example of Tehran’s support for the Afghan militants came last year when the Taliban staged a large-scale attack in the western Farah province, reportedly with material and assistance provided by Soleimani’s Quds Force.
He said disturbing U.S. efforts to restore peace would be a viable option for Tehran officials as they determine responses to the deadly U.S. strike on Soleimani and other key Iranian officials.
“The only question would be the status of Taliban peace talks. If the Taliban has signed a deal with the U.S. and agreed to stop attacks on U.S. forces, then that makes it less likely to cooperate with Tehran,” he told VOA.
The Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has publicly expressed concerns that Soleimani’s death could turn his country into a battleground.
“We call on the Islamic Republic of Iran, our big neighbor, with whom we have extensive common language, religious, historic and cultural [values], and we call on the U.S., who is Afghanistan’s strategic and fundamental partner, to prevent conflict escalations, and we hope that both sides solve their differences through negotiations,” Ghani said in a statement last week.
Despite Ghani’s ongoing efforts to keep Afghanistan out of the conflict, some analysts charge escalating salvos in the Middle East inevitably will disrupt the minimal progress made in the Afghan peace process.
According to Rebecca Zimmerman, a researcher on Afghanistan, “If Iran is looking for a way to respond to the U.S, without taking actions that could lead to war, Afghanistan is a place where it might be able to inflict pain while staying below the threshold of war.”

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Mohammad Jawad Rahimi, a U.S.-based Afghanistan political analyst, says the peace process is particularly vulnerable given Iran’s leverage on certain members of the Taliban.
“I don’t believe that all the Taliban listen to Iran, but definitely some of them who are receiving Iranian support will be used against the U.S.,” said Rahimi, noting adding that Taliban leaders in the past repeatedly have traveled to Iran and received military support from Tehran.
“In 2016, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor spent two months in Iran and on his way back to Pakistan, he was killed by a U.S. airstrike. An Iranian passport and other documents were found in his pocket. Last year, the Taliban delegation, including Mullah Beradar, traveled to Iran and met with Iranian Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif and other Iranian officials. One of their main agenda items was to stop the U.S.-Taliban negotiations. The meeting between the two sides was confirmed by the Taliban’s spokesman and Iranian officials,” Rahimi told VOA.
The Afghan peace process has gained some momentum since late 2018 in an effort to end nearly 19 years of ongoing war in Afghanistan. The process, involving direct U.S. talks with the Taliban, seeks to reach an agreement that begins intra-Afghan peace, followed by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.
VOA’s  Muhammad Habibzada from Washington contributed to this story.

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Iranian state media reported Wednesday a Ukrainian passenger plane carrying 180 people crashed shortly after taking off from an airport in Tehran.
There was no immediate word on injuries.
The reports said the suspected cause of the crash was mechanical issues.

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Iran’s top commander Qassem Soleimani was killed last week in a U.S. airstrike in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Soleimani, who led Iran’s elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was the architect of many Shi’ite and pro-Iranian proxy militia groups across the region known as the “Axis of Resistance.” Here is a look at those groups.

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Tesla’s Shanghai factory delivered its first cars to customers Monday and chief executive Elon Musk said the electric automaker plans to set up a design center in China to create a model for worldwide sales.
Musk presided at a ceremony where a half-dozen buyers wearing red Tesla T-shirts drove away new Model 3 sedans. He expressed thanks to earlier customers who he said made Tesla’s expansion in China possible by purchasing imported models from the fledgling brand.
Tesla Inc. built the Gigafactory 3, its first outside the United States, following the ruling Communist Party’s 2018 decision to allow full foreign ownership in electric car manufacturing. It is due to produce the Model 3 and a planned SUV, the Model Y.
Producing in China insulates Tesla from possible duty increases on imported U.S.-made vehicles from Beijing’s tariff war with Washington. Other foreign automakers including General Motors Co., Volkswagen AG and Toyota Motor Co. have long had joint venture factories in China.

Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk takes off his coat onstage during a delivery event for Tesla China-made Model 3 cars in Shanghai, China, Jan. 7, 2020.China is the biggest global market for electrics, but Tesla’s manufacturing launch comes at a time when sales are sagging following the end of government subsidies in mid-2019.
Total electric vehicle sales fell almost 45% in November from a year earlier to 95,000. Sales for the first 11 months of 2019 were up 1.3% at just over 1 million vehicles.
Musk said Tesla plans to increase investment in China and set up a design center to “create a car for worldwide sale,” but he gave no details.
The Chinese-made Model 3 starts at 299,050 yuan ($42,680) following a price cut announced last month.
The company said production began in December and 15 Model 3s were delivered to Tesla employees in Shanghai on Dec. 30.
Sales targets
Tesla faces a crowded market flooded with dozens of electric models from rivals including GM, VW, Nissan Motor Co. and China’s BYD Auto and BAIC. They are under pressure to meet government sales targets that shift the cost of promoting the technology to the industry.
Automakers that fail to meet their targets can buy credits from rivals that do. That might turn into a windfall for Tesla and other brands that earn a surplus because their whole output is electric. Beijing has yet to set the price of credits.
The Shanghai factory makes Tesla the first foreign auto brand with full ownership of its China operation.
Other global brands work through partnerships with state-owned automakers and share their revenues. Most are expected to remain in such ventures to take advantage of their Chinese partners’ government relationships despite the ruling party’s plans to allow full foreign ownership in the whole auto industry by next year.
Tesla reported earlier it delivered a total of 367,500 cars last year.
The company surprised investors by reporting a $143 million profit in the quarter ending in September, raising hopes Tesla may be turning to profitability. The company lost $1.1 billion in the first half of the year.
 

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Russian President Vladimir Putin visits Istanbul Wednesday to inaugurate a new gas pipeline between the two countries. Energy cooperation is the foundation of a growing rapprochement between Russia and Turkey, which is a NATO member. As Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul, during the visit the Russian and Turkish leaders are expected to address growing differences in their bilateral relationship, on issues ranging from Syria to Libya.

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The start of a new year is the time for resolutions and promises, and New York state decided to welcome 2020 with a series of bans. The state governor Andrew M. Cuomo signed almost 700 initiatives ranging from helping immigrants to protecting pets. Nina Vishneva looked into what will be banned in the state in 2020 and how New Yorkers feel about it. Anna Rice narrates her story.

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A researcher with dual French-Iranian nationality held for months in a notorious Tehran prison will not be tried on espionage charges, her lawyer said Tuesday. But she and another French researcher still face other security-related charges.
Iranian prosecutors dropped the spying charges against Fariba Adelkhah after an hours-long hearing, Saeid Dehghan told The Associated Press. Both Adelkhah and Roland Marchal will remain in custody on charges of spreading propaganda, their lawyer said.
Iranian officials disclosed in July that Adelkhah, a prominent anthropologist who often traveled to Iran for research on post-revolutionary Iranian society, had been arrested on espionage charges. Her friend and fellow researcher Marchal was arrested as he tried to visit her, France revealed in October. He is being held in a men’s ward.
In December, France summoned Iranian envoy to Paris, saying it considered the months-long detention of Adelkhah and Marchal “unacceptable” and sought permission for consular officials to visit them.
Iran does not recognize dual nationality for its citizens.
Also in December, Adelkhah and Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an academic and co-prisoner from Australia, went on hunger strike to protest their detention. The strike was revealed by the Center for Human Rights in Iran. They were confirmed by Sciences Po’s research center CERI, where Adelkhah works.
Abdekhah’s lawyer did not say if she remained on hunger strike.
Moore-Gilbert, a University of Melbourne scholar on the Middle East, has been jailed since October 2018.
Two Australians were freed from Iran in October while Australia freed an Iranian in what appeared to be a prisoner swap.
Meanwhile, Iran had indicated a willingness to make prisoner exchanges with the United States after freeing a Chinese-American scholar from Princeton held for three years in a prisoner swap.
However, these moves all came prior to the U.S. killing of Iran’s top general last week, which has dramatically increased tensions between Washington and Tehran.
 

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U.S. officials said Tuesday that Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general whom the U.S. killed in a drone strike, posed a distinct threat to Americans in the Middle East, but again publicly offered no specific evidence of any attack he was about to carry out.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters “multiple pieces of information” from intelligence sources were given to President Donald Trump before he made the decision to target Soleimani in last week’s attack that killed him in Iraq at the Baghdad airport.

National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien said Soleimani was plotting to attack American facilities where he would have killed American “diplomats, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.” But similar to Pompeo, O’Brien offered no specifics on the timing of what Trump administration officials have called an “imminent threat” that Soleimani posed.
O’Brien called it “strong evidence and strong intelligence,” while adding, “Unfortunately we’re not going to be able to get into sorts of methods at this time, but I can tell you it was very strong.”
Pompeo said, “We could see clearly that not only had Soleimani done all the things that we have recounted, like hundreds of thousands of massacres, enormous destruction of countries like Lebanon and Iraq, where they denied…people in those two countries what it is they want, sovereignty, independence and freedom. This is all Soleimani’s handiwork. Then we would watch as he was continuing the terror campaign in the region….”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks about Iran at the State Department in Washington, Jan. 7, 2020.“If you’re looking for imminence, you need look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani,” Pompeo said, including the late December attack that killed an American contractor working in Iraq.
Pompeo added that there were “continuing efforts on behalf of this terrorist to build out a network of campaign activities that were going to lead potentially to the death of many more Americans.”
The top U.S. diplomat concluded that the drone attack “was the right decision, we got it right. The Department of Defense did excellent work. The president had an entirely legal, appropriate basis, as well as a decision that fit perfectly within our strategy on how to counter the threat of malign activity from Iran.”
Iran has vowed to exact revenge for Soleimani’s killing, with O’Brien saying, “We take those seriously and we’re watching and monitoring them.” But with Trump threatening to respond to any new Iran attack, O’Brien said, “We hope that they’re deterred, and that they think twice about attacking America and its interests.”
Even as threats and counter-threats ricocheted between Washington and Tehran, O’Brien said he believes the world is a safer place with the killing of Soleimani.
“Look, over, over the past four months, the two greatest terrorist threats in the world, (Islamic State leader Abu Bakr) al Baghdadi and Soleimani, have both been taken off the battlefield,” O’Brien said outside the White House. “I think that makes us safer, and in fact we’ve been congratulated and told that privately by world leaders from every region in the world who’ve reached out to congratulate us for this activity.”
In Iran, officials delayed Soleimani’s burial, state media reported, after more than 50 people were killed in a stampede of mourners and more than 200 others injured.

Coffins of Gen. Qassem Soleimani and others who were killed in Iraq by a U.S. drone strike, are carried on a truck surrounded by mourners during a funeral procession, in the city of Kerman, Iran, Jan. 7, 2020.Tens of thousands of people had gathered to honor Soleimani in his hometown of Kerman before his planned burial, following similar ceremonies this week in Tehran, Qom and Ahvaz.
Many of the mourners screamed for retaliation against the United States for the killing of Soleimani. “No compromise, no submission, revenge!” they shouted.   
Soleimani’s killing has sparked fears of a wider conflict as the United States and Iran threatened strong responses to each other’s actions.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif contended in a CNN interview that the U.S. killing of Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, constituted “state terrorism.”
“This is an act of aggression against Iran, and it amounts to an armed attack against Iran, and we will respond,” Zarif said. “But we will respond proportionately – not disproportionately…we are not lawless like President Trump.”
With heightened tensions between the United States and Iran, Washington has denied Zarif a visa to travel to New York for upcoming United Nations meetings. Pompeo refused to spell out the reasons behind the denial of the visa.
Following the airstrike, Iran announced it was further cutting its compliance with the 2015 agreement that restrained its nuclear program. That prompted Trump, who withdrew from the deal and applied new sanctions against Iran, to tweet Monday, “IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2020
   
Trump also vowed late Sunday that the U.S. will strike “very hard and very fast” at as many as 52 Iranian targets if Iran attacks U.S. personnel or assets.  The number 52 represents the number of Americans Tehran took hostage in 1979 for 444 days.
“They’re allowed to kill our people,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people and we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way.” Pompeo said the U.S., in any new attacks on Iran, would act according to international legal constraints on warfare, under which attacks on cultural sites are considered a war crime.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani rebuffed Trump’s threat on Monday, tweeting, “Those who refer to the number 52 should also remember the number 290. #IR655. Never threaten the Iranian nation.”
It was a reference to the U.S. mistakenly shooting down an Iranian passenger jet flying over the Persian Gulf in 1988, killing all 290 people aboard the aircraft. Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan expressed deep regret over the incident and the U.S. paid nearly $62 million in reparations to the victims’ families.
 

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Zimbabwean authorities say they have retrieved the bodies of two park rangers who had arrested four poachers but were then thrown into Lake Kariba by the suspects.
                   
The bodies of the two rangers were taken to the capital, Harare, for examinations, said Tinashe Farawo, spokesman for the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority on Tuesday.
                   
The two rangers had arrested four Zambian men for poaching and on Dec. 31 were transporting them by boat to Kariba town to be charged and jailed. But the four suspects overpowered the rangers and threw them into Lake Kariba, said Farawo. The rangers’ bodies were discovered after a week-long search.
                    
Authorities are searching for the suspected poachers, he said.
                   
The rangers had caught the poachers in Matusadona National Park, home to lions, leopards, elephants and hyena on the shores of Lake Kariba, one of the world’s largest man-made lakes. The park is popular with tourists who go on walking safaris and boating on the lake.
                   
The rangers had detained the poachers overnight before attempting to take them by boat to Kariba town.
                   
Although the parks agency has recorded “a significant decrease” in poaching in the wildlife rich southern African country, cases of armed contact between poachers and rangers have been on the rise in the Kariba area, where Zimbabwe borders Zambia to the north, said Farawo. The two countries share the lake as well as the magnificent Victoria Falls along the Zambezi River.

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Hong Kong’s health chief said Tuesday that a respiratory illness whose cause remains unknown will be added to an official list of diseases that medical practitioners are required to report to the government.
The disease — an unidentified form of viral pneumonia — has sent 59 people to the hospital in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan, in central Hubei province. As of Sunday, seven were in critical condition, while the rest were stable. Municipal authorities have ruled out SARS, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed 700 people in 2002 and 2003.
In Hong Kong, a total of 15 patients were being treated Sunday for symptoms including fever and respiratory infection after recent visits to Wuhan. It is not clear whether they have the same illness as the Wuhan patients.
Speaking at a news conference, the health chief, Sophia Chan, said the “severe respiratory disease associated with a novel infectious agent” will be added to a list of reportable infectious diseases in Hong Kong’s Prevention and Control of Disease Ordinance.
The regulation enables the government to take stronger measures against the spread of certain diseases, such as tuberculosis and chicken pox. Actions under the ordinance could include enforcing quarantines or limiting the movement of people who are suspected to have infections.
“Under the amendment, medical practitioners will have to report suspected cases as well as carry out appropriate investigations and follow-ups to the Center for Health Protection under the Department of Health,” Chan said.

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