WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- President Joe Biden said the threat of Russian President Vladimir Putin using tactical nuclear weapons is “real”, days after denouncing Russia’s deployment of such weapons in Belarus. “When I was out here about two years ago saying I worried about the Colorado river drying up, everybody looked at me like I was crazy,” Biden told a group of donors in California. “They looked at me like when I said I worry about Putin using tactical nuclear weapons. It’s real,” Biden said. Last week, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said his country has started taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In May, Russia dismissed Biden’s criticism of its plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, saying the U.S. had for decades deployed such nuclear weapons in Europe.

 

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BERLIN/MUNICH/FRANKFURT (Reuters) -- China’s Premier Li Qiang told Germany’s top CEOs that a lack of cooperation was the biggest risk during a visit to lobby for stronger ties even as Europe seeks to reduce its dependence on Asia’s rising superpower. Li met with the heads of corporate titans like Mercedes-Benz, SAP and Siemens Energy on Monday in Berlin ahead of Chinese-German government consultations on Tuesday at the start of his first official trip overseas. The premier will also head to Paris for an official visit and to attend a financial conference on June 22 to 23. The fact his first trip overseas started in Germany underscores the weight of the ties between Asia and Europe’s largest economies. China is Germany’s largest trade partner and is a key market for German companies to export goods and procure materials.

  

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BEIRUT (Reuters) -- Former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn has sued the company for more than $1 billion in a lawsuit filed to Lebanon’s public prosecutor last month, according to a copy of the lawsuit seen by Reuters. The lawsuit filed on May 18 accuses Nissan along with two other companies and 12 named individuals of crimes including defamation, slander, libel and the fabrication of material evidence. A judicial source said the prosecutor has a scheduled a court session on Sept. 18 to begin proceedings. Ghosn, once a titan of the global car industry, was arrested in Japan in late 2018 and charged with financial misconduct. He denied the charge and said his detention was part of a plot by Nissan executives to block a merger. He escaped Japan hidden in a box aboard a private jet in December 2019, fleeing to Lebanon, his childhood home.

 

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KATHMANDU (Reuters) -- Glaciers in Asia’s Hindu Kush Himalaya could lose up to 75% of their volume by century’s end due to global warming, causing both dangerous flooding and water shortages for the 240 million people who live in the mountainous region, according to a new report. A team of international scientists has found that ice loss in the region, home to the famous peaks of Everest and K2, is speeding up. During the 2010s, the glaciers shed ice as much as 65% faster than they had in the preceding decade, according to the assessment by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental scientific authority on the region.  “We’re losing the glaciers, and we’re losing them in 100 years’ time,” said Philippus Wester, an environmental scientist and ICIMOD fellow who was the lead author of the report. The Hindu Kush Himalaya stretches 3,500 km (2,175 miles) across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.

 

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BAMAKO (AFP) -- Mali’s ruling junta has asked prosecutors to probe the UN’s peacekeeping mission for “espionage” following a report which said hundreds of people were massacred last year by Malian troops and their allies. In a statement published on social media on Tuesday, the public prosecutor’s office said a unit specializing in “terrorism and transnational crime” had received a complaint from the state over members of the MINUSMA mission. MINUSMA’S human rights division investigated events that unfolded in the central town of Moura between May 27-31, 2022. According to a report published last month by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), at least 500 people were executed by the Malian army and “foreign” fighters. The junta’s complaint describes the MINUSMA members as “co-authors or accomplices in crimes, among others, of espionage, harming the morale of the army or air force, use of false documents and harming external state security,” said the statement, which was dated Monday.

 

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HELSINKI (AFP) -- Finland’s parliament on Tuesday elected conservative Petteri Orpo as prime minister at the head of a four-party coalition including the far-right Finns Party which plans a major crackdown on immigration. Parliament voted in favor of Orpo, who won April elections and has been in thorny negotiations to build a coalition since then, by 107 in favor, 81 opposed and 11 absent. Orpo was to be formally appointed as prime minister later Tuesday by President Sauli Niinisto, taking over from Sanna Marin, whose Social Democrats finished third in the election behind Orpo’s National Coalition Party (NCP) and the Finns Party. In addition to the NCP and the Finns Party, the new coalition is made up of the smaller Swedish People’s Party (RKP) and the Christian Democrats.