World News Highlights 1030 GMT March 18

BEIJING - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating riots in Tibet in which dozens may have died and said his followers were trying to "incite sabotage" of Beijing's August Olympic Games. And a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman went as far as saying the Dalai Lama should face trial.

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LONDON - European shares rose for the first time in four trading days on Tuesday, led by a rebound in financial stocks ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision. HSBC, UBS and BNP Paribas rose 2.5-5 percent, recovering some of the losses from Monday when financial stocks around the world were battered by the fire sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan.

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MOSCOW - Russia and the United States struck an optimistic note on Tuesday before talks that are likely to be tough on nuclear arms control, NATO expansion and U.S. plans to build a missile defence shield. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were due to hold talks with their Russian counterparts after meeting President Vladimir Putin and president-elect Dmitry Medvedev on Monday.

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BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq - The United States intends to complete its mission in Iraq and will not allow the country to become a staging ground for further terrorist attacks on Americans, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said on Tuesday. "All Americans can be certain that we intend to complete the mission so that another generation of Americans does not have to come back here and do it again," Cheney told about 3,000 U.S. troops at Balad Air Base 70 km (45 miles) north of Baghdad.

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TOKYO - The Japanese government put forward on Tuesday a former top finance ministry bureaucrat to run the central bank, but a senior opposition lawmaker warned the surprise choice was likely to be vetoed just like its first choice. The government named Koji Tanami, currently head of a government-backed lending agency, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, to head the central bank, a document obtained by Reuters showed.

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WASHINGTON - More than three in four Americans think the United States is in a recession according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll released on Tuesday. Not since September 1992, two months before President George H.W. Bush lost his re-election bid, have so many Americans said the economy was in such bad shape, USA Today reported.

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MITROVICA, Kosovo - NATO troops secured a hostile strip of north Kosovo on Tuesday after Serb riots in Mitrovica killed one Ukrainian U.N. police officer and forced the pullout of U.N. personnel from the Serb stronghold. The violence was the worst since Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia on Feb 17, and highlighted the risk of the new state's partition along ethnic lines.

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JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian stabbed an Israeli rabbi in Arab East Jerusalem on Tuesday, emergency services said, in an attack likely to further increase already high tensions in the city. The rabbi, 49, was stabbed in the neck but his wounds did not appear to be life-threatening, ambulance workers said.

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BAGHDAD - A conference to reconcile Iraq's warring political groups began to unravel even before it got under way on Tuesday, with the main Sunni Muslim Arab bloc pulling out and protesting it had not been properly invited. The gathering, billed as the biggest of its kind in Iraq, aimed to bring leaders of rival factions together around much-delayed so-called laws meant to promote common cause between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

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NEW YORK - Turkey's economy can withstand global economic turmoil, Economy Minister Mehmet Simsek told Reuters, to the point that a new IMF stand-by agreement is not needed and is indeed "unlikely". The International Monetary Fund's $10 billion loan agreement with Turkey, which expires in May, has been an anchor for Turkey's economy, helping it rebound strongly from a financial crisis in 2001.