Belarus said on Friday that its main military court had jailed two Belarussians to eight and 10 years for spying for the neighboring Baltic state of Lithuania.

The Belarussian security service -- still known as the KGB -- said in a statement that a military tribunal had found two men identified as A. Fenzelyau and Ye. Kochura guilty of treason.

European Union rotating president Lithuania called Monday for Israel to stop building settlements in the occupied West Bank, saying they were impeding the peace process.

The statement followed talks between Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and visiting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was to meet EU ministers Saturday to rally support for military strikes against Syria, after a G20 summit failed to resolve bitter international divisions on the issue.

Kerry will press the case for punitive action against Syria after what the United States says was a chemical weapons attack by the regime of President Bashar Assad near Damascus.

Lithuanian police said Tuesday they were probing anti-Semitic slogans scrawled near the site of a former Nazi labor camp in the Baltic state's capital.

The unknown perpetrators wrote "Juden Raus" (Jews out) with marker on a sidewalk in Vilnius and drew a swastika on a nearby pole, police spokeswoman Evelina Pagounis told Agence France Presse.

Lithuania's wooden synagogues, the vestiges of a Jewish presence which was wiped out in the Holocaust, are falling into ruin from a lack of funding and support.

Hidden behind a row of houses, the wooden synagogue in the eastern town of Alanta looks more like a barn than a former house of worship.

Lithuania will become the twelfth European Union nation to adopt a cross-border financial transaction tax, the Baltic state's new Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius said on Friday.

Butkevicius told reporters that he had assured visiting EU tax commissioner Algirdas Semeta that his center-left government would make a formal move in January.

Britain said Wednesday it will abstain on a vote for upgraded Palestinian diplomatic status at the United Nations unless the Palestinians commit to an unconditional return to talks with Israel, as Germany said it would not vote in favor of the resolution.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said Britain would only support Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Thursday's vote at U.N. headquarters if Abbas agreed to negotiations over a lasting two-state deal with Israel.

A new cyberespionage tool linked to the Flame virus has been infecting computers in Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere, security researchers said Monday.

Kaspersky Lab, which was credited with revealing the Flame virus earlier this year, dubbed the new malware "miniFlame," and said it was "a small and highly flexible malicious program designed to steal data and control infected systems during targeted cyber espionage operations."

Latvian airline airBaltic announced Monday it was branching out into another business, claiming to be the world's first carrier to sell cars during its flights.

From Friday, passengers on all airBaltic flights will be able to buy a Mini Cooper R56 -- provided they have a spare 24,699 euros ($33,048).

Lithuania said Friday that it had barred Syrian planes from crossing its airspace on their way to Russia's Kaliningrad territory amid concerns that they could transport military cargo.

A Lithuanian defense ministry spokesperson told Agence France Presse that it acted in line with European Union sanctions, which were imposed in May due to a crackdown by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.