Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan announced on Wednesday a cabinet reshuffle "in the coming days," against the backdrop of a political crisis sparked by gunmen besieging two ministries.

"There will no doubt be a ministerial reshuffle in the coming days," he told a press conference, without specifying which portfolios would change.

The United States is to donate another $100 million (76 million euros) in humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees boosting its total to $510 million, the State Department said Wednesday.

The additional funds, to be officially announced Thursday by Secretary of State John Kerry, will fund U.N. programs for shelter, food and help to refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey as well as inside Syria, it said in a statement.

Saudi authorities on Wednesday beheaded a Pakistani man found guilty of smuggling drugs into the conservative Muslim kingdom, the interior ministry said.

The man was caught attempting to smuggle an amount of heroin hidden inside his stomach, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

Islamic authorities in Belgium tried Wednesday to deter young men from going to Syria to fight, saying the Koran provided no justification and that they risked being dangerously radicalized by extremist groups there.

"Their return from the conflict is to be much more feared than their departure," Belgium's leading Islamic groups said in a statement.

Emirati Islamists on trial accused of plotting to seize power in the Gulf state on Wednesday publicly appealed to the president to probe their alleged torture in custody and denied the charges.

"For months, we have been locked in solitary confinement in narrow cells flooded with bright light day and night. We were insulted and threatened, while some of us suffered physical torture," they wrote in a letter posted online.

British Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Wednesday he will fly to the Russian resort of Sochi on Friday to discuss the Syrian conflict with President Vladimir Putin.

The trip was confirmed by the Kremlin, which said in a statement that Cameron would be on a "working visit" without giving further details.

The editor of an Egyptian newspaper and a reporter will face trial for publishing a "false report that could disturb public peace," a judicial official said on Wednesday.

Magdy al-Gallad, editor of the daily Watan newspaper, and journalist Ahmed Khatib, were charged over a report that a militant cell arrested last year had a hit list comprising 100 Egyptian figures.

Syria's main opposition National Coalition on Wednesday said any political settlement to the country's two-year-old conflict must start with President Bashar Assad's ouster, implicitly rejecting a U.S.-Russian initiative for dialogue with the regime.

U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, meanwhile, hailed the agreement between Washington and Moscow to push both sides in the Syrian conflict to end the bloodshed and sit down for talks.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Wednesday announced he was returning to Israel in late May, as he pursues intensive negotiations to try to kickstart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Speaking at the start of talks with Israeli chief negotiator Tzipi Livni in Rome, Kerry said that all sides "are working through a threshold of questions" with a new "seriousness of purpose."

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of resorting to a new strategy of "ethnic cleansing" to create a safe zone for his Alawite sect, in an interview published Wednesday.

"What concerned us about the Banias incident is that (Assad) has switched to a new strategy to reinstate influence by subjecting a certain area to ethnic cleansing," Davutoglu told the Hurriyet newspaper.