The U.S. government on Tuesday brushed aside a report of a leaked State Department cable indicating that Syria had used chemical weapons in its brutal crackdown on a nearly two-year-old rebellion.

Foreign Policy, an online magazine, said it had acquired a leaked State Department report by U.S. diplomats in Turkey that made a "compelling case" that President Bashar Assad's forces had used poison gas.

Some 670 Syrian students at British universities risk being expelled because they can no longer meet their fees due to the conflict back home, campaign organizers claimed Tuesday.

The collapse of the Syrian currency, the closure of the embassy in Britain, sanctions on Syrian banks and the Syrian higher education ministry stopping funding have made it hard for students to finance their tuition.

Hollywood actress Mia Farrow appealed on Tuesday for the international community to do more for Syrian refugees after making a two-day visit to camps in Lebanon ravaged by winter storms.

Farrow, a goodwill ambassador for U.N. children's agency UNICEF, said that 75 percent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon were women and children, and that they were the "most vulnerable victims" of the conflict raging since March 2011.

Electricity production in Syria has been halved by a lack of fuel supplies at power plants and transport difficulties caused by deteriorating security, the official daily Tishrin said on Tuesday.

"There is a shortfall of about 3,000 megawatts due to a lack of fuel and gas supplies needed to operate the power plants. Production is only at 5,500 megawatts," down from its normal level of 8,500.

Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi arrived in Tehran on Tuesday for consultations with his beleaguered regime's key regional ally, state television reported.

Leading a high ranking delegation, Halaqi was welcomed by his counterpart Mohammad Reza Rahimi.

A top Jordanian Salafist leader said on Tuesday the "mufti" of the jihadist al-Nusra Front in Syria's southern province of Daraa has been in a killed in raid.

"Riyad Hdeib, or Abu Hamzah, was martyred in a regime raid on Daraa on Monday. Hdeib was al-Nusra's mufti in Daraa," Abed Shehadeh, known as Abu Mohammad Tahawi, told Agence France Presse.

Russia said Tuesday it would be "counterproductive" to refer war crimes committed in the Syria conflict to the International Criminal Court as proposed by dozens of states led by Switzerland.

"We view this initiative as untimely and counterproductive to solving today's main goal -- an immediate end to the bloodshed in Syria," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Once cogs in a dynamic industrial engine that helped power Syria's economy, the factories in a sprawling zone in the heart of battle-ravaged Aleppo now stand largely silent, the workers mostly fled.

In their place, thousands of people sheltering from the violence that has swept Syria's northern commercial capital since July, and from the severe winter weather that has brought misery to much of the Middle East.

Twin blasts ripped through the university campus in Syria's second city Aleppo on Tuesday killing at least 82 people and wounding scores more, the provincial governor said.

There were conflicting accounts of the cause of the explosions in a government-controlled area of the battleground northern city.

An artillery attack in the central province of Homs killed at least 10 people on Tuesday, a watchdog said, adding that warplanes launched air strikes on multiple rebel bastions across Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that five women were among those killed in the shelling of Houla in Homs province.