The partner of a Japanese war reporter shot dead in Syria urged Damascus on Tuesday to investigate her death, saying she had been ambushed by pro-government forces.

Kazutaka Sato, who was the common-law husband of Mika Yamamoto and with her when she was shot dead in Aleppo on August 20, said the international community could never forgive the deliberate targeting of reporters.

U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Derek Plumbly shrugged off on Tuesday a request by the March 14 opposition to deploy UNIFIL troops on Lebanon’s border with Syria.

“We were concerned by what is happening at the border. But our focus, my focus is very much on what we can do to help the Lebanese Armed Forces,” Plumbly said following talks with Prime Minister Najib Miqati at the Grand Serail.

Rebel-held neighborhoods of Syria's northern city Aleppo, which faced renewed army attacks with artillery and mortar fire on Tuesday, are struggling with severe food shortages, a local activist told Agence France Presse.

"The regime prevents food from reaching the liberated areas (under rebel control). Residents are forced to smuggle products from neighborhood to neighborhood," said Barra, an activist in the opposition bastion of Sakhur in Aleppo's northeast.

Red Cross chief Peter Maurer held a 45 minute meeting with President Bashar Assad in Damasc on Tuesday during which he expressed concern over the humanitarian situation in Syria, an official said.

Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, during the meeting urged respect for international humanitarian law and the need to boost assistance on the ground in Syria, ICRC spokesman Hisham Hassan said in a statement.

The March 14 opposition has criticized Prime Minister Najib Miqati for asking Lebanon’s ambassador to Damascus to relay to Syrian authorities “objections” over the shelling of Lebanese border towns, a ministerial source said on Tuesday.

The source told al-Liwaa newspaper that Miqati’s request neither included a complaint nor a protest.

The head of the Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc MP Fouad Saniora handed on Tuesday President Michel Suleiman a March 14 memo that reiterates the opposition’s call for the expulsion of Syrian Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdul Karim Ali and the control of the Lebanese border with Syria through U.N. help.

The memorandum also called for the formation of a national salvation government and filing a complaint to the Arab League over Syria’s repeated border violations.

Syria's main opposition group pleaded Monday for weapons and urgent military intervention to defend civilians from bombardments by President Bashar Assad's army.

"We need a humanitarian intervention and we are asking for military intervention for the Syrian civilians," Syrian National Council leader Abdel Basset Sayda said after meeting Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo.

CIA chief David Petraeus is visiting Turkey for meetings on regional issues, a U.S. official told Agence France Presse on Monday.

The official would not say with whom the CIA chief would be meeting and where.

Veteran war surgeon Jacques Beres has his own compelling reasons for urging that a no-fly zone be imposed over Syria -- one bomb dropped by the regime leaves more wounded than doctors can fix in a day.

Working undercover in the northern city of Aleppo, which has been pounded for weeks as President Bashar Assad's forces seek to overrun rebel bastions, Beres insists the death toll in the Syrian conflict is higher than what is reported.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat stated on Monday that the latest positions on Syria indicate that a regional and international conspiracy has been devised against the Syrian people.

He noted in his weekly editorial in the PSP-affiliated al-Anbaa magazine the “suspicious American and Russian interests in Syria” as demonstrated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s remarks that the Syrian army will not withdraw from the cities and Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey’s refusal to impose a no-fly zone over Syria.