Republican Senator John McCain called for a suspension of U.S. military aid to Egypt after the army ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, breaking with the official position in Washington.

"I've thought long and hard about this, but I believe that we have to suspend the aid to the Egyptian military, because the Egyptian military has overturned the vote of the people of Egypt," McCain said Friday evening at a press conference in his home state of Arizona.

Nobel Peace laureate Mohammed ElBaradei was chosen Saturday as premier to help lead Egypt out of a deepening crisis, sources said, after bloodshed followed the ouster of the country's first freely elected president.

The Tamarod movement, which engineered mass protests culminating in the overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi on Wednesday, made the announcement after talks with Egypt's new interim leader.

Troops loyal to President Bashar Assad seized several buildings on the edges of rebel-held districts of Homs as they pressed an eight-day assault on the central Syrian city, activists said on Saturday.

The army launched its all-out assault last Saturday, subjecting rebel-held areas to continuous bombardment.

Thousands of supporters of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood paid their respects on Saturday to four members of the movement killed in 24 hours of clashes during protests against the ouster of their president.

Violence linked to the political crisis has cost the lives of at least 37 people and injured more than 1,400 across the deeply divided North African nation, official sources say.

Syria's main opposition on Saturday elected Ahmad Assi Jarba to lead the movement which groups opponents of President Bashar Assad, spokesman Khaled Saleh said.

Jarba, who represents the faction of veteran secular dissident Michel Kilo and who is seen as close to Saudi Arabia, obtained 55 votes in the deeply divided Syrian National Coalition.

Bombings north of Baghdad on Saturday killed five people, including a police officer, police and doctors said, a day after attacks across the country left 23 dead.

A roadside bomb killed four people west of the northern city of Kirkuk, while another bomb in Tikrit, also north of the Iraqi capital, killed a police officer and wounded two others.

Residents of Cairo's Manial neighborhood were recovering Saturday from a bloody night of clashes with armed supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who killed at least seven people and left dozens injured, they told Agence France Presse.

The violence erupted when residents tried to stop hundreds of Islamists passing through Manial to reach protests being staged in the iconic Tahrir Square against toppled president Mohammed Morsi, who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lawyers for Egypt's ex-President Hosni Mubarak entered a not guilty plea when his retrial for alleged complicity in the killings of protesters in 2011 resumed on Saturday.

The hearing comes coincidentally just three days after Mubarak's successor Mohamed Morsi was himself toppled and amid turmoil on the streets pitting Islamists against anti-Morsi protesters.

Syrian warplanes launched a series of strikes on the outskirts of Damascus Saturday as President Bashar Assad's regime pressed a bid to drive back rebels, a monitoring group said.

Fresh fighting meanwhile erupted in several flashpoint areas around the capital, while the army renewed its shelling on besieged rebel areas of the central city of Homs, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

A bomb hidden in a plastic bag exploded at a checkpoint in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Saturday, killing three policemen and wounding a fourth, a security services official said.

The device was planted near a police checkpoint in the north of the capital and detonated as the policemen opened the bag to check its contents, the official added.