CAIRO - Clashes between Egyptian riot police and protestors in Cairo have left 388 people injured on Thursday night, one day after a riot killed 74 people in a stadium in Port Said, state TV reported.

Security forces fired tear gas at protestors to prevent them from reaching the Interior Ministry building near Tahrir Square. The protestors chanted slogans against police and held them accountable for allowing fans to enter the stadium with sticks and knives.

Clashes also erupted between protestors and police in Suez governorate on Thursday, state TV said.

Post-match riots between fans of the football teams of el-Masry and el-Ahly in Port Said on Wednesday night left 74 dead and hundreds injured.

The Interior Ministry said 47 people have been arrested.

The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces announced a three-day national mourning over the tragedy from Thursday to Saturday.

Hussein Tantawi, head of the military council, has ordered the formation of a fact-finding committee to probe the clashes in the Port Said Stadium. He said police should be responsible for the security of games.

Egyptian Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri on Thursday sacked Port Said Governor Mohamed Abdel Hashem. The provincial security chief, Essam Samak, and the board of the Egyptian Football Association were also fired.

At an emergency session of the People's Assembly over the deadly football riot, Ganzouri extended deep condolences to the Egyptian people over the incident and said he shouldered the political responsibility for the violence.

On Friday, a big rally is called for in Cairo. The country faces fresh protests due to the latest violent event.

DAMASCUS, Syria - Any UN resolution on the Syrian crisis should support ongoing political dialogue among the local people, a senior government official said, stressing that Damascus is doing what it can to facilitate the process. 

Referring to the UN Security Council debates on Syria in New York, Jihad Makdissi, spokesman for the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the aim of any such move should be to help Syrians. 

"Yes, we do have a crisis. But overcoming the crisis definitely (should) not (be done) by pressuring Syria and dictating Syria what to do," he told China Daily in an exclusive interview. "It (should be done) by engaging and encouraging the opposition to come and talk, because the way out is to have political dialogue and resolution." 

Arab and Western powers on Tuesday urged the Security Council to pass a resolution that, backing an Arab League proposal, requires Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to hand powers to his deputy and defuse the 11-month-old uprisings. 

China on Tuesday said it firmly opposes forcefully pushing for a regime change in Damascus because it would violate "the purpose and principles of the UN Charter and the basic norms governing international relations".

Meanwhile, in Damascus, Makdissi said the government had declared a reform agenda, is rewriting the Constitution and that a referendum would soon be published.

"We have achieved our local administration and we have a parliamentary election coming, and we also have a new law for peaceful demonstration, as well as a new law for political parties that has already been issued, which we want the opposition to engage in," he said. 

He added that the country's ruling party will host a conference this month to elect new leadership.

Epicenter of the crisis 

Echoing earlier views by Russia and China, the Syrian official said there is no reason to internationalize the events unfolding in his country. Damascus is cooperating with any initiative that will help Syria out of the crisis, he said.

Viable solutions to the current crisis should include more than just a resolution, and incorporate mechanisms that will allow Syrians to sit around the same table and "talk to each other without precondition", Makdissi said. 

The official said the greatest obstacle facing Damascus is that forces of "external opposition" refuse to have meaningful dialogue. 

"So what we want is to let the West encourage the government to welcome any reform initiative instead of saying this is not enough and it's too late," he said, adding: "This is what they do with other Gulf countries." 

As government forces reclaimed the eastern suburb of its capital Damascus, the opposition is still active in other cities, including Homs and Hama, as well as in the provinces of Deraa and Idlib, where frequent clashes have been reported.

Even in the streets of Damascus, where the opposition has yet to gain ground, people find themselves increasingly taking sides. 

Taxi driver Bader Baltargy, 34, is a vocal Assad supporter who calls the crisis "a conspiracy of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the West". 

"The government and our president are the only ones that can save the country, and we are ready to defend our nation," he said.

But other locals believe there must be an immediate reshuffling of the administration to end the crisis.

"The officials are so corrupt, and our business is getting more difficult in this country," said Abdul Bassam, owner of a construction company in Damascus. "It's time to have a new government."

Bassam Abu Abdullah, an international affairs professor at Damascus University, said the crisis is a political conspiracy, but one that emerged in the wake of deep-seated political and economic woes.

Assad, the first leader in Syrian history to raise the issue of political reform, has been bound by an aging political mechanism that is too old to do the job, he said. 

At the same time, however, the professor said the deepening crisis in Syria is rapidly evolving into a "proxy war" against Damascus, particularly considering Syria's geopolitical position in the Middle East.

"There are 23 million Syrians, but why do they only support the opposition who are holding foreign passports and have nothing to do with the country?"

WASHINGTON - US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that Israel could attack Iran this spring, the Washington Post reported here on Thursday.

The Washington Post story said: "Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June before Iran enters what Israelis described as a 'zone of immunity' to commence building a nuclear bomb."

The newspaper's columnist David Ignatius wrote in the article that US President Barack Obama and Panetta "are said to have cautioned the Israelis that the United States opposes an attack, believing that it would derail an increasingly successful international economic sanctions program and other non-military efforts to stop Iran from crossing the threshold."

However, the White House hasn't yet decided how the United States would respond if the Israelis do attack, the story added.

The story continued: "US officials see two possible ways to dissuade the Israelis from such an attack: Tehran could finally open serious negotiations for a formula to verifiably guarantee that its nuclear program will remain a civilian one; or the United States could step up its covert actions to degrade the program so much that Israelis would decide that military action wasn't necessary."

The story said that US officials don't think that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made a final decision to attack. But the senior US officials doubt that the Israelis are bluffing, worrying about "the guns of spring - and the unintended consequences."

BEIJING - Even though China's grain output hit a record high last year, the country will continue to maintain grain imports at appropriate levels to balance market demand and supply, a senior official said Thursday. 

The country still imports corn because of the need to balance regional demands, Chen Xiwen, director of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group, said at a press conference. 

"The moderate corn imports do not mean that there is a supply shortage in the domestic market," Chen said 

Considering the exports of corn-processed products such as starch and ethanol and animal products fed on corn, corn exports still exceeded imports, Chen said. 

As for the reason of increasing soybean imports over recent years, Chen said the country's soybean production yield was lower than other countries due to climate, technology, seed varieties and transport reasons. The imports have helped save land for other high-value crops. 

Chen said China's food security was guaranteed as the country's grain output accounted for 22 percent of world's total output last year, while its population made up 19 percent of the world's total. 

China's grain output rose 4.5 percent year-on-year to a record high of 571.21 million tons in 2011, marking the eighth consecutive year of growth for the country's grain output.