Tagged: Egypt

People around the world are watching anxiously to see the reaction in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities to Thursday's "smooth military coup."

"Leftist and liberal Egyptian activists" have called for demonstrations, al-Jazeera reports, starting after midday prayers in that Muslim nation (Egypt is six hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast).

Egypt's presidential runoff election on Saturday and Sunday was supposed to bring some badly needed stability to a country that's been unsettled since the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

But two days before the election, Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court plunged the country into a full-blown political crisis by ruling Thursday that parliament must be dissolved because part of it was elected illegally.

Rulings by Egypt's highest court to dissolve the country's parliament and keep a former aide to Hosni Mubarak on the presidential runoff ballot have thrown that country's already shaky democracy into chaos.

Much is still unclear about what was happening.

NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson tells our Newscast Desk that: