(Newser)
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All eyes are on Egypt today, after its Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved parliament, handing the military power in what many are calling a "soft" or "smooth" coup. "The court is not neutral," one Council on Foreign Relations scholar tells CNN. "It is very much part of the old regime. I think you are going to see people pouring into the streets." Indeed, many activists are already calling for demonstrations later today, with both the April 6 Movement and Revolutionary Socialists on-board, the Guardian reports.
- Some are also calling for a boycott of this weekend's presidential runoff. "Electing [a] president in the absence of constitution and parliament is electing an 'emperor,'" Mohamed El Baradei tweeted yesterday.
- Prominent novelist Alaa Al Aswany agrees, writing in the Huffington Post that "the biggest mistake Egyptians could make would be to consider the second round of elections to be a real contest." He thinks the Muslim Brotherhood has a duty to call for the elections to be annulled.
- But in an emergency meeting last night, the Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice party agreed that Mohamed Morsi would stay in the contest, the speaker of the People's Assembly said today, adding that parliament hasn't yet received an order to dissolve, al Jazeera reports.
- In the meantime, many activists are cursing the naiveté of believing they'd brought change at all. "The system was like a machine with a plastic cover," one tells the New York Times, "and what we did was knock off the cover."
