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Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist based in Cairo. He is a Democracy Now! correspondent and a fellow at The Nation Institute.

Last week's presidential elections in Egypt were supposed to mark the final step in what has been an arduous transition from military rule to an elected civilian government. Instead, sixteen months after President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising calling for freedom and social justice, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces has assumed near-full control of all of the key branches of state.

Eric Trager is the Next Generation Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

On Wednesday night, thousands of demonstrators descended onto Tahrir Square to demand an end to military rule. It was the twentieth straight night of these protests, and the Muslim Brotherhood marked the occasion by calling on its hundreds of thousands of members nationwide to join an open-ended Tahrir Square sit-in and "complete the revolution."

The video is disturbing.

Swedish authorities say explosive material turned up in a truck close by one of the country's three nuclear power plants.

The Ringhals nuclear power plant says the material was hidden in a truck that was headed for the facility. Officials discovered it during a routine scan and turned it over to police. The plant says the unidentified material couldn't have caused serious damage.

Joshua Carback is an editor at the student newspaper at Geneva College.

While many Catholic organizations are suing Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius over the Obama administration's new contraception rules, unhappiness with the supposed HHS mandate "compromise" runs even deeper. Many Protestant institutions are also trying to overturn the compromise that coerces private religious institutions to fund health insurers who can provide beneficiaries with abortion-inducing drugs.

Emily Douglas is a senior editor at TheNation.com.