Another 680 to Be Executed in Egypt

It sucks to be on the losing side of a putsch:

An Egyptian court here on Monday sentenced to death the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and more than 680 other people after a swift mass trial on charges of inciting or committing acts of violence that led to the destruction of a police station and the killing of an officer.

The verdict, after a trial lasting only a few minutes, came just a month after the same judge drew condemnation from around the world for sentencing 529 other people to death in a similarly lightning-fast mass trial. The judge, Sayedd Yousef, affirmed the death sentences Monday of about 40 of the defendants in that mass trial and commuted the others to life in prison, which is understood here to mean 25 years.

Egypt’s local government was co-opted by the British in an attempt to collect their debts, who then later established a protectorate which gave way to a domestic kingdom which was overthrown by the military which briefly united with Syria after aligning with the Soviets but losing a war to Israel giving way to an accommodation with the Americans but undermined by the Islamist Egyptian Brotherhood which took power by stealth following a popular revolution only to be removed by a military coup.

There’s really no looking back and saying, “Those were the good old days.”