Egypt is roiling with a dire food crisis, impending local elections and a massive general strike planned for the weekend.

The political atmosphere is extremely tense, and police have rounded up more than 800 members of the powerful Islamist opposition group the Muslim Brotherhood ahead of the vote Tuesday in municipal polls. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Egyptian workers are staging a strike Sunday to protest low wages, the bread shortage and government neglect.

Given the extremely volatile climate and the notoriously brutal Egyptian brand of crowd control, there is widespread fear that the demonstrations could turn violent, even deadly. I'll be covering the strike Sunday and elections Tuesday, so check back for updates.

For background on the bread crisis, click here and listen to a report by the talented, Cairo-based Ursula Lindsey, a radio reporter for The World.

And the writers over at Oxford Analytica had this very good summary of what's brewing in Cairo:

Egyptian democracy is an iron first in a velvet glove.

Plainclothes state security forces have been roughing up hundreds of opposition Islamists in recent weeks, ostensibly an attempt to smooth the ruling National Democratic Party's path to future presidential elections.  Local council elections take place on Tuesday and Egypt's authoritarian government has already detained more than 800 members of the Muslim Brotherhood -- the country's largest, oldest and best organised opposition group -- including at least 148 would-be candidates in the council vote. The Brotherhood's case is becoming a cause celebre in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak is facing growing domestic and international pressure to democratise.

Underpinning the heavy-handedness is some sound Egyptian political calculus. Seats on local councils are important if political groups want to line up an independent candidate for a presidential run in the future. Independent candidates for the presidency need endorsements from 140 members of local councils, as well as support from members of both houses of parliament.  The strong showing of the Brotherhood in parliamentary elections in late 2005 will have made the Mubarak regime nervous it could achieve this figure. The Brotherhood, whose version of democracy has distinctly divine overtones, currently holds a fifth of the seats in the lower house of parliament through members elected as independents.