Driving the agenda: Turkey’s failed coup is the biggest story about Egypt in the international press this morning, starting with coverage of how Cairo blocked a U.N. Security Council call to respect the “democratically elected government of Turkey.” According to Reuters: “We proposed different language that respects democratic and constitutional principles but the Americans refused to engage,” Egypt’s U.N. Ambassador Amr Aboulatta said.

Erdogan is also said to have “avoided the fate of Egypt’s Morsi” (Wall Street Journal), and an Associated Press piece about state-owned media’s having jumped the gun and declared the coup a success in their print editions is getting wide pickup.

Egyptian author Yasmine El Rashidi went on NPR to talk to Steve Inskeep about her debut novel, Chronicle of a Last Summer. “It follows a young Egyptian whose life and country change over three turbulent summers.”

Egypt held the first centrally-dictated Friday sermon this past weekend following a government move to set Friday sermons through the Ministry of Endowments, reports Middle East Eye. Random attendees of the sermons opposed the idea, claiming a unified sermon fails to tackle different segments of society, while others believe the move is a political one aiming to curb discussion into state policies, the article claims. Last year, after banning unlicensed imams, the government imposed standardized weekly topics to be followed on Friday prayers. The latest move takes that one step further, imposing pre-written sermons that are to be followed verbatim.