The desperate situation in Zimbabwe is deteriorating yet further ahead of next week's presidential run-off election between Robert Mugabe and the opposition MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who was arrested and released over the weekend for the fifth time of the "campaign." Tsvangirai's deputy, Tendai Biti, is currently being held in an undisclosed location, with treason charges supposedly being prepared against him.

Meanwhile, the Mugabe re-election drive is in full swing: under the oversight of the army and police, killings, beatings and intimidation are being employed to cow the Flickring The Revolution?: Sokwanele documents horrors no conventional reporter can get nearpopulation into voting for ZANU-PF, with scarce food rations being used as political weapons to secure the support of a starving electorate. Voter registration in MDC areas is being severely curtailed, and officials have taken to simply handing out billions of dollars of Zimbabwe's all-but-worthless currency in return for votes. Mugabe bellows darkly of "going to war" if the country is "taken over by lackeys." Given the vast scale on which these elections are being perverted, he may not need to.

Reporting restrictions make it difficult to know exactly what is happening on the ground, with most Western media banned from the country or operating under intolerable circumstances. But information about the harassment and violence being suffered by opposition activists is filtering out by other methods, some of them remarkably innovative. Chief among these has been the advent of blogging, which we have seen in previous situations such as the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah two years ago and the short-lived Burmese uprising of last autumn.

Where mainstream media are sometimes unable to operate freely, whether due to restrictions imposed by repressive regimes or the exigencies of wartime conditions, lone bloggers have often come to the fore in passing on vital information denied to us through traditional means. In Lebanon in 2006, Beirut residents sat on their balconies describing Israeli aircraft coming overhead; students in Haifa liveblogged from bomb shelters until the all clear was sounded. Some of these firsthand accounts provided valuable context to the reports on the evening news bulletins; others challenged the conventional wisdom we were being fed by our media, whatever you thought that was.

A similar pattern emerged in Burma last year, with the junta's clampdown on reporting from inside the country making traditional reporting all but impossible. Small independent newspapers, resistance groups and bloggers filled the gap, with photos of demonstrations being posted to the web and picked up by news agencies hungry for fresh pictures --- any pictures --- to accompany their stories in the era of 24-hour rolling TV news. But the shortcomings of these outlets quickly became clear; with limited internet penetration into the impoverished country, it was easy enough for the government to block access to blogging platforms for residents of Rangoon and other cities, and the piecemeal supply of information eventually dried up.

The same sort of problem applies in Zimbabwe, whose citizens have long had more pressing problems than a dearth of affordable broadband connections. But information is coming through, thanks in part to the advent of trends such as microblogging, made possible through platforms like Twitter, which (for the benefit of readers as technologically backward as I am) allows users to post information from any internet connection or, crucially, a mobile phone, and makes it easy for others to access the resulting updates. Organisations such as Sokwanele, a civic action group operating out of Zimbabwe and neighbouring countries, are collating information from local activists and observers and disseminating it via RSS feeds and Twitter, and posting photos of demonstrations and police brutality to specially set up Flickr accounts, in ways which the authorities are simply powerless to stop. They even have an interactive Google map charting instances of voter fraud and intimidation by the authorities, and you can follow Morgan Tsvangirai's campaign via Google Earth.

This is not the first time that services like Twitter have been used to outwit security services. A Berkeley student covering an anti-government protest in Egypt used his cellphone to post the one-word update "Arrested" when the police picked him up, and was released within the day. But Zimbabwean activists can count on no such deus ex machina; no embassy or consulate is waiting to spring into action to release those incarcerated in Mugabe's jails. And this is where the limitations of technological advances are most evident. As in Burma, telling the outside world what is happening to you is one thing, and getting them to help you is quite another. Whether through impotence, overstretch or apathy, there is little appetite for Western intervention in the wake of Iraq (as discussed by Daniel last week), and Thabo Mbeki's South Africa, the one regional agent who might realistically exert some diplomatic leverage, has been utterly spineless in the face of Mugabe's brutal campaign against his own people.

And so we watch and wait for the results of next week's elections; and, thanks to the bravery and ingenuity of a few committed activists, we have a front row seat for Zimbabwe's continuing death agony. But we're unlikely to get up from the sofa, no matter what happens. So, yes, the revolution will be televised - but to what end?

Poland: Still a bit pissed about the war Saturday saw the kick-off of the European Football Championships in Basel. The tournament for Europe’s top 16 football (you call it 'soccer') nations is being co-hosted this year by Switzerland and Austria, neither of which is a noted hotbed of footballing passion, but feelings have nonetheless been running high for the past few days. That has little to do with the placid Alpine fans, and more to do with Sunday’s match between old rivals Germany and Poland.

In the run-up to the game, the Polish tabloid Super Express devoted its back page to a gruesome depiction of the Polish coach holding the severed heads of Joachim Löw and Michael Ballack, the German trainer and captain respectively, beside the headline “Leo, give us their heads!” A minor diplomatic incident ensued, with the situation defused only by an in-person apology from the Polish coach to the two decapitated Germans. “This is shit,” exclaimed Leo Beenhakker angrily. “Here one sees what sick people there are in this world.” Though the match itself was unremarkable, rival fans clashed afterwards, with some 150 detained; it is reported today that some of the German fans were heard singing Nazi and anti-Semitic chants.

Polish antagonism towards their neighbors has shown little sign of abating with the passage of time; last year, the then Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, caused outrage when he suggested that Poland’s voting rights in European Union institutions, weighted according to population, be rebalanced to take account of the millions killed by the Germans during the war. But in a continent which has largely banished conflict as a means of settling grievances, football is often the continuation of war by other means. Local rivalries exist in all sports everywhere, but Europeans are particularly good at using them as an excuse to dredge up old grudges.

Holland Brought It: to germany in 1988 Perhaps the most famous of these is the rivalry between Holland and, yes, Germany. When the Germans hosted these championships 20 years ago, the Dutch convoys came across the border singing "In 1940 they came, in 1988 we came" (it's catchier in Dutch, apparently). Two years ago, the fans traveled back across to Germany for the World Cup clad in WWII-style orange plastic helmets. The atmosphere is reasonably light-hearted these days, but there is no mistaking the undercurrents running beneath the surface.

Other match-ups are more hostile. Games between Greece and Turkey, or Serbia and Croatia, have in recent years seen major clashes between supporters. Armenia and Azerbaijan took it one stage further; their two qualifying matches for this competition were simply canceled amidst childish wrangling over venues. As for Israel, they clock up the air miles competing in the European football set-up, rather than against their Arab neighbors.

But, just as football fans can use the sport to express hostility, it can also serve as a vehicle for more positive nationalist sentiments. In the Gorbachev era, for example, with Soviet republics beginning to scent independence, fans used local club sides as proxies for the national teams that were still some years off. And so supporters of Ararat Yerevan, say, would look forward to games against "Georgia" or "Lithuania," not Dinamo Tbilisi or Žalgiris Vilnius, and chant the name of their opponents’ home republic in solidarity.

In some parts of Europe, club teams remain a focus for regional or national pride. Barcelona is still sentimentally seen as a substitute for a Catalan national side (despite being stuffed with foreign players), AEK Athens historically draw their support from the descendants of the displaced Greeks of Asia Minor, Glasgow Celtic "represent" Scotland’s Irish Catholic community. As for my own country, it has been seriously argued that devolution of government from Westminster to Edinburgh was delayed by two decades due to the timing of a referendum on the issue just months after Scotland's shattering failure at the 1978 World Cup.

Arc de Triomphe: after france's world cup win in 1998 But we who follow the sport with maniacal devotion (I'm typing this with one eye on the France-Romania match in the corner of my screen) do have a tendency to exaggerate its powers. The most remarked example of football as vehicle for social cohesion from recent years is probably France’s World Cup-winning team of 1998, whose members comprised a veritable rainbow of races and immigrant backgrounds; Armenian, Basque, Senegalese and Caribbean. The crowds celebrated in the Champs-Élysées under a giant picture of the great Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, illuminated in red, white and blue under the slogan "Zidane Président." The chattering classes in France loved it.

Only Jean Marie Le Pen and his National Front chose to strike a sour note: "France cannot recognize itself in the national side," he griped. "Maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of color, and should have been a bit more careful." Le Pen's casual racism seemed out of step with the time, but four years later he was in a runoff for the Presidency against Jacque Chirac, and few would say that Zidane's iconic image has done much for relations between "native" French and the country's large Muslim population. Perhaps sport serves as a focus for national pride when other outlets aren't available; maybe it's a safety valve that allows us to mock our enemies without (usually, at least) fighting them in the streets; maybe it can hold up a mirror to our society and help up see ourselves as others see us. Maybe it can even change that society for the better. But hang on; in the corner of my screen, it looks as if the French team of 2008 may finally be stuttering into life, so let's wrap this up.

The actual football game between Germany and Poland? It passed off without incident. The Germans won, as the Germans usually do. Appropriately, both goals were scored by striker Lukas Podolski, who was born in Poland and left when he was a child. He did not celebrate.

For those of us who have a low opinion of their politicians, the world-weary editorial in today's Lebanese Daily Star is something of a classic of the genre. "Since Lebanese political parties are built around backward concepts like tribal loyalties and cults of personality," they write,

they don't have policy platforms. This means that when an unqualified minister is appointed, he cannot even fall back on a coherent set of guidelines, making him even more useless than would otherwise be the case. For another, ministries in more advanced societies are stacked with professional civil servants who help limit the damage that can be done when a crook or a dolt is named as their boss.

The Corniche Beirut In Happier Days I love it. Still, for most Lebanese this is no laughing matter. Last month's peace deal in Doha, Qatar, hammered out a fragile coalition deal between Lebanon's patchwork of ethnic and religious minorities, and has widely been seen as a victory for our old friends Hezbollah, who have seen their veto on government policies formalised in the new constitutional arrangements.

US reaction has been lukewarm, to say the least, and Israeli opinion is even more pessimistic. After all, they launched a war against Hezbollah to try and neutralise their power; now the bastards are practically in government. But ordinary Lebanese are, at least for now, hoping that the peace deal can bring some much-needed stability to their country and, crucially, the investment that goes with it.

Anyone who's ever spent time trying to get their heads round the Byzantine power-sharing arrangements of countries like Iraq, Bosnia or Northern Ireland will have a strong sense of déjà vu about the Lebanese deal. Plum jobs, most notably prime minister and speaker of the house, are to be apportioned by faction leaders according to what minority they hail from: Sunni, Shia, Maronites, Druze, Greek Orthodox and Armenians must all be represented. Delicately balanced voting systems, side deals on redrawing the electoral map, compromises on the terrorists’ weapons stockpiles --- all the usual ingredients are present and correct.

And sitting there in the opposition is Hezbollah. They've have played a reasonably canny game to get this far; as Thomas Friedman noted in the Times over the weekend, the new deal will allow them power without responsibility, claiming credit for anything positive that comes out of the new government without being blamed for the screw-ups. Indeed, the main opposition party sits in the cabinet while maintaining a private army some 10,000 strong. That must make for some tense budget meetings.

It's not all good news for the Party of God; while their fight against Israel won them plenty of admirers, they've squandered a great deal of that goodwill since, not least following the recent "occupation" of West Beirut and subsequent violence that left dozens of Lebanese dead. But it's no wonder that the US and Israel bite their tongue and swallow, hard. This is not the outcome that they would have wanted, but it may be the best on offer.

The 64,000 lira question, of course, is whether this precarious arrangement will hold. I'm far too wily to offer a firm prediction on that, but you'd have to doubt the bookies are taking too many bets on the national unity government when that quality is so thin on the ground. Already, the process of appointing cabinet members is marked by squabbling and disagreement, as the Daily Star editorial suggested.

The most nervous outside observers, of course, are the Israelis; it's hard to see the ascendancy of Hezbollah as anything other than bad news from their standpoint. There have been signs of progress: the release of deported Lebanese spy Nassim Nasser this weekend coincided with the return by Hezbollah of the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in the 2006 war, raising suspicions of back-channel negotiations between the two. And if there's one thing worse than a weak and divided government in Beirut it would undoubtedly be its collapse, if the alternative were a Syrian- and Iranian-backed client state with an arsenal of rockets pointed squarely at northern Israel. So Israeli interests are tied in with the success of the new constitutional arrangement, however unfriendly some of its constituents. Either way, the problem is that there's very little Israel can do. Like the US, Israel's hands are tied by the knowledge that any involvement would most likely be counterproductive.

As for Damascus, they are now pursuing a twin-track strategy to maintain their influence in Lebanese politics while seeking to escape sanctions for Syrian involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri three years ago. With Hezbollah a powerful voice in the Lebanese cabinet, and Syria suddenly coming to the negotiating table with Israel after years of prevarication, the Syrians are --- not for the first time --- playing a strong hand well. The Lebanese fear is that any deal between those two will be at their expense, and who can blame them? That beautiful country has been the proxy battleground for others for many years now. I wouldn't begrudge them their current optimism, but it may be a while before Beirut's famous Corniche bustles with tourists as it did before all these horrors descended.

The Israel-Egypt Friendship Association is composed of hardy souls, but even they were forced to admit defeat last week when they phoned the Marriott Hotel in Cairo to confirm their reservations ahead of a planned goodwill visit to Egypt by a delegation of Israelis and Jews of Egyptian descent. Despite having booked and paid for their rooms three months in advance, there was, it seems, no room at the inn. Not just the Marriott, either; two hours later, their travel agent in Cairo was forced to advise them that there was not a single hotel in a metropolis of 8 million that was willing to host them.

Things seemed to be going pretty well initially. All the arrangements had gone smoothly; flights had been booked, visas cleared, diplomats and academics booked to speak to the delegates. Perhaps most importantly, the Egyptian security services --- the biggest potential stumbling-block --- had been consulted at all stages and given a list of the participants, and seemed to be cool with the whole trip. The trip's organiser, Levana Zamir, would have been justified in assuming that every eventuality had been foreseen. But she hadn't reckoned with Egyptian TV presenter Amr Adib.

Less jolly than he looks: Adib Wikipedia informs us that Adib is "a media personality with flair, intelligence, and integrity, as well as a sense of humor" and has "an uncanny insight into what interests his audience." Nothing like a bit of Israel-bashing to keep ratings buoyant, it seems. Adib devoted most of his Wednesday evening show to the visit; it was rich of the Israelis to come to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of Israel's founding "in Cairo, of all places." "Why should we bring in Jews born in Egypt", asked Adib, "who preferred to flee to Israel, which has fought us in blood-soaked wars?" Further, he suggested, they were coming to file claims for property that they had "donated" to the government when they left Egypt all those years ago.

Would that the Jews' second Exodus from Egypt had been so willingly undertaken. There were some 75,000 Jews in the country at the end of the Second World War. They had been good citizens during the war years; few Egyptians watched the newsreels footage of German lines advancing and retreating across the desert with quite so much attention. Cairo in those years, like Beirut or Baghdad, was a cosmopolitan city of Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and Jews, but also one that yearned to be free of British occupation. With the 1952 revolution and the coming of Nasser, Egyptians got their wish --- but not everyone was invited to the party.

Suez was the perfect pretext: Some 25,000 Jews were expelled from the country without delay, forced to leave with one suitcase and a limited supply of cash, and family members were allegedly taken hostage to ensure that the operation proceeded as smoothly as possible. All those leaving were made to sign documents "donating" their property to the Egyptian government; this was either retained or flipped for a quick sale to the highest bidder. After the Six Day War, most remaining Jewish property was appropriated by the state, and those Jews that had stuck it out decided their time was up. (No real shocker: Nasser's security service was said to be stuffed with ex-Nazis.) What right of return for them, I wonder?

The Jewish community in Egypt is now estimated to be in double figures. Ironically, given last week's events, that tiny community is as well-treated as any in the Arab world. Though typically disgusting antisemitism rages in the government-controlled press, authorities have in recent years co-operated with Cairo's Jews to renovate and rededicate the city's historic Sha'ar Hashamayim synagogue, and those few who remain --- elderly now, and fewer with every year --- live in peace among the teeming multitudes of modern Cairo.

There are even suggestions that the Jewish community in Egypt played their part in having the visit from their Israeli cousins canceled. Once the TV presenter, Amr Adib, had whipped up sentiment in the popular media, maybe it was more trouble than it was worth to host a visit at this moment in time, however anodyne and harmless it seems to us. Adib is, in strict fairness, not plucking the idea of reparations for the stolen property out of thin air. Israel has been known to use these forced "nationalizations" as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Egyptians; it has even been suggested that these assets might be used to offset Palestinian property claims against Israel itself.

Still, there is no evidence whatever that the Israel-Egypt Friendship Association had anything of the sort in mind. These were just a couple of dozen Egyptian Jews --- elderly, too, for the most part --- who wanted to visit the great synagogue, and the tombs of their relatives, once more before their time comes. There may not be that many opportunities for them to come back to the country they never wanted to leave in the first place.

A bizarre six-month standoff came to an end on Friday when the last few members of a Russian doomsday cult that had holed themselves up in a cave awaiting the end of the world finally gave themselves up. The cultists had threatened to blow themselves up using gas canisters if the authorities tried to remove them, but during the siege two women had died and the resulting stench eventually drove the remaining holdouts from their lair. The cult leader himself, Pyotr Kuznetsov, chose to direct operations from the rather more comfortable environment of a nearby house, before being hospitalized last month after attempting suicide by bashing his head repeatedly against a log. He is currently in a local mental hospital, his condition described as "stable."

Vissarion, Messiah of the Steppes: "To keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ." There are plentiful examples of colorful cults from around the world, many of which are harmless (my own favorite hails from the tiny island of Tanna in the South Pacific, whose inhabitants worship our very own Prince Philip as a deity), but in the European media, talks of "cults" normally centers on infamous American examples, from Jonestown through the Branch Davidians to the recent scandal surrounding the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas. Yet there is little doubt that, when it comes to fringe beliefs, Russia is the market leader.

Depending on whom you ask, there are anywhere between 600,000 and a million.Russians in the thousands of sects or cults that have sprung up in the country over the last decade in particular. Most of these, like Pyotr Kuznetsov's True Russian Orthodox Church, have obvious roots in the established state religion. Others are more esoteric, from the Georgian mystic in Lithuania, Lena Lolisvili, who prays to God to energize toilet paper that she then wraps around her patients to "heal" them, to Grigory Grabovoi's "DRUGG" ["friend"] Party, which claimed to be able to resurrect the children killed in the Beslan massacre - for a fee, naturally.

Grabovoi's audacious tilt at the Russian presidency had to be shelved, sadly, when he was imprisoned for fraud, which was a shame; his first act upon assuming the reins of power would have been to "immediately issue a law prohibiting to die," which I would have liked to see. But the overlap between charlatanism and politics remains; a small group in Novgorod who style themselves the "Rus' Resurrecting" sect worship an icon of Vladimir Putin. "We didn't choose Putin," Mother Fontinya told Moskovsky Komsomolets. "It was when Yeltsin was naming him as his successor [during a live New Year's Eve TV broadcast in 1999]. My soul exploded with joy! 'An ubermensch! God himself has chosen him!'" I cried. "Yeltsin was the destroyer, and God replaced him with his creation". Well, I guess he got her vote.

Perhaps the most famous of Russia's many current Messiahs is Sergei Torop, a.k.a. "Vissarion", a former traffic cop who experienced a spiritual awakening in 1990 and promptly set up a self-sustaining community on a remote mountain in the Siberian wilderness. Now known as - what else? - the "Jesus of Siberia," Vissarion's network of communes is thousands strong, and the holy one claims up to 100,000 followers worldwide. His "gospel" is at once wildly idiosyncratic yet pretty typical of Russian sects; a fusion of classical Orthodox doctrine and Eastern mysticism, with a hefty sprinkling of environmentalism and New Age nonsense thrown in for good measure. And the man himself is modest but firm when asked whether he is indeed the second coming of, you know, the big guy himself: "It's all very complicated," he told a Guardian reporter who went to interview him, "but to keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ."

Vissarion is slightly unusual, in that he does not seem to be fleecing his adherents for every ruble he can get. Salvation, in Russia as elsewhere, rarely comes cheap; many cults demand hefty tithes of their adherents' incomes, and some are patently nothing more than scams. But that's not to say there's nothing in it for the Jesus of Siberia:

"[My wife] was the one woman who would open the whole world of women to me," he says. "Through her, I knew I could understand all women; what women's weaknesses are. There are now lots of women in love with me... For me, all people are equally close and I carry large responsibility for them all. So it is, I need to be free. My wife is now learning how correctly to see and regard me, to understand she's not the only woman in my life. There are a thousand others!"

He may be the Messiah, then, but he's also a very naughty boy.

Russia's Vissarions only thrive, though, because there is a burgeoning market for the snake oil he offers. The fall of the Iron Curtain saw Russians assailed by change from all sides; the drab homogeneity of the country's streets and media quickly became a riot of advertising and information overload, a whirlwind of new products and services competing for the citizens' attention, and their money. In those chaotic Yeltsin years, kooky sects hardly stuck out as they might do in a more settled society; combined with a general rise in religious observance, it is perhaps unsurprising that not all the spiritual answers on offer in the new Russia are entirely sane. And, predictably, a lot of the blame falls on foreign influences. As the chairman of the Russian Union of Writers puts it, "Russia is cloning the cells of immorality that it grasped from Western culture".

For a long time, Russian authorities have adopted a relaxed attitude towards these groups. Their main response, in typical Russian fashion, has been a bureaucratic one; all religions are required to register with the Ministry of Justice, but sanctions for failing to do so are unevenly enforced. The principal opposition to this explosion in religious diversity, predictably enough, is the Russian Orthodox Church, who fire off angry press releases attacking Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists and help to organize seminars with catchy titles like "Totalitarian Sects as Weapons of Mass Destruction".

It's easy to mock the self-interested nature of the Church's warnings, and charismatic loons like Vissarion always make good copy. But one does not have to be a student of doomsday cults to grasp the problem these sects pose, and the scale on which vulnerable people are - potentially - being abused, not just financially but psychologically and, probably, sexually. As the recently discovered letters of Jim Jones follower Phyllis Alexander to her parents demonstrate with chilling clarity, the complete physical and mental submission that comes with cult membership often bears a heavy price. It will come as no surprise if the next Jonestown takes place in the icy wastes of Siberia.