... Education Ministry. The latest Pacific island nation caught in the tug-of-war struggle of influence between Georgia and Russia is Fiji, which recently received 200 new netbook computers by virtue of Georgia's Education Ministry. The gifts, made in a Tbilisi factory, arrived one week before Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared in Fiji to talk about trade and visa-free travel. Some critics wonder why the Education Ministry is donating computers to a Pacific island nation most Georgians would have...

... education minister under Georgia's first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Since being deposed, Javelidze has become a permanent fixture in Georgia's opposition periphery, known for making wildly ludicrous charges — for example, that Tbilisi Mayor Givi Ugulava intends to overthrow Saakashvili. He appeals to a fringe element of Georgian society that is waiting for the Gamsakhurdia government to be restored even though its leader has been buried three times in the last 20 years. The...

Georgian wine exports increased last year to $54.1 million, the most since Russia imposed a trade embargo in 2006, the National Statistics Office in Tbilisi said in an e-mailed statement Friday. Exports rose 37.7 percent in 2011 from a year earlier to 16.9 million liters. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan topped the list of customers. Russia prohibited imports of Georgian mineral water and wine in 2006...

... packs of Arbidol, worth more than 20 million rubles," an Interior Ministry source told BaltInfo. The search took place in connection with a criminal case against the general director of the Tsaryova Apteka pharmacy chain. The 44-year-old native of Tbilisi was arrested for organizing the production and sale of fake medicine, the Interior Ministry's economic crimes department said in comments carried by RIA-Novosti. The former high-ranking cop, whose name has not been released, is a 53-year-old of...

... defense analysts who riled Putin so much were Alexander Konovalov and yours truly. Putin began by saying that if the United States deploys radar installations for a missile defense system in Georgia, Russia might be forced to aim some of its missiles at Tbilisi. The problem with that argument is that Washington has no plans to deploy any radar facilities in Georgia. True, four Republican U.S. Senators proposed this idea last year, but it was little more than a propaganda stunt. No one in the White House...