As Georgia rushes to embrace the West, American-style fast food franchises are trying to make inroads into a country with a rich culinary tradition. For now, local restaurateurs and gastronomers say, Georgian cuisine still has the upper hand. But the times they are McChanging. Sensing a market opportunity, two global fast-food players are set on expanding their footprint in Georgia.
Technological innovation is normally associated with progress. But for potentially hundreds of property owners in Georgia, the digitization of land registration records has turned into a nightmare.
Orthodox Easter was celebrated on April 15 in Georgia. This year, Misha Tabatadze could not join in the traditional pilgrimage to visit the graves of loved ones. He could not light a candle in the cemetery where his daughter, Etuna, is buried, or place a brightly dyed red egg on her grave.
The Nabucco pipeline may not be dead yet. A scaled-down version of the long-planned project could end up being folded into a joint Azerbaijani-Turkish effort to transport natural gas from the Caspian Basin to Europe.
He was not the first person you might expect to see as an official guest at a US military exercise. But, nonetheless, there he was. Tucked among the ambassadors, diplomats and North American Treaty Organization (NATO) liaison officers watching US Marines and Georgian troops prepare for Afghanistan on March 20, was one of Iran's Tbilisi defense attachés.
The guest list for the annual Agile Spirit 2012 exercises had been the task of the Georgian Ministry of Defense, and, granted, Georgians are renowned for their hospitality to foreigners. The country’s open-door policy with Iran is also well documented.
But so is its desire to please Washington. The US long has maintained that Iran actively works to sabotage NATO operations in Afghanistan; a charge Tehran denies. On March 17, General Masoud Jazayeri, Iran's deputy commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Afghans to create «resistance groups» and set about «hitting American interests,» the Associated Press reported.
So, against that backdrop, you might think that having an Iranian military attaché at a US-Georgian military exercise for Afghanistan might make for an awkward moment.
While some NATO members may be skittish about the alliance’s continuing involvement in Afghanistan, Georgia remains firmly committed, and will soon rank as the mission’s largest non-NATO supplier of troops.
Always on the lookout for economic opportunity, officials in Georgia are trying to encourage members of the country’s far-flung Diaspora to organize, and bring their skills and cash back home.
Georgia is set to test its own domestically designed and built artillery system on March 3. In scheduling the event the day before Russia’s presidential election, officials in Tbilisi appeared to be firing a figurative shot at their nemesis – the Kremlin’s paramount leader Vladimir Putin.
Campaign finance reform in Georgia may potentially threaten freedom of expression and donor funding for non-governmental organizations, civil society activists say.
