Mikheil Saakashvili

The long-time ruling party loses to an upstart coalition led by a shadowy billionaire

In unprecedented move, President Saakashvili gracefully conceded his party’s defeat

Carla Bruni’s very tough act, Ahmadinejad vs. Paul the Octopus, and an extreme breed of couch surfer

From textbooks to statues, Tbilisi is hitting back at Moscow

“With all due respect, no sports mistake is supposed to lead to a death. Common sense tells me: yes, there can be mistakes. I don’t think mistakes should lead to death.”

I’m on a train from wi-fi hell so I can’t fill this posts with all the links to today’s news accounts that I’d like, but suffice it to say that the occasional mass protest against Mikheil Saakashvili is underway in Tbilisi, Georgia. When I was in Tbilisi to cover the last presidential election, shortly after the last round of mass protests, at the end of 2007, the Saakashvili regime sent Nino Burjanadze, the Parliamentary speaker and acting interim president, to talk to me and defend Saakashvili. This time she’ll be one of the protest ringleaders. This is the story of Saakashvili’s term in power: he is good at losing friends. Here’s an interview with Burjanadze (I’m quite sure, indeed have read elsewhere, that her supporters have been beaten, not “bitten;” you run into that sort of problem when an Armenian interviews a Georgian).

” I have staked my country’s fate on the West’s rhetoric about democracy and liberty.”

The president of Georgia speaks at a rally in Tbilisi, flanked by the presidents of Poland and Ukraine (the three Baltic countries’ leaders were there too), and quotes John McCain: