Georgia's new Prime Minister Vano Merabishvili named his first cabinet on Tuesday as the governing party prepares for crucial parliamentary polls in the ex-Soviet state in autumn.

Merabishvili appointed former defense minister Bacho Akhalaia as Georgia's interior ministry chief and former education minister Dmitri Shashkin to head defense, a presidency spokeswoman said.

Premier Najib Miqati struck a pessimistic tone on the power crisis on Friday despite an offer by his Georgian counterpart to provide electricity to Lebanon via Turkey.

In remarks to As Safir daily, Miqati said he did not invite a ministerial committee tasked with resolving the crisis to a meeting on Thursday after he “found out that it would not be useful anymore to hold unproductive meetings.”

New Delhi police said Wednesday they had arrested a man in connection with last month's bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat's car, which Israel blamed on Iran.

Police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said the man was 50-years-old but gave no details as to the charges he faced related to the February 13 attack.

Russia on Friday offered to restore diplomatic ties with Georgia for the first time since the neighbors waged a five-day war in 2008 over the status of two of Georgia's breakaway regions.

The foreign ministry said it welcomed a proposal from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili this week to offer visa-free travel to Russians and was looking to build on this gesture of good will.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said the U.S. is closely monitoring the activities of Hizbullah after a failed bomb plot in Bangkok and attacks on Israeli embassy staff in India and Georgia.

Napolitano told lawmakers Wednesday that the Homeland Security Department has contacted Jewish organizations around the country and is working with the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Iran's "terrorist activities" have been exposed to the world, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday following a series of blasts in India and Thailand, which Israel has blamed on Tehran.

"At this time, Iran's terrorist activities have been exposed to everyone," he said, accusing the Islamic republic of "harming innocent diplomats across the world."

Indian investigators were searching Tuesday for the motorcycle assailant who attached a bomb to an Israeli diplomatic car in the heart of New Delhi, an attack the Jewish state blamed on Iran or its proxies, including Hizbullah.

Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters investigators were working on the assumption it was a terror attack carried out by a "very well-trained person."

Israeli diplomats were targeted by bomb attacks in Delhi and Tbilisi on Monday, officials said, with two people injured in the Indian capital when an embassy car exploded in a ball of fire.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed the finger at Israel's regional arch-foe Iran.

Twenty years after the USSR collapsed, Georgia's fervently pro-Western government regards the Soviet Union as a repressive dictatorship and has been trying to erase its legacy.

But perhaps inconveniently for the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the USSR's most notorious leader Joseph Stalin was born as Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in the provincial Georgian town of Gori.

Bagrati cathedral, a world-renowned but crumbling masterpiece of mediaeval Georgian architecture, is suffering not only from wear and tear but also from the impact of human meddling.

Keen to please the influential Orthodox Church, the government in the deeply religious former Soviet republic has defied world heritage body UNESCO by starting to rebuild the 11th century monument.