Russia's top military commander warned on Thursday of a growing threat of conflicts along its borders that could even escalate into a nuclear war.

"The possibility of local armed conflicts along nearly the whole border has increased sharply," General Nikolai Makarov said, citing the fact that many of the country's Soviet partners are gravitating towards NATO.

As the global population hits seven billion, experts are warning that skewed gender ratios could fuel the emergence of volatile "bachelor nations" driven by an aggressive competition for brides.

The precise consequences of what French population expert Christophe Guilmoto calls the "alarming demographic masculinization" of countries such as India and China as the result of sex-selective abortion remain unclear.

Edible ties were launched in Georgia on Tuesday in an ironic response to mockery of the ex-Soviet state's president, who famously gnawed on his necktie during the Georgia-Russia war in 2008.

Waiting for a television interview at the height of the war but unaware that the camera was already rolling, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili started chewing his tie nervously -- a clip regularly repeated by Russian media seeking to portray him as emotionally unstable.

Georgia on Thursday arrested four news photographers, including President Mikheil Saakashvili's personal photographer, on accusations of spying for a foreign country, the interior ministry said.

"The arrested are accused of passing information that they obtained because of their work to an organization acting undercover for the intelligence services of a foreign country, against the interests of Georgia," it said.

In the kitchen of one of the most fashionable restaurants in Tbilisi, the chef is cooking up hearty peasant food using recipes long forgotten by most of his countrymen.

"Nobody cooks a bird like this these days," said chef Malkhaz Maisashvili, raising his carving knife to sweep slices of chicken into a pot. "I discovered the recipe in a small village."

Georgian police arrested a 75-year-old woman who single-handedly cut off Internet connections in Georgia and neighboring Armenia, the interior ministry in Tbilisi said on Wednesday.

The pensioner was digging for scrap metal when she hacked into a fiber-optic cable which runs through Georgia to Armenia, forcing many thousands of Internet users in both countries offline for several hours on March 28.