Georgia's prime minister resigned on Thursday over plans to arrest a top opposition leader, saying it risked escalating a political crisis in the ex-Soviet nation.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sought to reassure the Caucasus nation of Georgia over Washington's commitment to strengthening ties during a visit to the region where Russia is asserting its influence.

An opposition leader claimed victory in disputed presidential elections in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia, separatist officials said on Monday as the vote was rejected by the central government in Tbilisi and the EU. 

Aslan Bjania garnered 56.5 percent of the vote, against 35.42 percent for the former economics minister Adgur Ardzinba, the central election commission said.

Georgians on Wednesday went to the polls in the second round of a knife-edge presidential election seen as a crucial test for the increasingly unpopular ruling party led by a billionaire oligarch.

On August 9 2008, Tsitsino Vazagashvili's daughter and grandson were outside her block of flats when a Russian bomb exploded.

Her daughter, shielding her son with her body, was killed. The boy survived but, now 21, walks with a permanent limp.

Judges at the International Criminal Court Wednesday gave its prosecutor a green light to launch a new inquiry into allegations of war crimes during a brief but bloody 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.

It will be the first probe by the world's only permanent war crimes court into accusations of abuses by Russia, and also the first by the ICC to examine conflicts outside of Africa.

The prosecutor for the world's only permanent war crimes court Tuesday formally requested to open the tribunal's first inquiry into alleged abuses by Russia, by probing its 2008 war with Georgia.

In her request to a three-judge panel, prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said a preliminary investigation had found evidence of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Russian, Georgian and pro-Russian South Ossetian forces during the brutal, but swift, 2008 conflict.

A student died early Friday after being shot at a U.S. university in the state of Georgia, in an altercation that triggered a temporary lockdown of the campus.

Christopher Starks, a junior from the Atlanta metropolitan area, died at a local hospital following an "altercation" late Thursday at Savannah State University's student union building, the school said.

NATO on Thursday opened a training center in Georgia as the ex-Soviet country eyes closer partnership with the Western military alliance amid tensions with Russia.

The establishment of the NATO-Georgian Joint Training and Evaluation Center, to be based just outside the capital Tbilisi, is aimed at buttressing the small ex-Soviet country which fought a five-day war with Russia in 2008.

Georgia on Tuesday accused Russia of cutting off its citizens from their farmland by installing border signposts demarcating the breakaway South Ossetia region, calling on Moscow to refrain from "escalation."

The signposts have been installed near three villages in recent days and land belonging to several local residents ended up beyond the demarcation line with South Ossetia, a Georgian region that declared independence and which Tbilisi considers occupied by Russia.