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High levels of rape, robbery and murder help keep Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, at the wrong end of the hardship table.

In Lagos, expect chaos. There are gun battles in Bogotá. Crime has been a curse in Karachi. But there is nowhere on earth quite like this.

According to a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the capital of Papua New Guinea has beaten all-comers - again - to take a title that no city on earth would covet.

With poverty, crime, poor healthcare and a rampant gang culture, Port Moresby consistently scores highest in the unit’s “hardship” table, meaning it is regarded as the worst place to live among 130 world capitals. Baghdad is not on the list.

According to the unit, most aspects of daily life in Moresby are problematic.

Little bigger than Plymouth, with a population of 250,000, it is a place where murder rates are exceptionally high, thanks mainly to the “raskol” gangs that control large areas of the city.

Tales of their exploits are legion; from bank robberies with M-16 machine guns, to car holdups by mobs armed with machetes.

Rape cases are even worse: in one widely reported incident last year, an injured nurse was dragged away from a car crash to be gang-raped.

Visitors to Port Moresby are advised not to go out after sunset, and to avoid walking the streets in most areas even during the day.

The houses of the wealthy squat behind walls tipped with razor-wire and gates watched by security guards.

The precautions are necessary because a survey of international crime by the Home Office shows that the murder rate there is three times that of Moscow, and 23 times that of London.

The rates for robberies and rapes are just as dire.

But the raskols say much of the violence is meted out by the police, and that they are provoked into retaliation.

The base of Moresby’s Bomai gang can be found up a dark sidestreet in the suburb of Four Mile. At the entrance to their squatter settlement a man is on guard, armed with a walkie-talkie.

“The police we know are very dangerous. They come in to the settlement and raid the people’s food and property and beers,” says Koiva, one of the leaders of the gang.

He has a pattern of welts on his head where he says he was beaten by a police officer with a glass bottle to extract a confession.

Another gang member, Stephen, shows two dark scars on his legs which he says were caused when he was shot in police custody.

Most people living in Port Moresby show little sympathy for the Bomai, whose raids on businesses and residential compounds have made them infamous. “Bloody raskols. Shoot first and ask questions later, that’s what they [the police] should do,” says an Australian expatriate.

Often, that is precisely what happens.

“I think the government are happy every time the police shoot a young man but we have thousands more youths on the streets,” says Peter Gola, a former raskol working at City Mission, a charity that helps the city’s street children.

Most raskols argue that their crimes are driven by the crushing poverty of life.

“We never mean to kill people,” says Koiva. “We’re just trying to scare them and get what we want to get.”

Papua New Guinea has no welfare state, so in rural areas family and clan networks have kept people in food and lodging. That system has broken down in the capital, which sits in an arid part of the country where unemployment rates are estimated to be between 60- and 90%.

A kilo of rice here costs four kina - about 70p - and a tin of fish is three kina, but this is beyond the means of many families.

Most raskols say they get into crime when their parents send them out to make money. Pressured to generate an income, they turn to violence. An armed robbery can easily net more than 100,000 kina (£17,500).

“When that happens, we live like kings,” says Harris, another Bomai member. “If you’re lucky, you eat something good. Maybe chicken.”

But there is some hope for change. Twenty minutes’ drive from Moresby, City Mission’s New Life farm has offered an alternative to the violence for between 5,000 and 6,000 street children since it opened 11 years ago.

The regime is strict: smoking and drinking are forbidden and there is a strong religious flavour to the instruction.

But the founder, Larry George, says the structure and respect of their new lives can work wonders.

“Most of them aren’t bad kids,” says Mr George. “It’s mainly just poverty that’s driving the crime. People can read in the papers about the government stealing millions of kina and get really frustrated.”

Many of the children, he says, end up as security guards, exchanging fire with the raskols who were once their peers.

Global ranking

Best five

1= Melbourne, Australia

1= Vancouver, Canada

1= Vienna, Austria

4 Perth, Australia

5 Geneva, Switzerland

Worst five

126 Phnom Penh, Cambodia

127 Lagos, Nigeria

128 Dhaka, Bangladesh

129 Karachi, Pakistan

130 Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

Try as it might, Beijing can’t control everything

This country, after trying to anticipate and stop every possible security situation leading into the Summer Olympics, has found with deadly certainty that the Games will only magnify discontent and anger.

In the western border city of Kashgar, 4,000 km from this host city, militants have attacked and killed a battalion of police officers.

The terrorists, lashing out in a volatile region, struck with unprecedented brutality, murdering at least 16 officers and wounding as many again.

It happened just as the world’s attention is on China. Which is part of the point.

As well as bloody, the attack on the officers — on a morning jog through the city — was symbolic, because it took place in an area of China under constant watch.

Officials here claim to have put down several planned attacks, orchestrated around the Games, which begin here on Aug. 8.

They have said separtists from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement have planned a number of assaults.

The police killings in Kashgar yesterday — which involved homemade bombs and knives, local media reports say — were just what Beijing has hoped to avoid, as clocks here in the capital count down the days, minutes and seconds until the start of the Olympics.

Security is everywhere, as face recognition software blueprints your features when you use your Olympic credentials to get into secure locations.

The police presence is especially tight around Tiananmen Square, where the world watched Chinese troops march against pro-democracy protesters almost 20 years ago. But on the same day the terrorists killed the police officers here, a small band of Beijing residents still managed to use a corner of the huge square to be heard.

At least for a moment.

One of the main social issues here in the capital has been the land scooped up, cleared out and rebuilt on.

Charging their homes have been stolen for the sake of progress — in this case, not for the Olympics, but for urban development — a small band of angry residents tried to protest in the square yesterday. Waving banners and attracting some media attention, as well as police officers, the group said they were proud of hosting the Olympics, but upset with how ordinary homeowners are being treated as China welcomes the world.

A leading American political philosopher and economist is warning that the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) which includes nearly 100 New Zealand soldiers and police cannot end any time in the foreseeable future because of social conditions there.

The alert came in a paper by Professor Francis Fukuyama of John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

In a World Bank study, Professor Fukuyama says an exit strategy is not possible because RAMSI had made short term progress.

“The militias responsible for the violence earlier in the decade have been disarmed and disbanded, and the formal criminal justice system has been functioning to identify and punish those responsible for serious crimes,” he wrote.

“On the other hand, the social conditions that led to the violence persist in ways that make it impossible to consider ending RAMSI’s presence any time in the foreseeable future.”

A very large Malaitan population remained on Guadalcanal and there was a significant population of jobless and disaffected young people in the settlements around the capital Honiara.

Professor Fukuyama said the most troubling indicator of potential future problems was the Solomon’s police which, in the short term was RAMSI’s chief success.

The militias had grown out of the Solomon’s Police as they were more loyal to their ethnic group or wantok (extended family) than to the Solomons as a whole.

“It is not clear that any progress has been made in changing this mindset,” he wrote, adding there were still many officers in the police who were involved in the conflict and have not yet been purged.

Professor Fukuyama said one of the striking gaps was “the absence of any sense of national identity” in the Solomons.

“In the absence of a long-term nation-building project owned and promoted by the country’s political leadership, I am at a loss to understand how the country will ever overcome the divisions that led to the 1999-2003 violence.

“Ethnic and wantok loyalties will never disappear, but they can be held in check by a national elite that is loyal to a larger concept of nation. At the moment, I don’t see any dynamic that would lead the country in this direction.”

Few people were willing to admit to actively thinking about an exit strategy or are able to contemplate even a rough date for termination of the mission and handing back the currently shared state functions.

“RAMSI is thus operating under rather fictional premises, namely that at some point the country’s capacity will improve across the board to the point that RAMSI can be withdrawn.”

Professor Fukuyama argues that the region needed to give up the idea that RAMSI was a crisis response and should move to sharing sovereignty over the state and keeping the current monopoly it has on lethal use of force.

While RAMSI had dealt with the immediate issues, “there is no dynamic process that that will permit RAMSI to wind down at least a residual security role any time in the foreseeable future”

A girl accuses the officer who killed a 20-year-old Irishman during a recent burglary call.

A cop from Silverton who fatally shot an Irish national while making a burglary call two weeks ago was jailed early Sunday on charges that he sexually abused an underage girl.

The allegations surfaced Saturday, when a woman and her daughter dropped in to the Keizer police station, accusing Silverton officer Tony Gonzalez, 35, of sexually abusing the girl on multiple occasions.

Authorities declined to identify the girl, other than to say she was younger than 18. They provided no details about when or where the sexual incidents allegedly occurred.

Gonzalez was held on two counts of sexual abuse in the first degree, a felony that carries a 75-month minimum sentence, and three counts of third-degree sex abuse.

The officer remains on administrative leave from the Silverton Police Department pending the outcome of an investigation into the June 30 shooting of Andrew “A.J.” Hanlon. The 20-year-old Irishman, described by family members as mentally disturbed, had lived with his sister for about a year in the town east of Salem.

Gonzalez was responding to a burglary call when he spotted Hanlon, yelled a warning, then shot him to death. Authorities have declined to release details of the incident.

Hanlon’s brother-in-law, Nathan Heise, has said the young man had a habit of banging on their door when he wanted to be let in. Heise and his wife believe that Hanlon had mistakenly gone to the wrong house, startling the residents and prompting the call to police.

Marion County Deputy District Attorney Matt Kemmy, the prosecutor handling the official investigation of the shooting, said he expects to present the case before a grand jury in the next two weeks. That panel will decide whether the shooting of Hanlon was justified.

Kemmy, who suddenly found himself looking into the sex-abuse charges against Gonzalez on Saturday night, said the two cases are unrelated. It was happenstance, he said, that the girl stepped forward with her allegations against Gonzalez after news media carried accounts of Hanlon’s shooting.

“It will be more clear as time goes on,” he said, but the two cases “are independent.”

Silverton police declined comment Sunday about the allegations Gonzalez faces, but police are expected to issue a statement today.

Hanlon’s family, intrigued by news of Gonzalez’s arrest, referred comments about the development to their Portland lawyer, Kelly Clark.

“It would be odd to say this morning’s developments don’t change anything, because they raise all kinds of questions,” Clark said on Sunday. “But we just think now is not the time for us to be asking questions or making public comments.”

Hanlon’s family, which wept through his funeral in Silverton on Saturday afternoon, will wait until the district attorney’s office and Silverton police conclude their investigations of the young man’s shooting, Clark said.

“Let’s assume the officer is charged with some sort of a crime in the shooting of A.J.; that’s going to leave them — the family — with one set of reactions,” Clark said. “If nothing happens, or the response comes back that the authorities believe he was fully justified, then the family will be probably in a completely different frame of mind.”

Gonzalez was held for a little more than an hour in the Marion County jail early Sunday before he was taken to Polk County and booked into jail there.

“It was for his safety,” said Polk County communications supervisor Ian Wilson. “He had made arrests in that county and it wouldn’t be safe for him to be in Marion County Jail.”

Kemmy said he will file a district attorney’s information against Gonzalez today, which will formally charge him with sex abuse. The prosecutor said he expects to take the allegations before a grand jury sometime before July 22.

Gonzalez will be arraigned Tuesday in Marion County Circuit Court and “will not have an opportunity to make bail until arraignment,” said Marion County Sheriff’s Office Commander Jason Myers.

Last Friday, three New York City police officers were acquitted for the killing of
23-year old Sean Bell, early in the morning on what was to be his wedding day, in
November of 2005. Bell’s 50-bullet murder sparked outrage in a city that is no
stranger to police brutality; the list of police killings of unarmed black men over
the years is long and familiar.

People like to treat police shootings as “tragic” isolated incidents, but the ugly
truth is that police officers inflict violence on black communities on a regular
basis. And they get away with it, time and time again. “When cops go on trial for
overuse of deadly force, their victims are generally young blacks and Latinos,” writes
one commentator. “The attorneys that defend them are top gun defense attorneys and
have had much experience defending police officers accused of misconduct. Police
unions pay them and they spare no expense in their defense. The cops rarely serve any
pre-trial jail time, and are released on ridiculously low bail.”

Bell, meanwhile, was handcuffed while mortally injured. Is this really what we call
“justice for all”?

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas though our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

Kenyan police have denied carrying out extra-judicial killings of alleged members of the outlawed Mungiki sect.

Police spokesman Eric Kiraithe dismissed the allegation of police executions of suspects as “outrageous”.

The Kenya National Human Rights Commission (KNHRC) had made the claim after investigating incidences of dead bodies being dumped around the capital.

In June, the president ordered police to hunt down Mungiki sect members blamed for a series of grisly murders.

“Even if you hide, we will find you and kill you,” President Mwai Kibaki had said in a warning to members of the quasi-religious sect which was outlawed in 2002.

Mungiki followers have been demanding protection fees from public transport operators, slum dwellers and other businessmen in and around Nairobi.

Those who refuse are often brutally murdered.

Arrests

Mr Kiraithe said KNHRC’s allegations were a plot to discredit the government in the run-up to the December elections.

Mungiki followers

Rise of Kenya’s vigilantes

A news agency reports that more than a dozen bloodied bodies have been dumped in bush on the outskirts of Nairobi in the past week.

The state-sponsored KNHRC has been investigating whether these and other killings were the victims of police executions.

KNHRC commissioner Hassan Omar said the organisation had reports of “cars being driven to secret locations with suspects” followed by “gunshots, then dead bodies and food for the hyenas”.

Mr Omar said some of the latest victims may have been innocent of any crime.

But Mr Kiraithe insisted that police officers followed the rule of law when dealing with suspects.

After the president’s directive, police raided the Nairobi slum of Mathare to arrest hundreds of suspected sect members.

At least 30 people died in gun battles with police during that operation, leading the human rights organisation Amnesty International to call for an enquiry.

As all realistic citizens recognize, cops aren’t just thugs-with-badges. They are liars, too.

While a cop may imply that failure to speak immediately will result in arrest, a person cannot be arrested for exercising the right to remain silent. Police can only arrest a person if probable cause exists, and the choice to remain silent cannot be part of that analysis. If the officers already have probable cause, they would not need to question you. If they do not, the statement you make could well supply it.

WASHINGTON - More than 2,000 criminal suspects died in police custody over a three-year period, half of them killed by officers as they scuffled or attempted to flee, the government said Thursday.

The study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics is the first nationwide compilation of the reasons behind arrest- related deaths in the wake of high-profile police assaults or killings involving Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo in New York in the late 1990s.

The review found 55 percent of the 2,002 arrest-related deaths from 2003 through 2005 were due to homicide by state and local law enforcement officers. Alcohol and drug intoxication caused 13 percent of the deaths, followed by suicides at 12 percent, accidental injury at 7 percent and illness or natural causes, 6 percent. The causes of the deaths for the remaining 7 percent were unknown.

The highly populated states of California, Texas and Florida led the pack for both police killings and overall arrest-related deaths. Georgia, Maryland and Montana were not included in the study because they did not submit data.

Most of those who died in custody were men (96 percent) between the ages of 18 and 44 (77 percent). Approximately 44 percent were white; 32 percent black; 20 percent Hispanic; and 4 percent were of other or multiple races.

“Keep in mind we have 2,000 deaths out of almost 40 million arrests over three years, so that tells you by their nature they are very unusual cases,” said Christopher J. Mumola, who wrote the study.

“Still, they do need to be looked at to determine whether police training can be better or practices can be better,” he said.

State laws and police department policy typically let officers use deadly force to defend themselves or others from the threat of death or serious injury. Deadly force also is allowed to prevent the escape of a suspect in a violent felony who poses an immediate threat to others.

The Justice Department study released Thursday suggests that most of the police killings would be considered justified, although it does not make that final determination. About 80 percent of the cases involved criminal suspects who reportedly brandished a weapon “to threaten or assault” the arresting officers.

Another 17 percent involved suspects who allegedly grabbed, hit or fought with police. More than one-third of the police killings, or about 36 percent, involved a suspect who tried to flee or otherwise escape arrest.

The report was compiled at the request of Congress in 2000 after the 1997 struggle between New York police and Louima, a black security guard who left the precinct house bleeding after officers jammed a broken broomstick into his mouth and rectum. A few years later, two police shootings of unarmed black men followed, including Diallo, who was shot 41 times after he reached into his pocket for a wallet.

Since then, following police sensitivity training, New York has seen a few killings involving suspects and officers, including last year’s shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black bridegroom-to-be whom police say they believed was reaching for a gun.

Other findings:

Among law enforcement, 380 officers were killed in the line of duty over the three-year period and 174,760 were reportedly assaulted, according to FBI data. Most of the deaths were accidental (221), while 159 were homicides.

Blacks were disproportionately represented in arrest-related deaths due to alcohol or drug intoxication (41 percent vs. 33 percent for whites); accidental injury (42 percent vs. 37 percent for whites); and unknown causes (46 percent vs. 39 percent for whites)

BEIJING — Police in China’s capital said Tuesday they will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user’s browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content.

Starting Sept. 1, the cartoon alerts will appear every half hour on 13 of China’s top portals, including Sohu and Sina, and by the end of the year will appear on all Web sites registered with Beijing servers, the Beijing Public Security Ministry said in a statement.

China stringently polices the Internet for material and content that the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening. Despite the controls, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers.

The animated police appeared designed to startle Web surfers and remind them that authorities closely monitor Web activity. However, the statement did not say whether there were plans to boost monitoring further.

The male and female cartoon officers, designed for the ministry by Sohu, will offer a text warning to surfers to abide by the law and tips on Internet security as they move across the screen in a virtual car, motorcycle or on foot, it said.

If Internet users need police help they can click on the cartoon images and will be redirected to the authority’s Web site, it said.

“We will continue to promote new images of the virtual police and update our Internet security tips in an effort to make the image of the virtual police more user friendly and more in tune with how web surfers use the Internet,” it said.

China has the world’s second-largest population of Internet users, with 137 million people online, and is on track to surpass the United States as the largest online population in two years.

The government routinely blocks surfers from accessing overseas sites and closes down domestic Web sites deemed obscene or subversive.

Bangkok, Thailand - “Hello Kitty” - the Japanese animation character has found a new job in the Thai police department. The cute round-faced cat will now punish any officer in Bangkok who is late, parks in the wrong place or commits other minor transgressions.

The bad cops breaking the rules will be made to wear the large, bright pink Hello Kitty armband, which has two hearts embroidered on it.

However, if the offense is more serious, traditional disciplinary action would be taken. Since Hello Kitty is considered an icon for young girls, it would be considered less manly if macho police officers are seen with it. Invented by a Japanese company in 1974, the character has been popular for years with children and young women.