The website Urban Titan has made a list of the most dangerous cities in the world, and some of them — sites of armed conflict — will come as no surprise: Baghdad; Karachi, Pakistan; and Mogadishu, Somalia, for example. Others to make this disreputable roll include Capetown, South Africa (isn't Johannesburg what everyone talks about?); Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where an ongoing drug war has made going out for coffee dangerous; and Caracas, Venezuela, home of South America's last socialist dream.
Rio de Janeiro, sadly, also earned a spot. Not a good thing if you're thinking of attending the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil or going to Carnaval next spring.
Two U.S. cities made the list: Detroit and New Orleans. No surprise there. It's just the facts, folks, based on the numbers.
In fact, our sister site slate.fr decided to rank these cities, using crime statistics. On its list, Capetown came in first, Detroit No. 3 and New Orleans No. 9.
Our astute French friends noticed the big whopper that we caught, too, and made a correction. The editors at Urban Titan listed Chechnya, Russia, as one of the cities. Last time we looked, Chechnya was a country (at least, a semiautonomous region of Russia) with Grozny as its capital. If the editors of Urban Titan can't tell the difference between a city and country, we have to trim our esteem of them down a bit.
In other news: Hillary Clinton: Africa Faces 'New Colonialism' Threat.