Bulgaria is ranked 56th in the Global Peace Index for 2009 after receiving low marks for respect of human rights and military expenditure.

Bulgaria was ranked just above its neighbor Greece. Bulgaria's low ranking can be blamed on its high military expenditure and an increasing number of public demonstrations, the index showed.

New Zealand is now officially your best bet for a risk-free destination, according to the new Global Peace Index (GPI), an annual ranking of the world's nations on the basis of how peaceful they are.

Despite the much-vaunted progress on security, Iraq remained bottom of the list, below Afghanistan, Somalia and Israel, which found itself listed as more dangerous than Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the top, the usual Nordic suspects clustered below New Zealand: Denmark, Norway and Iceland came second, third and fourth, followed by Austria and then Sweden.

The Global Peace Index is the first Index that has been created to rank the nations of the world by their peacefulness and identifies some of the drivers of that peace. It includes 144 countries.

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