Reporter Lets Militant Group Circumcise Him With a Bamboo Stick, Wins Award

Now this is dedication to your craft.  Remember it when you duck out of work at exactly the eight-hour mark.

Simon Eroro is a reporter with the "Papua New Guinea Post-Courier".  If you're not familiar, Papua New Guinea is a small country in the South Pacific, north of Australia.  It's the east half of an island, the other half is part of Indonesia.

Simon was working on a story about a militant group called Free West Papua, who've been crossing into the country from the Indonesia side. He had to cross rivers and jungles to meet up with the militant group, who could have very well killed him on the spot.  Instead, they told him they couldn't allow him into their camps because he was "unclean".

By "unclean," they meant "uncircumcised."  So in order to get his story, Simon had to get circumcised.  And he LET THEM DO IT, using a bamboo stick to hack off his foreskin.  Seriously.

He gained their trust, wrote the story, and it led to a major police operation to tighten the border and step up the effort to protect Papua New Guinea from the militants.

For his effort - and his foreskin - Simon just won his paper's highest award, the Scoop of the Year award.

[The Telegraph]