quote:

Since Australia granted Papua New Guinea independence in 1975, its capital Port Moresby has become synonymous with violent crime carried out by "raskol" gangs.

Although much of the crime is driven by poverty, tribal allegiance also plays a part in the ethnically diverse capital. Papua New Guinea has more than 760 distinctly different languages.

The raskol street gangs control much of the city of 250,000 inhabitants, some armed with automatic weapons and machetes. Raskol raids on businesses and compounds are common.

Unemployment has been estimated between 60 and 90 per cent in the city. In 2004, Port Moresby received the dubious honour of being named the world's least liveable city by the Economist.

While most expatriates live within fortified compounds, it is the native Papuans who bear the brunt of Port Moresby's violent crime. The city's largest police station is located in Boroko in the southeast.

According to station commander, Senior Inspector Mark Yangan, an average week consists of about three murders, four rapes, and 30 car-jackings. Few murders are ever solved and Yangan admits the rape statistic is misleading, as most go unreported. As a whole, Port Moresby has a murder rate of 54 per 100,000 citizens, more than 10 times Australia's national average.

Most of Port Moresby's citizens live in the grip of poverty with low or no wages. The nation's corrupt and ineffectual government provides no social security, and many essential items are imported and therefor beyond people’s means. Sanitation is inadequate and in recent years, Port Moresby has seen its first cholera outbreaks since the 1960s.

The compounds of the city’s close-knit expatriate community are protected by security guards and attack dogs. The Australian High Commission, surrounded by high concrete walls and razor wire, provides arguably its most secure accommodation. It is jokingly referred to by locals as "Fort poo poo-Scared".

quote:

The criminals from the exotic island of Papua New Guinea are the subject of a new photo book about the Raskol gangs ruling the streets of the country's capital city, Port Moresby.

Photographer Stephen Dupont traveled to the mysterious land off the northeast tip of Australia to photograph the faces of these gang members who roam the streets of the city.

Dupont, a native of Australia, traveled to the island, which is one of the least explored spaces on earth, in 2004 and captured the essence of the renegades running the city, in a recently to be released book 'Raskols: The Gangs of Papua New Guinea.'

quote:

Kuru is an incurable degenerative neurological disorder endemic to tribal regions of Papua New Guinea. It is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, caused by a prion found in humans.[1]

The term "kuru" derives from the Fore word "kuria/guria" ("to shake"),[2] a reference to the body tremors that are a classic symptom of the disease; it is also known among the Fore as the "laughing sickness" due to the pathologic bursts of laughter people would display when afflicted with the disease. It is now widely accepted that kuru was transmitted among members of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea via funerary cannibalism.[3]

quote:

Kuru causes physiological, as well as neurological effects that ultimately lead to death. It was endemic among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea and was confined to the Fore population and those nearby populations with whom they intermarried. It is characterized by truncal ataxia, preceded by headaches, joint pains, and shaking of the limbs. Trembling is present in almost all patients with this transmissible spongiform encephalopathy; kuru is also known as "shiver".[4]

quote:

Those affected are usually people who follow the practice of family mortuary cannibalism.[6] In some parts of Papua New Guinea, bodies of those who died from kuru were dismembered to feast on the internal organs. "Often, they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives."[6]

quote:

Alpers and Lindenbaum's research conclusively demonstrated that kuru spread easily and rapidly in the Fore people due to their endocannibalistic funeral practices, in which relatives consumed the bodies of the deceased to return the "life force" of the deceased to the hamlet, a Fore societal subunit.[10] Corpses of family members were often buried for days then exhumed once the corpses were infested with maggots at which point the corpse would be dismembered and served with the maggots as a side dish.[11]

canyoneer posted:

I'm sort of surprised to learn that it's difficult to immigrate to Australia.
It's the destination of choice for my white South African cousins because it's way easier than getting into the US.
I'm guessing the"white" part is the important bit.

Serak posted:

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE

sebmojo posted:

tomstuart posted: