Word: borneo
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...fashioned Bugis sailing vessels like the Marco Polo. These are still built by hand in the style favored by Sulawesi's traditional seafaring folk in the southern port town of Bira. The Bugis have always been traders, filling the cavernous holds of their schooners with timber from Borneo to exchange for spices in the Moluccas. The Marco Polo, however, is designed to carry passengers, with seven simple bunks, a shower and a shaded gazebo on the upper deck...
...sized European bank loses hundreds of millions by gambling on the financial markets while his superiors remain clueless for months. When he can no longer hide the losses, the trader disappears. At this point the stories diverge. Unlike Leeson, who fled from his Singapore base to Borneo and then to Frankfurt, Rusnak never left town and, his lawyers insist, was not a fugitive. The other difference: seven years ago, Leeson's losses of $1.3 billion from dodgy derivatives deals were large enough to bankrupt his employer, Barings Bank; it was taken over by the Dutch group ING. Allied Irish...
...Manser's story is really the tale of the Penan, a people out of time, the last hunter-gatherers in Asia. Once masters of a seemingly endless rain forest that covers Borneo, almost all of the 9,000 Penan have given up the struggle against what must once have seemed a ludicrous impossibility: that loggers would sweep through all but a tiny fraction of Sarawak's forests, polluting rivers, driving animals away and bulldozing the trees and plants that for centuries have served as the Penan's medicine cabinet, toolbox and larder. There are barely 200 fully nomadic Penan left...
Members of the Penan tribe of northeastern Borneo know that Batu Lawi, a 2,000-m sheer limestone pinnacle, is a demon-haunted place to be avoided at all costs. To Bruno Manser, however, Batu Lawi represented everything he loved about the untouched forest of the region. He almost perished trying to reach its summit in 1988. As he told friends, he spent 24 hours hanging from a rope, unable to reach the rock face. Only a desperate swing brought him within grabbing distance of the rock...
...activist, who would now be 46, has never been found, despite numerous searches by his Penan and European friends. Nor has any trace been found of his 30-kg rucksack. When he vanished, some suspected foul play: Manser had fallen on the wrong side of the logging interests in Borneo?who can be ruthless. There was talk of a bounty on his head and suspiciously heavy movements of police and loggers in the area at the time of his disappearance. Malaysia's politicians were fed up with the troublesome foreigner. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad publicly complained of "white people...