Word: lumpur
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Atop 5,820-ft. Mount Ulu Kali, the tropic air turns chill at night and lights from the distant capital of Kuala Lumpur glitter like diamonds. But visitors to the new 200-room Genting Highlands Hotel could hardly care less about the breathtaking view. Since the resort opened in May, thousands of eager customers have driven up a misty, winding mountain road for a headier kind of excitement-gambling in Malaysia's first legalized casino...
Respectability. At almost any hour of the day there is steady action at the blackjack, baccarat, roulette and craps tables, many of them run by female dealers or croupiers. The players are affluent businessmen from Kuala Lumpur and nearby Singapore, accompanied by wives or mistresses in silk pantsuits. Collectively, they wager an estimated $100,000 every 24 hours. On a visit last month, the Sultan of Selangor put a royal stamp of respectability on the new venture by winning $133 at roulette...
MALAYSIA, another veteran of a Peking-backed insurgency, has made an even more startling turnabout. Last month Kuala Lumpur accepted its first Chinese Red Cross flood aid; last week it rolled out the red carpet for a sellout tour by the popular Communist Chinese Silver Star Cultural Troupe. With Rumania and other third-party countries acting as the middlemen, Malaysia's pragmatic new Premier Tun Abdul Razak has begun indirect negotiations with China, offering to open trade and diplomatic relations in return for Peking's promise not to support Malaysia's holdout guerrillas. He has already faced...
...portents of national disaster. Soon after a particularly vicious frog war in the early 1940s, the Japanese invaded and occupied Malaya. The country's twelve-year struggle against Communist terrorists began after frogs warred in Kedah in 1948. Two weeks before violent race riots erupted in Kuala Lumpur in early 1969, there had been a huge frog battle near Penang. Thus when the latest frog fight broke out at Sungei Siput in November, local astrologers and bomohs (witch doctors) predicted another major calamity for Malaysia...
Their fears seemed realized last week. Monsoon rains poured down upon Malaysia, causing one of the worst floods in the country's history. At least 60 people were missing or dead, and 200,000 were stranded and threatened with starvation or drowning. Kuala Lumpur was cut off from the rest of Malaysia as the two rivers running through the capital overflowed, submerging most of the city under as much as twelve feet of water. While food and supplies were being flown in by helicopters from the Malaysian, Singapore, British and Australian air forces, Malaysia's Prime Minister...