Word: sabah
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...issue was the Philippines' claim to the Malaysian state of Sabah. The dispute is one of the more complicated quarrels on the international scene, but is not without a certain fascination of its own. The plot goes something like this; Sabah is a 29,000-sq.-mi. chunk of Borneo, rich in timber, rubber, tobacco and untapped mineral wealth. It is located in the Sulu Sea only 20 miles from the southernmost Philippine Islands. Once a haunt of Moro pirates, Sabah was signed over in perpetuity to the British in 1878 by its ruler, the Sultan of Sulu...
...elders. They climb the tropical trees with abandon and plunge happily into cooling water-holding their noses when they dunk. Despite the similarities, the equatorial playground, at the edge of a 12,000-acre forest preserve on Borneo is no boys' camp. It is the Malaysian state of Sabah's experimental center for the rehabilitation of orangutans...
...logging operations have driven the survivors ever deeper into the rain forest; native hunters shoot the mothers and carry off the young orangutans for illegal sale to foreign zoos (price: as much as $4,000 apiece). To save this vanishing Asian cousin of Africa's gorilla and chimpanzee, Sabah state officials are seizing young orangutans from poachers and trying to retrain them for the wild...
Civilized Taste. It is no simple matter. Like human babies, the orangs are prone to disease, require fussy diets and demand constant coddling. "They pull your ears affectionately," says Sabah Conservator of Forests Thomas Bayles, "and they go to bed hugging each other." Worse yet, they take all too eagerly to the comforts of domestication, quickly develop a fondness for such civilized delicacies as salt, pineapples and chicken eggs. Despite efforts to toughen them up by letting them run loose, the adolescent orangs swing down from their treetop nests when it rains and sleep in their dry cages...
...Queen Elizabeth a gold-plated fruit basket, Indira Gandhi a silver miniature of New Delhi's minaret, Kutb Minar. From Russia's President Nikolai Podgorny came a 31-ft. porcelain vase, from Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba a solid gold olive tree and from Kuwait's Emir Sabah as Salem as Sabah two black Arabian stallions. President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines sent a packet of seeds of a new strain of rice that, if it finds the right soil, can increase yields tenfold. The gifts and the illustrious names of their senders were well suited...