Word: malayas
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...Despite 30 years of breakneck economic development, Malaysia remains a spirit-haunted land where, as Hairudin Harun of the University of Malaya notes, a recent survey showed that 90% of professionals said they had consulted spirit me-diums for marital, health or work-related problems. "Most of these (mediums) are harmless. It is like watching David Copperfield," Hairudin says. But he adds that the regular reports in Malaysian newspapers of ritual dismemberment and the discovery of skulls and other body parts used in occult rituals testify to the continuing popularity of a much darker side to Malaysians' faith...
...thumped in 1979 by Thatcherism, whose strong + defense policy discredited Labour's now defunct creed of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Today recession-racked Britons are unsure where to turn. They are listening more closely to the clipped, almost military-style speeches of a man who spent his formative years defending Malaya against communist guerrillas and newborn Kuwait against Iraqi claims in the 1960s...
...most important of the first Japanese assaults was the invasion of Malaya. The target there was not only the peninsula's wealth of tin and rubber but also the strategic citadel of Singapore. Built in the 1920s and '30s among the mangrove swamps of Johore Strait, at the then enormous cost of $270 million, Singapore stood as the theoretically impregnable naval headquarters of the whole British empire east of Suez. One symbol of the island's true strength, however, was its array of 15-in. guns that could not turn and fire into the supposedly impenetrable jungle behind them. Another...
With hardly a shot fired, General Tomoyuki Yamashita unloaded his main invasion force troops in rough waters off Singora Beach, just north of the Thai border. They had little trouble marching southward into Malaya. Orders from British headquarters in Singapore called for defending the border "to the last man," since "our whole position in the Far East is at stake," but the only force assigned to do so was an ill-trained, ill-equipped Indian division. It had neither tanks nor antitank guns, because the British had declared the jungle "impenetrable." As Japanese tanks pressed southward, the force retreated...
...mainland, Yamashita's bicycle-riding invaders needed only 70 days to pedal and hack their way 600 miles down the Malayan peninsula. All through the night of Jan. 31, British troops marched out of Malaya and across the 1,100- ft.-long causeway to the island fortress of Singapore. The last 90 to leave were Argyll Scots marching to their bagpipers skirling Hielan' ((Highland)) Laddie. The British then blew a 70-ft. gap in the causeway -- but the inrushing waters proved to be only 4 ft. deep at low tide...