You hear about potential buy-outs, but they never seem to come to fruition.

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Last year Macau's security chief, Manuel Monge, blithely reassured tourists worried about being caught in gangland shoot-outs that the hitmen never missed their mark.

ECONOMIST: Macau

The two sisters never wear their own designs prairie dresses with revealing cut-outs, ultra-mini skirts made of strips of cheesecloth and foil, ballooning tulip skirts with a high slit up the front, which are not only impractical but require rail-thing figures to wear them too.

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Turn-outs in local elections, which even in good years were never much more than half the turn-out at general-election time, have fallen to as low as 22% of the electorate since 1997.

ECONOMIST: Local elections (2)