Word: stripped
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Enter Macau, the former Portuguese colony handed over to China in 1999. Last year some 12 million visitors poured into the 9-sq.-mi. territory, whose small contingent of casinos generated $3.6 billion in gaming revenue--three-fourths of what the Vegas Strip managed to pull in. Long a mecca for Asia's high rollers, Macau in 2003 averaged a daily haul of nearly $22,000 per gaming table compared with just $2,200 in Vegas. And thanks to the recent removal of certain internal travel restrictions, some 150 million mainlanders can now head to Macau without a tour guide...
...culture--and to profit from it--China ended Ho's choke hold on the industry in 2001, launching a bidding war for two additional casino licenses and slapping a 39% tax on all three. One of the new license holders is Steve Wynn, who is credited with reinventing the Strip in Vegas. "Right now, Macau is for the gambler--period," Wynn told TIME last month before breaking ground on a $705 million wonderland to be flanked by the old Lisboa and a planned joint venture between Ho and MGM Mirage. "The trick is to add other dimensions to the town...
...when its parent company finishes building an $800 million replica of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, complete with imitation canals and singing gondoliers. Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson is so gung ho about Macau that he is enlisting partners in a $10 billion project to duplicate the Vegas Strip on a sliver of reclaimed land between two of the territory's islands...
...need that courage. At Danbury, Stewart will have none of the creature comforts that she touts to her fans and customers. She will probably be strip-searched on arrival. There will be no Egyptian-cotton sheets for the bed in her cell and no color-coordinated accessories. Inmates are allowed nothing more than wedding bands, religious medals and prescription eyeglasses, and they are not permitted to decorate the concrete walls...
POWER PLAYERS: The high-rolling moguls who rule the Strip...