London (CNN) - Tesco has lost the price war it declared back in September – and the third-biggest retailer in the world (by sales) has issued a profit warning.

The UK company says its strategy of slashing 3,000 prices simply didn’t work, failing to entice enough shoppers through the doors to make up for smaller profit margins.

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Hong Kong, China (CNN) – The bigger they are, the harder they fall. That's the tenet behind the Skyscraper Index which tracks a link between construction booms of tall buildings and economic busts over the past 140 years.

Some say the facts are bizarrely coincidental. Others say the numbers don’t lie. But if true, the latest Skyscraper Index report from Barclays Capital suggests both China and India are due for economic doom because of their current skyscraper boom.

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Kashgar, China (CNN) – China is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize some of the historic trading towns on its western frontier. But critics say modernization is happening at a cost to the region’s cultural heritage.

In the ancient market city of Kashgar, traders have been wheeling and dealing for thousands of years. For centuries, the city was dominated by the Uighurs - a Turkic speaking Muslim people - now considered a minority group in China.

The government is now investing heavily to revive this sleepy backwater and transform it into a modern day boom town.

Yet critics say there the Uighur's cultural heritage is being lost.

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(CNN) – The global research department of HSBC has released a report predicting the rise and fall of the world’s economies in the next 40 years.

The world’s top economy in 2050 will be China, followed by the United States. No surprises there – since China’s reforms in the 1980s, economists have said it’s not a question of if, but when, China’s collective economic might will top the U.S.

But among the smaller, developing nations, there are several surprises by HSBC prognosticators:
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