Sebastián Piñera, an airline tycoon, is well placed to break his country’s political mould. But he promises less change than meets the eye. THE mood at Sebastián Piñera’s final campaign rally was hardly triumphant. The turnout on the Alameda, the main avenue in the centre of Santiago, Chile’s capital, was poor by the standards of the rallies of previous election-winners. Groups of young people—there for the bands rather than the politics, they said—chatted obliviously through an uninspiring speech by Mr Piñera, the presidential candidate of Chile’s conservative opposition.

The president and her husband offer carrots and sticks to the news media. WHEN Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s president, said on May 27th that she will cancel the tax debts of five private media companies, she couched her generosity in an argument about the importance of a free press. It was lofty talk from someone who often snaps back at criticism from the news media. Ms Fernández went her entire presidential campaign and most of her first year in office without giving a press conference. Her husband, Néstor Kirchner, who governs with her, gave none in his four years in the top job. Rather than warming to the Fourth Estate, though, the Kirchners are becoming more adept at media manipulation. The five firms in question have agreed to repay the debts by giving space for official advertising that paints the Kirchners in a positive light. Such propagandising is not new to Argentina but its growth under the Kirchners has been extraordinary.

A new United Nations report predicts a 40 percent drop in foreign investments in Latin America this year. I hope I'm wrong about this, but the fall in foreign funds may be even steeper. The U.N. Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) report, released Wednesday, shows that foreign direct investment in the region rose by 13 percent in 2008, to a record $128 billion. The rise, as in the previous year, was largely due to a rise in world commodity prices, which fueled rapid economic growth in South America.

On the evening of March 26, in a windowless room that once served as Teddy Roosevelt’s White House office, President Barack Obama made decisions that would change the future of the U.S. auto industry. Five weeks earlier, General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC handed over survival plans that the government demanded as a condition for $17.4 billion of loans in December from President George W. Bush.