The bumpy ride in the rickety van heads up the steep hill into Morro da Providência, this city’s oldest favela. Last stop: a small, silent square with a hardware shop, bar and pair of young policemen in armored gear toting machine guns, patrolling the still-unopened cable-car station that the city has recently built. The port spreads out below. Spurred by two looming mega-events — the World Cup next year and the Summer Olympics in 2016 — local officials are struggling to reinvent this onetime third-world city with a first-world economy.

A reader who invested in .la domain names asked me this week if I knew how the domain name was doing since GoDaddy put some of its marketing weight behind the domain. Here’s your answer: GoDaddy customers have registered over 7,000 domain names since the company got involved in June. The registrar started promoting the domains in July.

According to a mailing from the offical site of the .NYC new gTLD domain name extension, mydotnyc.com the city expects that the .NYC extension will go live in the 1st half of 2014. “The City of New York will be one of the first cities in the world to be granted its own domain extension by ICANN, the nonprofit organization responsible for overseeing the domain names.

In late August, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, barely two months into his first term, sat down with several of the principals of the Creative Artists Agency at their Century City offices. The meeting was short, lasting a little more than 20 minutes, but that was all Garcetti needed to get his message across. He was there to pitch his plans for a citywide “rebranding” effort and wanted to use Hollywood’s most powerful talent agency as a sounding board for his plans, if not more.

This post-industrial city near the Brittany coast has tried all manner of things to distinguish itself as the other important city in France. Theme-park style rides combined with public art – loads of it, literally, including a giant mechanical elephant that sashays out to a plaza with up to 30 people on its back, and playfully sprays water from its trunk at those on the ground. A memorial celebrating abolition, as a mea culpa for being a major seaport for the slave trade.

Like the 1964 Olympics, the 2020 Summer Games are expected to have a positive impact not only economically but psychologically as well. They will also offer Japan the chance to set an example for the industrialized world, to demonstrate that despite its troubles — deflation, a rapidly aging population and scars from a triple disaster — it can still pull off the world’s biggest sports event.

For Yuki Ota, who won Olympic silver for fencing in Beijing in 2008 and again in London in 2012, Tokyo’s winning bid for the 2020 Summer Games and Paralympics was like receiving his first gold medal.