Revellers in Rio have joined a whirl of festivities as carnival fever took hold, the world's biggest street party putting firmly aside lingering protests over corruption and the cost to Brazil of hosting the World Cup. With the football extravaganza now just three months away, flamboyantly dressed metropolis residents indicated that, for the moment, they had spent enough time demonstrating and wanted to let loose instead.

If there are two Brazils, then one of them is here, in a café by the Praça São Salvador, a few blocks from the beach in Rio de Janeiro. Wearing a gray T-shirt, sunglasses and a ring in the shape of a human skull, Alan Fragoso, 27, takes a sip of his caipirinha. Fragoso used to be a sort of Brazilian Don Draper, an advertising man selling products to the nation's emerging consumer class. Then one day he quit. "What I really want is to work with projects I believe in," he says, "not to invest in consumption."

For a city, there’s nothing quite like the glory of winning an Olympic bid. The highly competitive process starts nine years before the games and involves untold amounts of campaigning and planning. Once selected, fortunate cities have seven years to prepare, updating their infrastructure and building new, impressive facilities. If they pull it off, they get two weeks to show it all off to the entire world.

On a warm summer morning earlier this month, dozens of building workers were putting the finishing touches to the restoration of Casa Moreyra, a 17th-century colonial manor house in San Isidro, the business district of Lima, Peru’s capital. With an investment of $6m, Casa Moreyra is the new home of Astrid y Gastón, a restaurant ranked 14th in the world by Restaurant magazine.

Now, the guardians of Japan’s economic future are banking on much the same thing. They hope that the beloved, magical cat can reach into his bag of tricks and pull out a ticket to the global spotlight, both for himself and for the nation that created him. Although appointed Japan’s “anime ambassador” in 2008, Doraemon didn’t speak English until a few months ago.

Life-long Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev has suggested changing his country's name to to "Kazak Yeli" to make it friendlier to investors and tourists. “The name of our country has the ending ‘stan,’ as do the other states of Central Asia,” he said Thursday. “At the same time, foreigners show interest in Mongolia, whose population is just 2 million people, and its name lacks the suffix ‘stan.’ Perhaps with time the question of changing the name of our country to Kazak Yeli should be examined, but first this should definitely be discussed with the people.”