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Antonini, a Venezuelan businessman with U.S. citizenship, was indeed in a jam. A month earlier, he'd arrived in Buenos Aires on a chartered flight with Argentine energy officials and executives of Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Argentine customs agents then caught him with a suitcase stuffed with $800,000 in cash. Antonini was allowed to return to the U.S. - but it seemed the entire hemisphere wanted to know if he'd been carrying the money for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as some sort of bribe for the Argentine government...
...hundred and seventy miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border, the dusty old mining town of Real de Catorce has been reborn. Though the Mexican government officially condemns the harvesting of the psychotropic peyote cactus by anyone outside the Huichol Indian community of Central Mexico, whose members use it for religious purposes, Real de Catorce's website advertises the town as the place of the "pilgrimage of people of all ages and nationalities...[who] travel thousands of miles to arrive at this sacred site and experience a mystical communion with the magical cactus." Now narco-tourists are ravaging the Huichols...
...marketing campaign, will raise the company's profile in the competitive U.S. premium-car segment, where it hopes to double sales of all models by 2015 to around 200,000. "I would almost describe every one of those R8s as a mobile billboard for the Audi brand," says Johan de Nysschen, head of Audi's U.S. operations...
Designing a car to be priced higher than its German rivals was an exercise in brand positioning, says De Nysschen. "We think we found a sweet spot in the market." Bentley--which, like Audi, is part of the Volkswagen Group--successfully exploited a similar luxury-market niche when it positioned itself between supercostly Rolls-Royce and the sedans and coupes of BMW and Mercedes...
...What you won't see is huge numbers of R8s on the road. Ever. Rhys thinks Audi will keep global production at 4,500 for the time being, though it could eventually push it to 6,000. Even so, that's still not many cars. Which is the idea. De Nysschen insists Audi will ensure that demand for the R8 always outstrips supply--to keep its aura of exclusiveness intact. "In that market segment," he says, "the difference between too many and too few cars...