Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has won a landslide re-election victory. Ms. Fernandez won 53 percent of the vote Sunday with most of the votes counted.  She was 36 percentage points ahead of her nearest of six rivals - Socialist governor of Santa Fe province, Hermes Binner.It is a bittersweet victory for Ms. Fernandez whose husband, former president Nestor Kirchner, died of a heart attack a year ago this week.  Ms. Fernandez, who succeeded her husband in 2007, struggled to hold back her tears when she cast her ballot in his hometown of Rio Gallegos.

WITHIN months of becoming Ecuador’s president in 2007, Rafael Correa (pictured) announced that he was working on antitrust legislation, pointing out that Ecuador was one of the few countries in South America without such a law. This August he introduced a bill that aimed to increase the market share of small and mid-sized companies and “democratise access to the means of production”. René Ramírez, the planning secretary, promised that it would “never affect honest businessmen”. But the initiative, which became law last week when Mr Correa declined to veto it, seems to reflect the president’s scepticism of what he calls “the myth of competition” rather than any desire to promote it.

Chalk up another successful product launch for Apple.The company announced sales of its iPhone 4S have topped 4 million since the device made its global debut last Friday.The tally is more than double that of the iPhone 4 during its first three days of availability, says Apple marketing Vice President Philip Schiller in a statement.The iPhone 4S is the first product launched by Apple since the death of its CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, who passed away two weeks ago after battling pancreatic cancer.As this Associated Press story notes, the iPhone 4S launch turned into a memorial of sorts for Jobs, with many joking that 4S stood "for Steve."

An offer of free games, translation software or other apps to compensate BlackBerry users for last week's prolonged outage left Research In Motion investors cool on Monday, and the shares fell 6 percent.RIM declined to say if it would need to amend its earnings forecasts to account for the cost of its promise to give $100 of free apps to every BlackBerry smartphone user.RIM is also offering a period of free technical support to businesses that use the gadget, which has steadily lost market share to Apple's sleeker, sexier iPhone. RIM's stock has dropped 60 percent over the past year."RIM has responded swiftly but this won't undo the damage done to its reputation," analyst Geoff Blaber at CCS Insight told Reuters earlier on Monday. "This may go some way to appeasing customers but what's critical is that the problem does not repeat itself."Highlighting the challenges, Apple said it sold 4 million of its new iPhone 4S in the three days after its launch last week.Tens of millions of BlackBerry users were left without mobile email and other messaging for up to four days last week after a failure at a RIM data center in England triggered a service disruption across five continents.

On September 21, 2011, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt faced a hailstorm of criticism from senators and rival CEOs alike at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights Subcommittee. According to Nextag (who?) CEO Jeffrey Katz, "Google rigs the results" of searches to give preferential treatment to its own businesses. Yelp (who, again?) CEO Jeremy Stoppelman claimed, "Google is no longer in the business of sending people to the best destinations on the Web. It has everything to do with generating more revenue." Senator Mike Lee of Utah charged the search engine of having "clear and inherent conflict of interest."Two questions come immediately to mind. First, who cares about Google's business practices? If you disagree with how Google runs its incredibly popular search engine, don't patronize it. There is no need for paternalistic bureaucrats to intervene in such a simple matter. If my local pizza shop bombards me with advertisements for other local businesses every time I walk through its doors, I will think twice about picking up lunch from there next time.