News From Around The World: New iPhone unveiled, Europe’s refugee quota, gum-dispensing T-shirts etc

What to watch for today

Apple unveils a new iPhone. The 6S model will have a better camera and faster processor than its predecessor, but is expected to look largely the same. Apple also might unveil a new Apple TV device and a larger iPad.

Benjamin Netanyahu visits London. The Israeli prime minister arrives in the UK for a three-day visit to meet with his counterpart, David Cameron. The trip has been denounced in the UK by union leaders, left-wing activists, and members of the Labour Party, who have called on Netanyahu to answer for “war crimes” in Gaza.

Queen Elizabeth II becomes the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Her tenure of 63 years, seven months, and two days breaks the record set by her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Earnings: John Wiley & Sons, Box, Krispy Kreme, and Barnes & Noble are among the companies posting their latest quarterly results.

While you were sleeping

Europe offered to resettle many more refugees... Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said that the EU will offer asylum to 120,000 largely Syrian refugees via binding quotas for member states, with penalties for those that refuse to take their fair share. That is in addition to an earlier plan to distribute 40,000 migrants, and will cover around 60% of those currently in Italy, Greece, and Hungary; most will be relocated to Germany, France, and Spain.

... As Australia revamped its approach to immigration. Prime minister Tony Abbott announced that the country will permanently house some 12,000 refugees fleeing violence in Syria, and would begin airstrikes on Islamic State targets this week. The figure is in addition to Australia’s commitment to settle almost 14,000 refugees annually.

Ryanair raised its full-year profit forecast by 25%. Europe's largest airline by passengers increased its outlook to around €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) for the year to March, after poor weather and a strong pound boosted summer travel from key British hubs. The news sent shares higher by as much as 10% in early trading.

Netflix may have plans for Asian expansion. The video-streaming service posted and then deleted a Chinese-language press release announcing plans to enter Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore early next year. Netflix has come under pressure from rising competition and is in a race to expand globally.

Anglo American sold some of its most problematic mines. The mining giant announced that South Africa's Sibanye Gold agreed a 4.5 billion rand ($330 million) deal for the Rustenburg platinum mines. The deal, which furthers the company's exit from South Africa, is part of Anglo American's strategy of offloading loss-making assets (paywall) to increase its competitiveness.

Shinzo Abe detailed a corporate-tax cut. The Japanese prime minister said he would lower the corporate tax rate by at least 3.3 percentage points, from 35% currently. The move will take place next year and is aimed at spurring more corporate investment, as part of the government's goal of fostering 2% inflation.

Quartz obsession interlude

Steve Levine on why two big carmakers refuse to give in to driverless cars. “It’s hard to believe that future drivers, even in cities, will ever agree to be ever and always mere passengers. Around the world, the sensation of controlling one’s own way through the chaos—when every other driver on the road is an idiot, and danger lurks along every mile—is still seen as one of the purest remaining expressions of freedom.” 

Matters of debate

The Fed should think about how its policies affect ordinary people. Tightening credit will worsen inequality.

A lack of health education can be as dangerous as disease. The list of common misconceptions is mind-boggling.

One hundred days in, Nigeria's new president is on the right track. Muhammadu Buhari combines toughness and frugality.

Casualwear is the ultimate American uniform. It’s about being an individual, and yet also fitting in.

American children need to stop being taught to fear the topic of race. Acting "colorblind" doesn't help them deal with reality.

Surprising discoveries

Most mammals take the same amount of time to pee, regardless of size. All need around 21 seconds to relieve themselves.

A homeopathy conference ended after delegates began hallucinating. The German attendees consumed an LSD-like drug, likely by mistake.

The need to de-clutter can be a life-consuming illness. It’s the opposite of hoarding.

Someone patented a gumball-dispensing T-shirt. Perfect for making back-to-school friends.

This girl can fold a pizza box faster than you can say “pizza.” She's had seven years of training at a pizzeria.

How a cheap Indian whiskey beat Smirnoff to become the world’s largest spirits brand

The quantity of whiskey Kishore Chhabria sold in 2014 can fill up at least 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools—and there would still be a few pegs to spare.

To be exact, the 59-year-old portly and bespectacled millionaire sold 255 million litres of his Officer's Choice whiskey last year, according to a report by UK-based The Spirits Business. That was enough to unseat Smirnoff as the world's largest spirits brand by volume. The Diageo-owned vodka brand sold some 230 million litres.

To find his way to the top of the global alcohol industry, it has taken Chhabria nearly three decades and hundreds of legal battles.

The rise of Officer's Choice mirrors Chhabria's own travails. Launched in 1988, the mass-market whiskey languished as Chhabria negotiated his business through a series of splits and mergers. Only in the last 10 years has the whiskey brand dramatically rebounded, with new variants, fancier packaging and a far-reaching distribution network. Now, Chhabria wants to take his empire global.

The officer and no gentlemen

The story of Officer's Choice begins in 1985, and has all the elements of a Bollywood potboiler: sibling rivalry, betrayal, legal wrangling and murky corporate battles.

In 1984, Manu Chhabria, a Dubai-based businessman and Kishore's elder brother, was one of the world's largest importers of Sony Electronics. His company Jumbo Electronics was based out of the UAE, with Kishore handling the firm's London operations.

Soon, Manu was keen on expanding his business empire in India. One acquisition followed another, cutting across industries including leather, tyre, infrastructure and pharmaceuticals.

Meanwhile, in 1985, London's RG Shaw & Co. was looking to sell its 38.4% share in Shaw Wallace & Company, a Kolkata-headquartered liquor company with a 99-year-old history. The company owned brands such as Royal Challenge, Director’s Special and a few beers, including Haywards 5000.

Manu moved swiftly to acquire a majority stake in the company but was eventually locked up in a takeover battle with the then management of Shaw Wallace, led by chairman SD Acharya, for almost two years.

The deal was also delayed because India's government suspected a clandestine agreement between Manu and Vijay Mallya, the flamboyant 30-year-old chairman of the United Breweries (UB) Group, to take control of the company. India's enforcement directorate was concerned that Mallya may have used Manu—a foreign national—as a frontman to acquire the stake.

By 1987, even as the case remained in court, the Chhabria brothers took control ofShaw Wallace. It was their first tryst with the alcohol industry.

By the turn of the decade, the Chhabria brothers were slowly falling apart. "I didn’t own a single share in Manu’s business empire and was working as a salaried employee, earning only Rs7,500 ($414) per month (there was a salary cap of Rs10,000 per month in the pre-liberalisation days)," Kishore said in an interview last year. "This, naturally, made me insecure about my future and that of my family. I would often ask Manu to do something to secure my family’s future."

The inevitable split got underway in 1992.

Kishore wanted to separate and keep BDA Breweries and Distilleries, a subsidiary of Shaw Wallace. BDA was acquired by Shaw Wallace in 1988 and was later developed as an arm to promote its lower rung of liquor brands. BDA launched Officer's Choice the same year.

The brothers parted ways with Kishore taking control of BDA, while Manu keeping the larger Shaw Wallace.

Kishore Chhabria with his products.

"After much persuasion and effort, he gave me BDA, which was a small, semi-defunct company in the early 1990s," Kishore said in 2014. "It was a dot in front of SWC (Shaw Wallace) and initially I was reluctant. I told him that giving me BDA was like giving a child a lollipop to stop him from crying but finally gave in."

Soon, the matter was in court with the brothers filing a string of cases against each other. By some estimates, they filed 160 cases against each other.

King of good times

The hawkish Kishore also stuck up a partnership with Mallya in 1992.

Vijay Mallya.

Mallya offered the younger Chhabria a 26% stake in Herbertsons, a company that owned popular whiskey brands such as Bagpiper. Mallya owned 30% stake in the company.

But that friendship wasn't to be. Mallya and Chhabria were soon at loggerheads, with each accusing the other of slyly raising their stake in Herbertsons.

This is how Chhabria described his fall out with Mallya:

"An enemy’s enemy is my friend… That’s why I joined hands with Vijay (Mallya)—for protection. I had a written agreement with Manu giving me ownership and control of BDA. So, I took BDA into the Mallya group in return for a 26% stake in Herbertsons."

"The deal was that we would each hold 26% in the company and jointly run Herbertsons. Mallya gave me a very handsome salary package, a Mercedes and the title of vice-chairman, but he had no intentions of sharing control and gave me no responsibilities."

"Soon, we had disagreements over how to run the company. Around this time, I received information that Mallya had started buying Herbertsons shares from the open market. I, too, started increasing my stake. I finally ended up with 51% in the company and was in a position to take control."

Another round of out-of-court settlements followed. Under the deal, agreed in 2005, Kishore would exit Herbertsons, while Mallya would return BDA Distilleries. Kishore also received Rs130 crore as part of the settlement. The same year, Mallya merged Herbertsons and seven other spirits firms to form United Spirits.

By then, Manu had passed away and bequeathed his wealth to his wife. Mallya—then at the top of his game—made an attempt at buying Shaw Wallace. He finally succeeded in 2005 when Manu's family invited bids for selling their stake.

But he wasn't done with Kishore yet. Mallya claimed that BDA also belonged to him, since the company was part of the Shaw Wallace portfolio and filed multiple cases again.

The big leap

"The end of litigation in 2005 was the real breakthrough, when Mallya and I settled out of court," Kishore said in an interview in May this year. "With this the lull phase of the brand, too, ended. And the journey, from a brand that sells five million cases a year to becoming the largest selling whisky, began."

Kishore decided to hire Deepak Roy, once Mallya's blue-eyed boy who left the UB Group in 2005. The new CEO of Allied Blenders and Distillers (ABD)—as BDA was renamed in 2007—Roy had also spent a decade working with Diageo in the 1990's. Together, Kishore and Roy decided to rebuild the company's image among India's burgeoning middle class and spent aggressively on marketing and packaging.

"We were the fourth or the fifth largest whiskey maker back then," Roy told Quartz in a telephone interview. "But Officer's Choice had a name many associated with. In India, the name officer always strikes a chord with the middle class. It was about aspiration. We decided we should capitalise on that."

ABD conjured up a new marketing campaign, along with the introduction of newer brands and fresh packaging. Work also began on creating a more robust distribution network. When the company realised that its old bottle wasn't quite working for tipplers, who were slowly graduating to branded whiskey, it introduced new packaging.

Officer's Choice in Tetra Pak packaging.

Over the next six years, Officer's Choice introduced two new brands—Officer's Choice Blue and Officer's Choice Black—one positioned above the other. "We had a consistent blend and we worked really hard at it. And as aspirations grew, we realised that people wanted to upgrade. So we introduced premium versions of the whiskey," Roy said.

Officer's Choice also kept its pricing very low. "In an industry that is often under pressure due to high taxes, we had to also keep pricing under check," Roy said. As is the norm in the alcohol industry, Officer's Choice reviewed its pricing every year. "But we also ensured that we did not price ourselves more than our competitors," Roy said.

"Allied Blenders is quite popular in the rural part of the country," Manjunath Reddy, a research analyst at Euromonitor International, said. "The company targeted rural consumers with small pack sizes and economy or mid-priced products."

Today, ABD's portfolio comprises Officer’s Choice Blue, Officer’s Choice Black, Jolly Roger Rum, Class 21, Wodka Gorbatschow, Officer’s Choice Brandy, Lord & Master brandy and Kyron Premium Brandy.

The final result

Finally, the results started to show by 2011 when Officer's Choice overtook Bagpiper, a brand then owned by United Spirits.

Today, ABD has 49 bottling units—at least one in each Indian state—and a distribution network that's been significantly ramped up in the last few years. Roy said that the improvement in distribution was one of the most crucial factors in scaling up Officer's Choice's growth.

"Their ingredient of success has been to focus on one brand," Alastair Smith, director at London-based market research firm IWSR, told Quartz. "The company has a good name and good packaging and is at a premium to the mainstream brands. They also have a very experienced management team and ownership."

In the next year and a half, Chhabria wants to take ABD public, Roy told Quartz. ABD plans to raise between Rs750 crore ($114 million) and Rs1,000 crore ($152 million) through an initial public offering, which it intends on using for acquisitions—both in India and elsewhere—and expanding its domestic bottling operations.

Today, Kishore isn't actively involved in the day-to-day running of the company. His arch-rival Mallya is almost bankrupt, while Diageo has gained control of his company, United Spirits. He is now India's newest liquor baron.

Turkish Financial Crisis

The steady selling of Turkish assets is fast becoming a stampede. Fearing for the country's economic, political, and security stability, investors are quitting the country in droves.

As a result, the Turkish lira has been touching new all-time lows against the dollar in trading today (Sept. 7)—with no respite in sight:

Amid the general decline in emerging-market assets, Turkey stands out for the severity of its rout. Analysts have long considered Turkey the most vulnerable of the largest developing economies to capital outflows as investors rethink their appetite towards risk given the economic slowdown in China and prospect of interest-rate hikes in the US.

But what's really spooked investors in the country recently are concerns closer to home, namely a bout of political instability and separatist violence that puts pressure on a country already facing a tough fiscal situation.

Yesterday, Kurdish separatists killed more than a dozen Turkish soldiers in the deadliest attack on the country's military in years. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded today with airstrikes on targets linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party.

The violence comes amid political uncertainty ahead of snap elections on Nov. 1, described by Erdogan as a "re-run" of the June poll in which his party lost is majority in parliament. The president's muscular response to security threats—against Kurdish separatists at home and ISIL militants abroad—is bolstering his party's nationalist bonafides ahead of the vote. The government has also recently taken to detaining journalists covering the unrest in the Kurdish-majority southeast.

Over 13.5 million children can’t go to school because of wars in the Arab world

The heartbreaking image of three-year old Aylan Kurdi lying face down washed up on a Turkish beach has triggered an international foreign policy re-examination of the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.

Over 13.5 million Arab children have also had their futures thrown into jeopardy over the past four years because they cannot go to schools according to a new report entitledEducation under Fire. Across nine countries in the region, UNICEF researchers found that nearly 9,000 schools are out of operation because of political instability and intractable armed violence.

“A lot of the schools are out of use because as they are sheltering displaced families fleeing from conflicts”. “Sometimes up to 9 families are sharing a classroom. This is because a lack of alternatives when it comes to refuges”.

Touma also noted that schools have been actual targets of armed strikes where children and adults have died on site, most graphically exhibited in Gaza last summer where oneUNRWA school was shelled by Israeli strikes killing 15 and wounding 200.

“We have also seen schools that have been taken over by different parties in different conflicts that have been turned into military bases or they have been turned into detention centres. They have effectively become prisons, we have seen this in Syria” she added.

The report contains testimonies from teachers and students who have been intimidated and witnessed their family members’ deaths. Yet, paradoxically it also notes amid the carnage that some schools are functioning in areas controlled by Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant (ISIL) with a revamped curriculum and terrifying restrictions for female students.

Sudan ravaged by decades of conflict and forgotten in media coverage of regional conflicts had the highest number of kids outside of the classroom with 3.1 million children not attending school regularly.

“People are going on these dangerous boat trips because they are seeking better opportunities for their children” Touma explained against a backdrop of images circulating of refugees from the Middle East crossing into European countries such as Hungary and Austria.

“There are a number of consequences on why need to put children back into school. Families don’t want to send their children out on the streets to make a better living or to join armed groups because of a lack of choices”.

There is a hopeful note though with children even under duress having a thirst for knowledge where 20% of the region’s populations are between the ages of 10-19. Jameela, a Yemeni teacher quoted in the report said, “I have seen children trying to write on the ground because they want to learn so much”.

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South Africa’s economy is facing headwinds, but these five sectors could help stabilize it

Amid the recent global economic slowdown and persisting domestic challenges in the country, South Africa's economy contracted by 1.3% in the second quarter of 2015,edging closer to a possible recession in the next quarter.

It is no wonder South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, was reported to have described South Africa's economy as "sick." It was an acknowledgment the current state of affairs could no longer be business-as-usual.

On Aug. 31, the global consulting firm McKinsey published a report detailing five priority sectors that could help boost economic growth significantly and increase employment opportunities in the country:  advanced manufacturing, infrastructure, natural gas, service exports, and agro-processing.

McKinsey estimates these five sectors could have a combined impact on GDP of R1 trillion ($87 billion) by 2030, creating 3.4 million jobs in a country battling with poverty and rising unemployment, now sitting at over 25% in the last quarter.

While McKinsey's report may provide insights on the opportunities that exist in the five chosen sectors, exploiting these opportunities could be challenging.

Take manufacturing, for example—a sector which could contribute R570 billion to GDP by 2030, according to the firm's estimates. But as of the second quarter, South Africa's manufacturing sector, which contributes 17% of South Africa's GDP, was in recession. The sector's travails are mostly tied to the country's electricity crisis and labor tensions, which have crippled other energy-intensive sectors in the country.

Too many plans, too little action

Earlier this year during his state-of-the-nation address, Zuma outlined a nine-point planto accelerate the economy. A cursory look at Zuma's plan–along with others like South Africa's National Development Plan—shows that McKinsey's "big five" priority sectors are already on the government's policy radar.

Nic Borain, a South African political analyst who consults for BNP Paribas Cadiz Securities, tells Quartz it's clear that South Africa is not short on ideas on for economic reconstruction, but that rather, the country lacks the requisite political will to implement them.

"I'm not sure that there is anything new that can be said about what needs to be done. The reality is that we have let the basic elements, like good governance, infrastructure and developing a working labour regime, slip. This—coupled with policy confusion and investor uncertainty—has made it harder for us to move out of our low growth cycle," says Borain.

Another political analyst, Daniel Silke, who is the director at Political Futures Consultancy in Cape Town, says that South Africa needs to become more innovative and proactive to battle for its place in the world economy.

"Investors—both global and domestic—will move to countries and regions that provide more favorable investment climates," he says. "Given that South Africa's economy is historically dependent on the extractive industries, there is a special burden that lies on us to become more innovative and competitive."

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