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Newswallah: Bharat Edition

Jammu and Kashmir: The Jammu and Kashmir High Court held that a Muslim man's power to divorce his wife is not “unrestricted or unqualified,” Kashmir Live reported. Justice Hasnain Masoodi, in his 23-page judgment, delved into the details of Shariah, or Islamic law, and the Koran, the Muslim holy book, to come to the conclusion that a “husband cannot have unrestricted or unqualified power to pronounce the Talaaq.”

Assam: The World Bank has pledged $320 million for improving the road networks in northeastern India, The Times of India reported. The agreement, which was signed Monday by the state government and the central government, laid down a six-year period for completion of the project.

Arunachal Pradesh: In a daytime heist at a bank in the state capital, Itanagar, three men carrying small firearms stole 450,000 rupees, or $8,200, The Assam Tribune reported.

Jharkhand: The Jharkhand High Court issued a contempt notic e to the chief of the Jharkhand Disom Party, the social activist Dayamani Barla and four others for burning an effigy of the high court during a protest  last month, according to a Press Trust of India report.

Rajasthan: The Election Commission has started an awareness program in the state to encourage women to register as voters. Currently, more than 2 million women are not registered, the Daily Bhaskar reported. Rajasthan has a skewed child sex ratio, and the authorities are concerned about the inadequate representation of women in the general, assembly and municipal elections in the state.

Gujarat: The labor strike at the Apollo Tyre factory near Vododra, which began on Oct. 23, has been declared illegal by the state's labor commission, the Business Standard reported. This could result in the termination of jobs for the 700 striking workers, who are demanding the recognition of a newly formed union.

Karnataka: Hundreds of hens have been culled after an outbreak of bird flu near Bangalore city. Chicken consumption has dipped 40 percent as a result and chicken prices have also dropped, The New Indian Express reported. The price of eggs, however, is up by about 25 paise per egg after Kerala's government allowed the import of eggs from Tamil Nadu.



Pakistani Girl, Continuing Her Recovery, Reads in Hospital

This undated photo released by Queen Elizabeth Hospital, shows Malala Yousufzai, as she continues her recovery in Birmingham, England.Queen Elizabeth Hospital, via Associated PressThis undated photo released by Queen Elizabeth Hospital shows Malala Yousafzai, as she continues her recovery in Birmingham, England.

The 15-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by a Taliban attacker because of her activism for girls education has been photographed reading from her hospital bed in England, where she is being treated.

The teenager, Malala Yousafzai, was shot while riding in a school bus on Oct. 9 in the Swat Valley in her home country, after she had become a symbol of resistance against the Taliban by advocati ng access to education for girls. She was later flown to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the Midlands city of Birmingham on Oct. 15, where her family later joined her. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, later said she was recovering at an “encouraging speed.”

Her recovery continued to be followed on Twitter with widespread interest, and online petitions and international events have been initiated in support.

More than 90,000 names had been added to an online petition to nominate Ms. Yousafzai for the Nobel Peace Prize, a movement started by a man living in Canada, Tarek Fatah, who identifies himself on Twitter as an Indian born in Pakistan. Mr. Fatah is a co-founder of the liberal Muslim Canadian Congress.

Another online petition has circulated on the Web site of the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, is calling on Pakistan to agree on a plan to deliver education for every child; for discrimination against girls to be made illegal in all countries; and for international organizations to ensure that the 61 million children who are not in school worldwide are provided an education by the end of 2015.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Mr. Brown's petition will be delivered on S aturday, the day designated by the United Nations as the day of a global support campaign for her.

The U.N.'s Ban Ki-moon talks about Malala Day on Saturday.


Video of Emotional Obama Thanking Staff Is Last Act of Social Media Campaign

As my colleague Michael Shear reports, video of President Obama tearing up as he thanked his campaign staff on Wednesday in Chicago was quickly viewed more than a million times on YouTube.

Video of President Obama thanking his campaign team in Chicago on Wednesday was sent by e-mail to his supporters on Thursday night.

A link to the video was sent to Obama supporters by e-mail on Thursday night, one day after a celebratory update on the president's @BarackObama Twitter feed became the most popular tweet in the brief history of the social network.

As election post-mortems roll in, some analysts have described Mr. Obama's re-election as a victory for social networking - both the online variety and an older form, of direct appeals to voters in person and through telephone calls - which proved powerful enough to counteract the hundreds of millions of dollars of negative ads that blanketed the airwaves of traditional broadcast media.



Image of the Day: Nov. 9

Women hang saris for drying in the sun, as clear weather prevails in New Delhi.  Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesWomen hang saris for drying in the sun, as clear weather prevails in New Delhi.  

India\'s Appetite for Whiskey Attracts Diageo

Whiskey manufactured by Scottish whiskey maker Whyte and Mackay.Carl De Souza/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesWhiskey manufactured by Scottish whiskey maker Whyte and Mackay.

India is the largest guzzler of whiskey in the world. One of the fastest-growing whiskey markets, it is estimated to be worth about $10 billion by 2013, according to a trade group study from last year.

So it was little surprise that on Friday the world's biggest spirits company, Diageo, said it planned to buy 53 percent in India's United Spirits, in a deal worth about $2 billion. The move is one of the biggest by a foreign company to savor a chunk of the Indian whiskey market. The last time a foreign company entered the domestic alco hol market in a major way was when Pernod Ricard acquired Seagram's wine and spirits operation in India in 2001.

Analysts say there are a cocktail of factors that make India the largest consumer of whiskey by volume: The alcohol has a long history in India, going back to the British colonial period. Also, over the past 20 years, the country's growing middle-class with its disposable income, particularly among youth, has increasingly quaffed whiskey.

In recent years, the prestige of sipping single-malts has grown among Indian elites. Whiskey has also gained popularity in smaller cities like Indore, Ludhiana and Lucknow, where consumption in restaurants and retail outlets has increased.

“We as a country have a strong palate,” said Sandeep Arora, a so-called certified whiskey ambassador, meaning he took a British training program on the drink, who lives in India. “We love flavors and spice, that bite in the mouth.” Whiskey, he notes, provides that.

Mr. Arora also points to Bollywood, the Hindi film industry in India, as a factor that glamorized whiskey drinking in the 1970s and '80s.

“Amitabh Bachchan was not drinking vodka. He was drinking whiskey,” he said.

In recent years, the flourishing of homegrown whiskey clubs and tastings attests to the growing popularity of the drink. Mr. Arora, who plans to open a professional whiskey club early next year, estimates that Indians consume 200 million cases of whiskey a year, of which less than a million cases are imported foreign liquor.

In India, prohibitively high import duties on foreign whiskey have ensured that those who controlled the local brands have called the shots for decades, including players like Vijay Mallya, the owner of United Spirits. The last few years, however, duties have slowly eased and more Indians have been able to sip global brands as a result.

Whiskey drinkers never had it better in India, w ith international drinks companies marketing aggressively here. In a good bar in the capital of New Delhi, Mr. Arora estimates that patrons can choose from up to 140 brands of imported whiskey.

“When you look at the growth, the sheer volume, more people are drinking more,” he said.

Although domestic brands enjoy tremendous popularity in India, they have yet to break into the global market, analysts say. One reason is that some of the alcohol in India is made from sugar cane molasses and not grain, so those liquors can't be labeled as whiskey in the European Union. Instead, those brands have to be content with the more modest title of “rum” abroad.

“You can call them Indian spirit; you can call them rum,” Rick Connor, director of public affairs for Chivas Brothers told Time magazine in 2007. “We do object to calling them whiskey.”



India Will Launch Revamped Aakash

The home screen of the Aakash-2 tablet.Pamposh Raina for The New York TimesThe home screen of the Aakash-2 tablet.

On Sunday, the government will officially introduce Aakash-2, the improved version of India's super-cheap tablet computer, Aakash, aimed at revolutionizing education across colleges and universities in the country.

The new version comes with a higher processor speed, improved battery life, a touch screen that offers better quality resolution and several apps designed for students, among other things.

The tablet will be unveiled by the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, in New Delhi, on the sidelines of an event celebrating National Education Day. The day marks the 124th anniversary of the birth of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was the first education minister of independent India.

Unlike the launch event for the first version of the tablet, known as Aakash, held in October 2011, where students were handed several hundred tablets, this year teachers will get to test and use this new version first.

This is the second time in the last six months that teachers have been introduced to an upgraded version of the tablet, and they are testing a few thousands tablets across India.

Sunday's event will have several thousand teachers virtually participate by video conferencing, in addition to the attendees who will be physically present at Delhi's Vigyan Bhavan, a government convention center with a seating capacity of over 1,000 people.

So far, the first 100,000 tablets, meant to be distributed among students by the end of the year at a subsidized price of 1,132 rupees, or $21, are still being shipped. India Ink was told that the entire batch will be distributed to teachers for various teachers' training programs, which will allow them to remotely partake in workshops.

The government agency that spearheads the project, the National Mission on Education Through Information and Communication Technology, plans to float a new tender soon for the next phase of Aakash, which will manufacture a few million tablets. Those will be eventually distributed among students.



Diageo and United Spirits: Terms of the Deal

A Diageo facility near Glasgow, Scotland, in this Aug. 26, 2010 file photo.David Moir/ReutersA Diageo facility near Glasgow, Scotland, in this Aug. 26, 2010 file photo.

Diageo, the British spirits giant, and United Spirits, the Indian liquor company controlled by Vijay Mallya, announced a $2 billion deal Friday expected to give the British company just over half of the Indian company.

The terms of the multi-stage deal, announced after the market closed on Friday, are complicated. Here's how it works:

Stage One: Diageo will acquire a 27.4 percent stake in United Spirits at 1,440 Indian rupees per share, valuing the total stake at £660 million ($1.1 billion).

Some of this sta ke acquisition, 19.3 percent, will come from companies which are subsidiaries of United Spirits, or were established for the benefit of United Spirits management:

They are: UBHL group, the USL Benefit Trust, Palmer Investment Group Limited and UB Sports Management and SWEW Benefit Company. UBHL Group, the holding company for Mr. Mallya's entire conglomerate, will continue to have a 14.9 percent holding in United Spirits after this initial acquisition.

After this 19.3 percent acquisition, shareholders of United Spirits will be asked to approve a “preferential allotment” of shares to Diageo at the 1,440 Indian rupees per share price, to bring the total to 27.4 percent. If shareholders don't approve this, UBHL Group has agreed to sell shares of United Spirits to Diageo to reach 25.1 percent.

Stage Two: Diageo will “launch a Mandatory Tender Offer” to the public shareholders of United Spirits for an additional 26 percent stake in the company, also at 1, 440 Indian rupees per share.

This offer is mandatory under Indian market regulations. The price represents a premium of 35 percent over United Spirits trading price on September 24, the day before an announcement that the companies were in a talks about a deal, the companies said. The second stake purchase is worth about £625 million.

If, for any reason, Diageo does not get a majority stake in United Spirits after stage one and stage two have been attempted, UBHL has agreed to vote its shareholding in United Spirits as directed by Diageo for four years, which would essentially allow Diageo to run the company.

After the deal closes, expected in the first quarter of 2013, Mr. Mallya will be chairman of United Spirits. The chief executive of United Spirits has not been named.



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