Hello there, here’s some advice on how NOT to fire people

Hello there, here’s some advice on how NOT to fire people: "Never use a trinity of abstract nouns. It shows you know what you are saying is inadequate.
“Collectively,” the memo ends, “the clarity, focus and alignment across the company, and the opportunity to deliver the results of that work into the hands of people, will allow us to increase our success in the future. Regards, Stephen.”
It won’t, Stephen. Collectively, a trinity of almost identical, empty mass nouns and the opportunity to deliver something that is not specified is not going to increase anything. Except possibly the dismay, disdain and distrust of the people who work for you.
And just as a bonus, here is rule number eight. Don’t end a memo with “regards”."



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It seems bankers cannot be banked on to be virtuous

It seems bankers cannot be banked on to be virtuous: "Their contempt for the rules is graphically demonstrated in a series of email conversations released yesterday, revealing the collusion between the unnamed traders and managers. The picture they paint is of people who knew they were doing wrong but were confident they would get away with it. For some, it appeared to be a bit of a laugh.
“Every little helps . . . It’s like Tesco’s,” said one trader to his manager about a request to manipulate Libor.
“Absolutely, every little helps,” replied the Lloyds manager.
And this is the response from a Lloyds employee, on being told another trader would be setting “an obscenely high” figure: “Oh dear . . . my poor customers . . . hehehe!!
The Libor scandal came to light two years ago. Since then, seven banks have been hit by hefty fines for their part in the rate-rigging, including Barclays and the bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland."



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Path for Skirting U.S. Taxes Widens With REIT Blueprint - Bloomberg

Path for Skirting U.S. Taxes Widens With REIT Blueprint - Bloomberg: "The shares of the biggest U.S. phone companies, including AT&T Inc. (T) and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), rose today amid prospects the Internal Revenue Service will allow them to pursue another tactic: placing some operations in tax-advantaged vehicles known as real estate investment trusts, or REITS. Last week, shares of containerboard makers such as International Paper Co. (IP) soared on speculation they will use another tax-free structure known as a master limited partnership, or MLP.

Companies are finding all kinds of ways to escape America’s 35 percent corporate rate, from acquiring a mailbox in Ireland to using a 54-year-old tax break originally meant to allow middle-class people to invest in real estate.

The use of foreign addresses, known as “inversion,” is getting increasing attention in Washington this year as corporations like Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and Walgreen Co. (WAG) consider such a move. Congressional Democrats held a press conference today to announce a new proposal to deny government contracts to some inverted companies, and Obama last week labeled such companies “corporate deserters.” Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said last week he may be open to short-term action to address inversions."



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Facebook worth 128 times its profits? That's beyond optimistic – it's euphoric | Technology | theguardian.com

Facebook worth 128 times its profits? That's beyond optimistic – it's euphoric | Technology | theguardian.com: "After so many years of economic gloom, it’s nice to have some good news. On Thursday, such tidings came in the form of a surge in the valuation of Facebook, which climbed to more than $192bn in the wake of good first-quarter earnings.

This means that, as of Friday morning, the social network is now worth more, at least on paper, than Toyota ($189bn), AT&T ($184bn), Coca-Cola ($180bn), Disney ($150bn) and even Bank of America ($164bn).

How could that have happened?

Valuing a company

The total value of a publicly-listed company is pretty easy to work out: you just take its share price, and multiply it by the number of shares it has issued. That tells you what investors think its worth – it’s the price where buyers and sellers equal out.

What a company “should” be worth is a little tricker. For private companies, say a small family-run grocery store, the convention is, roughly speaking, that a business is worth some multiple of how much profit (or sometimes just cash) it generates.

So for a shop that does steady trade over time, a fair price might be about five years’ worth of profits. If the business can show it’s been growing rapidly each year, and is making more and more money, we might decide seven or eight years’ profit is fairer. There’s no exact science."



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Record Student-Loan Debt Prompts Treasury Push to Stem Defaults - Bloomberg

Record Student-Loan Debt Prompts Treasury Push to Stem Defaults - Bloomberg: "The U.S. Treasury, which finances more than 90 percent of new student loans, is exploring ways to make repayment more affordable as defaults by almost 7 million Americans and other strapped borrowers restrain economic growth.

Leading the effort is Deputy Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin, who became the department’s No. 2 official in March after more than three years as a Federal Reserve governor. As higher-education debt swells to a record $1.2 trillion, Raskin, 53, is alert to parallels to the mortgage crisis.

Back then, “we would see signs on telephones polls with 1-800 numbers urging homeowners to call to stop foreclosures. People generally got into more trouble when they used those services,” she said in an interview. Driving past the same telephone poles recently, she saw signs “urging people to call a 1-800 number for helping paying student loans.”"



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Who Gets Saved? Hepatitis Cure at $84,000 Makes Doctors Choose - Bloomberg

Who Gets Saved? Hepatitis Cure at $84,000 Makes Doctors Choose - Bloomberg: "Early this year, liver specialist Ken Flora and his colleagues sent letters to 1,300 patients announcing exciting news: powerful new drugs to cure the lethal hepatitis C virus were finally available.

Soon after, some patients received a different message: notices that their health plans were refusing to pay for the $84,000 drug. So far only about 50 of the patients have received the medicine, Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Sovaldi.

Not since AIDS drug cocktails were introduced almost two decades ago has a medical breakthrough set up such a rush for a life-saving but expensive therapy. Constrained by limited budgets, health insurers and government programs are forced to make hard choices about which patients will get the cure. Many are opting to treat only the sickest."



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Fintan O'Toole on Irish Culture

‘We don’t believe enough in the future not to stuff ourselves with what’s in front of us now’: "We’ve outsourced our sense of control to a domineering church, to national elites and then to global “forces” – the market gods that we propitiate with sacrifices. And over time, we’ve come to feel comfortable with this lack of responsibility: just look at the pitiful way we welcomed the troika to make decisions for us, and at the political chaos that has followed its partial departure. The corollary of getting used to being told what to do is that you gorge yourself when no one’s there to stop you.
Which comes first? Is the lack of self-control the product or the creator of a malfunctioning public culture? Most probably the two are so intertwined the distinction between cause and effect is lost. But if they are so deeply connected, we need to find a way of making that connection in public discourse. The State is never going to get anywhere preaching to its citizens about responsibility, self-control and the need to think about the future when these are, to the State itself, alien concepts."



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Why we are more vocal about loo rolls than our jobs

Why we are more vocal about loo rolls than our jobs: "Nothing is too basic to be written about, not even postage stamps. “Ocado puts them in a neat little envelope so they don’t get lost in your shopping,” writes one customer, while another tries something more humorous: “I have used this product before but disappointed that they failed to work when stuck on to an email.”
While people feel compelled to write reviews of everyday items, they are more reticent when it comes to doing something that would be far more useful – reviewing their jobs. Indeed nearly twice as many people have written about Waitrose Essential Toilet Tissue on the Ocado site as have gone on Glassdoor – which is to jobs what TripAdvisor is to holidays – and told us what it is like working at Ocado.
This is a shame – and a puzzle. The experiences of current and former employees should be the single most important thing to consider when choosing a company to work for. But despite the constant prompts the website gives to leave reviews, only a tiny proportion of employees at big companies seem to want to tell the world anything about their jobs at all."



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Latest State of the Climate: Yup, Still Getting Hotter - Bloomberg

Latest State of the Climate: Yup, Still Getting Hotter  - Bloomberg: "North America was largely an exception, with a relatively wet and mild year experienced in the United States. Europe and Asia had a high number of warm days, and Asia had the fewest cool nights on record.

Trends also continued at the poles. The seven lowest observations of ice in the Arctic have all occurred in the last seven years. The increased ice in Antarctica may seem counterintuitive. One reason is that winds have increased there in recent decades, a shift linked to depleting ozone and increased greenhouse gases. The winds directly contribute to increasing the ice extent.

The report, published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, also comes with this interactive map of extreme climate events from 2013."



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China Finds Debt Addiction Hard to Break in Growth Quest - Bloomberg

China Finds Debt Addiction Hard to Break in Growth Quest - Bloomberg: "China’s leaders are having trouble breaking their addiction to debt-fueled investment.

Outstanding credit rose to 206.3 percent of gross domestic product last quarter from 202.1 percent in January-to-March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from government releases the past two days. Investment in fixed assets, a typical outlet for loans, accelerated in June for the first time since August."



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California Sets Fines for Waste as Record Drought Deepens - Bloomberg

California Sets Fines for Waste as Record Drought Deepens - Bloomberg: "California regulators approved emergency statewide rules that for the first time allow fines against water-wasters after a call for voluntary reductions failed to curb enough use as a three-year drought worsens.

The California State Water Resources Control Board passed an emergency measure that sets fines of as much as $500 a day on residential and business property owners if they overwater lawns to the point that runoff flows onto streets or sidewalks. Residents washing cars without shutoff nozzles on hoses would also face penalties.

After three years of record low rainfall, 80 percent of the most populous U.S. state is now experiencing extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a federal website. Reservoirs are 45 percent below normal levels, and farmers have left fallow an estimated half-million acres in the nation’s most productive agricultural region. The dry spell is likely to boost the prices of food nationwide, and farm and shipping interests stand to lose billions in revenue.

“This is an historic action because of the historic nature of this drought,” said Water Resources board Chairwoman Felicia Marcus."



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This Indian meal service is so efficient it’s the envy of FedEx

This Indian meal service is so efficient it’s the envy of FedEx: "They have cemented their place in Mumbai's colorful tapestry. They deliver lunch from home to the office or school every day, monsoon or shine.

"We take great pride in ensuring delivery even against great odds: We worked through the floods in 2005 and the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008 when most of the city had come to a standstill," said Vitthal Sawant, a 34-year-old dabbawala who has delivered lunches for more than 15 years.

The dabbawalas are a common sight in Mumbai: men clad in white kurtas, weaving their bikes through impossible traffic and swarming throngs, juggling multiple tiffins — circular silver tins with four to five compartments, each packed with food — that are destined for office buildings and school courtyards."



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When $9.6 million is made to look like chump change, or when it is 25th percentile of poor performers

Intel President: We've Made Some 'Gut-Wrenching' Changes That Employees Don't Like - Yahoo Finance: "James explained that everybody's bonuses used to be tied to how the company performed as a whole. She and Krzanich changed that to a mix of "business-unit specific objectives and corporate profitability," she says, which now helps Intel enforce "accountability to operating units."

Krzanich's pay was not left out of the shift. The letter to shareholders noted that he was being paid "well below [former CEO] Paul Otellini’s compensation as CEO" and less than some of his peers, too, at about " the 25th percentile relative to peer company CEOs."

He was paid $9.6 million in 2013."



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Student debt 'help' often predatory, officials say

Student debt 'help' often predatory, officials say: "On Monday, Illinois is expected to become the first state to bring legal action against debt settlement companies in connection with their student loan practices, contending in two separate lawsuits that Broadsword Student Advantage and First American Tax Defense duped vulnerable borrowers into paying for help that never arrived.

In her suit against the companies and their operators, Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, contends that the businesses lured borrowers into paying hundreds of dollars upfront, and in the case of Broadsword, $49.99 a month after that, according to copies of the lawsuits reviewed by The New York Times. The companies often misled customers about those fees, according to the suits, and in some instances feigned affiliation with federal relief programs.

In a particularly cruel twist, Ms. Madigan said, the companies sometimes charged customers for debt assistance that they could have received free from the Education Department."



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We Are All Texans Tomorrow: 1,001 Blistering Future Summers - Bloomberg

We Are All Texans Tomorrow: 1,001 Blistering Future Summers - Bloomberg: "If you live in Phoenix, Arizona, and find the summers there just aren’t hot enough for you, you’re in luck. Just stick around long enough, and it’ll feel just like Kuwait City, where the average summer day registers a lizard-pleasing 114 degrees Fahrenheit (45.6 Celsius).

This new interactive map by nonprofit research group Climate Central draws lines, literally, between the cities of today and the cities they’ll feel like by the end of this century if greenhouse-gas pollution continues on its current path.

For example, the average summer day in Manhattan reaches 82 degrees, but by 2100 it will feel like Lehigh Acres, Florida, at 92 degrees. Summers in Saint Paul seem too chilly? Hang tight, and before long it will feel just like Mesquite, Texas.

Climate Central analyzed 1,001 U.S. cities. Click on the image below and fill in the sentence “I live in ”, and see how you (or your grandchildren) might fare by the end of the century. Most of the lines will take you to southern U.S. cities, but some locales must be transported to Middle East to find equivalent temperatures."



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Japanese struggles

The End of `Made in Japan'? - Bloomberg View: "A huge drop in machinery orders -- the biggest on record -- is yet another reminder Japanese executives remain reluctant to invest their massive cash reserves or raise wages. Even more ominously, M2 money supply growth is now in negative territory. Such measures should be surging 14 months after the Bank of Japan unleashed history's biggest monetary bonanza. Instead the tepid 3 percent rise in M2 last month put Japan's money supply in the red in real terms, a clear sign BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda's bond-buying spree has lost potency.

"The reality is this: so far, the spending retrenchment in April-May tracks fairly closely the retrenchment seen in 1997," says Richard Katz, publisher of the New York-based Oriental Economist Report.

Economists are clamoring for another jolt of monetary audacity after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ill-advised sales tax increase in April. Clearly, the sugar high from the BOJ’s April 2013 move to double bond purchases has worn off. Yet the BOJ is expected to keep policy unchanged at its July 14-15 meeting.

"The BOJ's inaction risks turning the quantitative-easing program from a qualified success into a failure," says Adam Slater, senior economist at Oxford Economics in London. "Now, the danger is increasing that this will instead be a tardy response to a significant deterioration in economic conditions.""



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Great Story: Róisín Ingle on ... getting back on the bike

Róisín Ingle on ... getting back on the bike: "At the Irish Cargo Bike Championships in Phoenix Park last month somebody kindly gave me a go of their vehicle. I say vehicle because strapping my children into the sturdy looking box at the front of the bike was a surprisingly empowering moment.
You see, as a committed non-driver, I don’t get to ferry my children around from GAA to dance class to the supermarket. And yet here I was about to take them up and down the cycle path, transporting them from A to B under my own steam.
“It takes a while to get used to it,” I think I heard the bike owner say but I was gone, driving my children somewhere, anywhere, like a proper grown-up."



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Dáil in Distress: Brooks N Euros

Dáil committee to discuss Brooks concerts next week: "Dublin Correspondent
Dublin City Council chief executive Owen Keegan has agreed to appear before an Oireachtas transport and communications committee next Tuesday to discuss the Garth Brooks Croke Park concerts.
However, Mr Keegan has raised concerns about potential links between committee members and the GAA.
The American country singer had planned to play five concerts at Croke Park from Friday, July 25th to Tuesday, July 29th – 400,000 tickets were sold for the events last January and February. Aiken Promotions applied for licences for the five nights in April. However, Dublin City Council last week issued licences for the first three concerts only.
Brooks said he would perform five concerts or none at all, and, last Thursday, he rejected a proposal to hold two of the concerts as matinees."



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Neonicotinoids linked to recent fall in farmland bird numbers | Environment | The Guardian

Neonicotinoids linked to recent fall in farmland bird numbers | Environment | The Guardian: "New research has identified the world’s most widely used insecticides as the key factor in the recent reduction in numbers of farmland birds.

The finding represents a significant escalation of the known dangers of the insecticides and follows an assessment in June that warned that pervasive pollution by these nerve agents was now threatening all food production.

The neonicotinoid insecticides are believed to seriously harm bees and other pollinating insects, and a two-year EU suspension on three of the poisons began at the end of 2013. But the suspected knock-on effects on other species had not been demonstrated until now.

Peer-reviewed research, published in the leading journal Nature this Wednesday, has revealed data from the Netherlands showing that bird populations fell most sharply in those areas where neonicotinoid pollution was highest. Starlings, tree sparrows and swallows were among the most affected."



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Collection of James Joyce papers available online

Collection of James Joyce papers available online: "An important collection of material concerning James Joyce’s life and work has been made available online by the National Library of Ireland.
The collection is unusual for the personal nature of some of the documents included: it contains a number of manuscript drafts and proofs of Finnegans Wake, but it also covers several letters between Joyce and his son Giorgio and Giorgio’s wife Helen about such family matters as Joyce’s marriage, the illness of his daughter Lucia, and the nervous breakdown of Helen Joyce and her separation from Giorgio.
Donated
The documents are owned by the James Joyce Foundation, Zurich. They were donated to the foundation by the late Hans Jahnke, the son of Giorgio’s second wife, Dr Asta Jahnke-Osterwalder, in 2006."



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Brooks down

Legal threat contributed to Garth Brook’s decision to cancel concerts: "Concern about legal action taken to stop his Croke Park concerts contributed to Garth Brooks’s decision to cancel the events, according to Labour Relations Commission chief executive Kieran Mulvey.
Mr Mulvey, who tried to resolve the disputes over the five proposed concerts, said Brooks became disillusioned by the lack of certainty over whether he could perform.
Injunction proceedings were lodged in the High Court on Monday, aimed at preventing the three concerts licensed by Dublin City Council from going ahead."



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Coconut Crisis Looms as Postwar Palm Trees Age: Southeast Asia - Bloomberg

Coconut Crisis Looms as Postwar Palm Trees Age: Southeast Asia - Bloomberg: "Asia’s coconut palms, which mark the landscape from the Philippines to India, face a crisis as aging groves become less productive, with harvests that are a source of food and income for millions being outstripped by demand.

The trees, many of which were planted about 50 to 60 years ago, no longer yield enough to meet rising demand, according to the Rome-based Food & Agriculture Organization. There’s an urgent need for replanting, said Hiroyuki Konuma, regional representative for Asia and the Pacific at the UN agency, which is coordinating a response to the challenge. While world consumption of coconut products is growing more than 10 percent a year, production is increasing by only 2 percent, it said."



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We shouldn't expect Facebook to behave ethically | Technology | The Observer

We shouldn't expect Facebook to behave ethically | Technology | The Observer: "In case you missed it, here's the gist of the story. The first thing users of Facebook see when they log in is their news feed, a list of status updates, messages and photographs posted by friends. The list that is displayed to each individual user is not comprehensive (it doesn't include all the possibly relevant information from all of that person's friends). But nor is it random: Facebook's proprietary algorithms choose which items to display in a process that is sometimes called "curation". Nobody knows the criteria used by the algorithms – that's as much of a trade secret as those used by Google's page-ranking algorithm. All we know is that an algorithm decides what Facebook users see in their news feeds.

So far so obvious. What triggered the controversy was the discovery, via the publication of a research paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that for one week in January 2012, Facebook researchers deliberately skewed what 689,003 Facebook users saw when they logged in. Some people saw content with a preponderance of positive and happy words, while others were shown content with more negative or sadder sentiments. The study showed that, when the experimental week was over, the unwitting guinea-pigs were more likely to post status updates and messages that were (respectively) positive or negative in tone.

Statistically, the effect on users was relatively small, but the implications were obvious: Facebook had shown that it could manipulate people's emotions! And at this point the ordure hit the fan. Shock! Horror! Words such as "spooky" and "terrifying" were bandied about. There were arguments about whether the experiment was unethical and/or illegal, in the sense of violating the terms and conditions that Facebook's hapless users have to accept. The answers, respectively, are yes and no because corporations don't do ethics and Facebook's T&Cs require users to accept that their data may be used for "data analysis, testing, research"."



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From Google to Amazon: EU goes to war against power of US digital giants | Technology | The Observer

From Google to Amazon: EU goes to war against power of US digital giants | Technology | The Observer: "Coal, gas and oil powered the industrial revolution, but in the digital era, data is replacing fossil fuels as the most valuable resource on Earth, and the ability to collect and interrogate it has created organisations with a power that can at times seem beyond the control of nation states. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google represent, in the words of Germany's economy minister Sigmar Gabriel, "brutal information capitalism", and Europe must act now to protect itself.

"Either we defend our freedom and change our policies, or we become digitally hypnotised subjects of a digital rulership," Gabriel warned in a passionate call to action published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine. "It is the future of democracy in the digital age, and nothing less, that is at stake here, and with it, the freedom, emancipation, participation and self-determination of 500 million people in Europe."

In France, economy minister Arnaud Montebourg believes Europe risks becoming a "digital colony of the global internet giants", and ministers have called for Google to contribute to the cost of upgrading the country's broadband infrastructure. Gabriel says Germany's cartel office is currently examining whether Google should be regulated as a utility, like a telecoms supplier – the group has 91.2% market share of search in Germany.

He believes that, as a last resort, there may be a case for "unbundling" Google, separating its search arm from mobile, or YouTube, or services such as email."



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Google U-turn over deleted newspaper links - FT.com

Google U-turn over deleted newspaper links - FT.com: "Google’s refusal to discuss the reasons behind its decisions and the spotlight that has fallen on some people who had hoped to use the new right to bury embarrassing or damaging information about themselves, has already drawn complaints from media companies and internet experts.
A Guardian spokeswoman said that the newspaper had not been notified of the decision to reindex six articles. It had only been told a day earlier that the articles had been removed from Google’s UK search service, and had not appealed against Google’s decision.
However, the newspaper had publicly accused Google of “an overly-broad interpretation” of the court ruling when it took issue with the removals. Three of them concerned the referee of a Scottish football game who had been accused of lying about a penalty decision."



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Fidelity makes a stand on executive pay - FT.com

Fidelity makes a stand on executive pay - FT.com: "Fidelity Worldwide Investment, one of the world’s biggest fund management groups, has for the first time voted against the executive pay proposals of a majority of FTSE 350 companies it invests in.
The group, which manages $275bn in funds from investors outside the US and Canada, wants listed companies to introduce fairer pay incentives that link performance with success over the longer term."



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Brooks- needs friends in High Places, in Ireland

Garth Brooks: ‘For us, it is five shows or none at all’: "Singer Garth Brooks tonight told the 400,000 people who have bought tickets for his Irish concerts that he will play five shows in Dublin or none at all.
In a statement issued after Dublin City Council refused to licence two of the five concerts; those due to be held on July 28th and 29th, Brooks said: “For us, it is five shows or none at all.”
“To choose which shows to do and which shows not to do, would be like asking to choose one child over another. However this plays out, Ireland has my heart and always will.”"



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Scotland's independence is left in the hands of a 'middle million' of switherers | Politics | The Guardian

Scotland's independence is left in the hands of a 'middle million' of switherers | Politics | The Guardian: "Dunbar is a pretty market town in East Lothian with an evidently active community: civic week has just finished, and the bakery is supported by more than 740 local shareholders. The town is also home to a concentration of undecided voters, perhaps because lower levels of deprivation here mean that people have more to lose, perhaps because – as one resident puts – East Lothian "looks both ways", to Edinburgh and the border."



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McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC laggards in US fast-food survey

McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC laggards in US fast-food survey: "
Fast food titans McDonald's, Taco Bell and KFC are conquering the globe, but they are losing to the likes of In-N-Out Burger, Chipotle Mexican Grill and Chick-fil-A in the United States, according to Consumer Reports' latest fast food survey.

The survey, released on Wednesday, ranked regional chain In-N-Out-Burger the industry's best hamburger chain, based on food quality, value and service. Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill was the No. 1 Mexican chain, followed by Chipotle, while Chick-fil-A ranked highest among chicken chains."



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McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC laggards in US fast-food survey

McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC laggards in US fast-food survey: "
Fast food titans McDonald's, Taco Bell and KFC are conquering the globe, but they are losing to the likes of In-N-Out Burger, Chipotle Mexican Grill and Chick-fil-A in the United States, according to Consumer Reports' latest fast food survey.

The survey, released on Wednesday, ranked regional chain In-N-Out-Burger the industry's best hamburger chain, based on food quality, value and service. Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill was the No. 1 Mexican chain, followed by Chipotle, while Chick-fil-A ranked highest among chicken chains."



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Public Meetings- Soctland shows the way

‘This is our last and only chance of creating something better’: "The referendum has brought about a renaissance in political public meetings – a phenomenon that had waned in British society since the 1960s, or later, replaced by television debates, direct mail and, more recently, social media.
Up to now, Yes Scotland has been significantly more skilled than Better Together in putting boots on the ground, listing for example more than 350 events that will take place within 50 miles of Edinburgh between now and polling day.
By contrast, Better Together lists about 175 events, though a significant percentage of those are phone-canvassing sessions held in supporters’ homes, rather than anything that is open to the public at large.
In Dunfermline last week the Courier newspaper held the last of its referendum meetings, bringing together former Labour MP Dennis Canavan and Dunfermline and Fife West MP Thomas Docherty, along with academic John Curtice.
The gathering was, at times, revealing. “Yes Scotland” is happy to have Canavan representing it, since it helps to rebut the perception that the campaign is little more than a front for Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party."



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