We have decided to make this editorial linked to this news story in Nature open to everybody to read. I quote from the opening paragraphs of the editorial.

Imagine that five American nurses and a British doctor have been detained and tortured in a Libyan prison since 1999, and that a Libyan prosecutor called at the end of August for their execution by firing squad on trumped-up charges of deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. Meanwhile, the international community and its leaders sit by, spectators of a farce of a trial, leaving a handful of dedicated volunteer humanitarian lawyers and scientists to try to secure their release.

Implausible? That scenario, with the medics enduring prison conditions reminiscent of the film Midnight Express, is currently playing out in a Tripoli court, except that the nationalities of the medics are different. The nurses are from Bulgaria and the doctor is Palestinian.

This is something worth making a noise about in my opinion. Stories generated by the editorial are being collected on Connotea by Declan Butler.

This week also saw a sad event for Macmillan, the retirement of Alastair Gordon after a 21 year distinguished career in publishing sales. I asked Charles Jenkins and Jim Papworth to pen a few words about him:

Alastair studied PPE at Oxford and after short stints in the wine trade and as a stockbroker, entered the publishing industry with Pergamon Press being interviewed by Robert Maxwell (as was I, RC).He subsequently joined Macmillan Publishers in 1985.

For the last decade he has been International Sales Director at Palgrave Macmillan.  Alastair built up enormous reserves of respect and genuine affection amongst colleagues and the international publishing and bookselling communities around the world.  Modest and unassuming by nature, his achievements have been considerable, overseeing significant sales growth in our international markets for academic, reference and professional books, especially in Europe, Middle East, South Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America, and encouraging and guiding literally hundreds of staff under his wise and humane leadership.  His presentations at sales conferences were legendary for their panache!

On his last day he sold a 30 volume set of Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes to a customer in Chile. Truly characteristic.