Muammar Gaddafi has been killed by Libyans he once scorned as “rats”, succumbing to wounds, some seemingly inflicted after his capture, in his hometown of Sirte on the Mediterranean.

Two months after Western-backed rebels ended 42 years of eccentric, often bloody, one-man rule by capturing the capital, Tripoli, his death and the fall of the final bastion ended a nervous hiatus for the new interim government, which is now set to declare formal “liberation” with a timetable for elections.

The killing or capture of Gaddafi’s senior aides, including possibly two of his sons, as an armoured convoy braved NATO air strikes in a desperate bid to break out of Sirte, might ease fears of diehards regrouping elsewhere.

However, mobile phone video apparently of Gaddafi alive and being beaten might inflame his sympathisers.

A Libyan official said Gaddafi, 69, was killed in custody.

“We confirm that all the evils, plus Gaddafi, have vanished from this beloved country,” interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in Tripoli as the body was delivered, a prize of war, to Misrata, the city whose siege and suffering at the hands of Gaddafi’s forces made it a symbol of the rebel cause.

“It’s time to start a new Libya, a united Libya,” Mr Jibril added. “One people, one future.”

A formal declaration of liberation, that will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made by Friday, he said.

Shot in head

A spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi, Jalal al-Galal, said a doctor who examined Gaddafi in Misrata found he had been shot in the head and abdomen. Jerky video shown on al-Jazeera showed a man looking like Gaddafi, with distinctive long, curly hair, bloodied and staggering under blows from armed men, apparently NTC fighters.

“They captured him alive and while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed,” one senior source in the NTC told Reuters. “He might have been resisting.”

Driven in an ambulance from Sirte, his partially stripped body was delivered to a mosque in Misrata. Senior NTC official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters that DNA tests were being conducted to confirm it was Gaddafi. He would be buried in Misrata, most likely by Friday according to Muslim custom.

Officials said his son Mutasin, also seen bleeding but alive in a video, had also died. Another son, heir-apparent Seif al-Islam, was variously reported to have surrounded, been captured or killed as conflicting accounts of the day’s events crackled around networks of NTC fighters rejoicing in Sirte.

In Benghazi, where in February Gaddafi disdainfully said he would hunt down the “rats” who had emulated their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbours by rising up against an unloved autocrat, thousands took to the streets, firing their weapons and dancing under the old tricolour flag revived by Gaddafi’s opponents.

Mansour el Ferjani, 49, a Benghazi bank clerk and father of five posed for a photograph holding a Kalashnikov rifle. “Don’t think I will give this gun to my son,” he said. “Now that the war is over we must give up our weapons and the children must go to school.

“But Gaddafi was a terrible dictator and this was the only way to get rid of him. We want everything people have in free countries – we want people to live in peace as you do across the Mediterranean where life doesn’t require the machinegun.”

In Sirte, a one-time fishing village and Gaddafi’s home town in which grandiose schemes had styled a new “capital of Africa” for the “king of kings”, fighters whooped with delight and some brandished a golden pistol they said they had taken from Gaddafi.

Accounts were hazy of his final hours, though there was no shortage of fighters willing to claim they saw Gaddafi, who had long pledged to go down fighting, cringing underground, like Saddam Hussein eight years ago, and pleading for his life.

Photo: Reuters

A toddler who was twice run over by vans and then ignored by 18 passers-by as she lay critically injured in the street has died, the hospital treating her said today.

Surveillance camera footage of people walking past the two-year-old girl, nicknamed Yue Yue, as she lay bleeding and unconscious, sparked a wave of condemnation and soul-searching on China’s popular social networking sites.

A rubbish collector who finally moved the girl to the side of the street in the southern Chinese city of Foshan was hailed as a hero, but the incident also led many online commentators to question the state of Chinese morality.

“Yue Yue died of systemic organ failure,” a spokesman from the hospital treating her told AFP, adding that no expense had been spared to try to save the girl, whose parents are migrant workers.

Doctors had earlier said Yue Yue, who had been in a coma since the October 13 incident, was unlikely to survive.

Yue Yue’s death was one of the most popular topics on China’s weibos – microblogging sites similar to Twitter – as people expressed sorrow and anger over the incident.

“Farewell to little Yue Yue. There are no cars in heaven,” wrote one microblogger.

“Yue Yue was consumed for a week by the fake kindness of netizens … All the wishes are fake and only the 18 passers-by are real. Farewell, and do not be born in China in your next life,” another weibo user wrote.

Many commentators speculated that the failure to help Yue Yue was motivated by fear of being blamed for her injuries after a high-profile 2006 case in which a driver who stopped to help an elderly woman was later prosecuted.

Peng Yu, then 26, said he stopped after seeing the woman fall in the eastern city of Nanjing, but she accused him of knocking her down with his car, and a court ordered him to pay her 45,000 yuan ($6900) in damages.

“The judge in Peng Yu’s case in Nanjing has destroyed the kindness of a whole nation and it is difficult to recover,” one weibo user wrote on Friday.

A commentary in Friday’s Global Times daily said the incident had exposed the “dark side” of Chinese society, but rejected suggestions that the law should punish those who failed to help victims.

“It is more appropriate to establish a reward system for those who offer help, rather than punish those who do not,” it said.

“The Yue Yue incident reminds us of where China is standing on the ladder of its moral development.”

Police in Foshan said the drivers of both vehicles that hit the young girl had been detained and would face trial.

One was detained the night of the accident and the other gave himself up three days later, they said.

A new biography portrays Steve Jobs as a sceptic all his life – giving up religion because he was troubled by starving children, calling executives who took over Apple “corrupt” and delaying cancer surgery in favour of cleansings and herbal medicine.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, to be published in the US on Monday, also says Jobs came up with the company’s name while he was on a diet of fruits and vegetables, and as a teenager perfected staring at people without blinking.

The Associated Press purchased a copy of the book on Thursday in the US.

The book delves into Jobs’s decision to delay surgery for nine months after learning in October 2003 that he had a neuroendocrine tumour – a relatively rare type of pancreatic cancer that normally grows more slowly and is therefore more treatable.

Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He went to a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproved approaches before having surgery in 2004.

Isaacson, quoting Jobs, writes in the book: “‘I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,’ he told me years later with a hint of regret.”

Jobs died on October 5, at age 56, after a battle with cancer.

The book also provides insight into the unravelling of Jobs’s relationship with Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google and an Apple board member from 2006 to 2009. Schmidt had quit Apple’s board as Google and Apple went head-to-head in smartphones, Apple with its iPhone and Google with its Android software.

Isaacson wrote that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the touch and other popular features of the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google’s actions amounted to “grand theft”.

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $US40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

Jobs used an expletive to describe Android and Google Docs, Google’s internet-based word processing program. In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a cafe in Palo Alto, California, Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn’t interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says.

“I don’t want your money. If you offer me $US5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”

The meeting, Isaacson wrote, resolved nothing.

The book is clearly designed to evoke the Apple style. Its cover features the title and author’s name starkly printed in black and grey type against a white background, along with a black-and-white photo of Jobs, thumb and forefinger to his chin.

The biography, for which Jobs granted more than three dozen interviews, is also a look into the thoughts of a man who was famously secret, guarding details of his life as he did Apple’s products, and generating plenty of psychoanalysis from a distance.

Jobs resigned as Apple’s CEO on August 24, six weeks before he died.

Doctors said on Thursday that it was not clear whether the delayed treatment made a difference in Jobs’s chances of survival.

“People live with these cancers for far longer than nine months before they’re even diagnosed,” so it’s not known how quickly one can prove fatal, said Dr Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

Dr Michael Pishvaian, a pancreatic cancer expert at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre, said people were often in denial after a cancer diagnosis, and some took a long time to accept recommended treatments.

“We’ve had many patients who have had bad outcomes when they have delayed treatment. Nine months is certainly a significant period of time to delay,” he said.

Fortune magazine reported in 2008 that Jobs tried alternative treatments because he was suspicious of mainstream medicine.

The book says Jobs gave up Christianity at the age of 13 when he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine. He asked whether his Sunday school pastor knew what would happen to them.

Jobs never went back to church, though he did study Zen Buddhism later.

Jobs calls the crop of executives brought in to run Apple after he was ousted in 1985 “corrupt people” with “corrupt values” who cared only about making money. Jobs himself is described as caring far more about product than profit.

He told Issacson they cared only about making money “for themselves mainly, and also for Apple – rather than making great products”.

Jobs returned to the company in 1997. After that, he introduced the candy-coloured iMac computer, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and turned Apple into the most valuable company in America by market value for a time.

The book says that, while some Apple board members were happy that Hewlett-Packard gave up trying to compete with Apple’s iPad, Jobs did not think it was cause for celebration.

“Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands,” Jobs told Isaacson. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed.”

“I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple,” he added.

Advance sales of the book have topped best-seller lists. Much of the biography adds to what was already known, or speculated, about Jobs. While Isaacson is not the first to tell Jobs’s story, he had unprecedented access. Their last interview was weeks before Jobs died.

Jobs reveals in the book that he did not want to go to college, and the only school he applied to was Reed, a costly private college in Portland, Oregon.

Once accepted, his parents tried to talk him out of attending Reed, but he told them he wouldn’t go to college if they didn’t let him go there. Jobs wound up attending but dropped out after less than a year and never went back.

Jobs told Isaacson that he tried various diets, including one of fruits and vegetables. On the naming of Apple, he said he was “on one of my fruitarian diets”. He said he had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating”.

Jobs’s eye for simple, clean design was evident early. The case of the Apple II computer had originally included a Plexiglas cover, metal straps and a roll-top door. Jobs, though, wanted something elegant that would make Apple stand out.

He told Isaacson he was struck by Cuisinart food processors while browsing at a department store and decided he wanted a case made of molded plastic.

He called Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, his “spiritual partner” at Apple. He told Isaacson that Ive had “more operation power” at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself – that there’s no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, said Jobs, was “the way I set it up”.

Jobs was never a typical CEO. Apple’s first president, Mike Scott, was hired mainly to manage Jobs, then 22. One of his first projects, according to the book, was getting Jobs to bathe more often. It didn’t work.

Jobs’s dabbling in LSD and other aspects of 1960s counterculture has been well documented. In the book, Jobs says LSD “reinforced my sense of what was important – creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could”.

He also revealed that the Beatles were one of his favourite bands, and one of his wishes was to get the band on iTunes, Apple’s revolutionary online music store, before he died. The Beatles’ music went on sale on iTunes late last year.

The book was originally called iSteve and was scheduled to come out in March. The release date was moved up to November, then, after Jobs’s death, to Monday. It is published by Simon & Schuster and will sell for $US35.

Isaacson will appear on Sunday on 60 Minutes in the US. CBS News, which airs the program, released excerpts of the book on Thursday.

Photo: Paul Sakuma

A YOUNG man captured by militants while protecting a country he loves, and two ordinary, devoted parents who never gave up fighting for his release – for five long years, the Gilad Shalit story has been etched deeply into the Israeli consciousness.

As word came through yesterday that Sergeant Shalit had been returned to Israeli soil, the release by Israel of 477 Palestinian prisoners into the custody of the Red Cross began.

Sergeant Shalit sat down with Egyptian state television for his first interview after his release from Hamas capture. Looking pale and thin, but smiling often, he spoke hesitantly, his eyes lowering as he spoke.

What did he miss the most? ”To talk and to meet people,” he replied.

”I hope this deal will help conclusion of a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Sergeant Shalit visibly struggled when he was asked: ”There are thousands of Palestinian prisoners still in Israeli jails, will you campaign for their release?”

”I’ll be happy if Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are freed as long as they don’t return to attack Israel,” he said.

”I missed my family and friends. I have a lot to do now I am free.”

Dressed in an Israel Defence Forces uniform after discarding the clothes Hamas dressed him in for his release, he landed at Israel’s Tel Nof Air Base to be reunited with his parents.

At his home in the Galilee village of Mitzpe Hila, supporters lined the road to his house with white roses in preparation for his homecoming.

Sergeant Shalit was taken prisoner in a raid by Hamas militants on the Israeli side of the Gaza border on June 25, 2006. His capture unleashed a huge Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip to try to secure his release in which at least 400 Palestinians died.

Yesterday, Palestinian flags fluttered in the breeze as hundreds of Palestinian families and loved ones waited outside

checkpoints and jails, and convoys of buses transported prisoners to release points in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There was a huge security presence at all prisoner exchange points.

Celebrations were planned in the West Bank and Gaza City to welcome home the prisoners – about 300 were to cross the Egyptian border at Kerem Shalom and then return to Gaza, and another 100 were to be freed from Ofer prison into the West Bank.

Many had been in jail for decades, often held in terrible conditions and with severe restrictions on visits by family and friends.

In Israel, there was palpable joy at the news of Sergeant Shalit’s release, not just for him but for his parents, Noam and Aviva, who kept up the pressure on Israel’s government and defence forces to make a deal to bring their son home.

Not satisfied with the failure to secure his release, and as their son continued to be held hostage in an undisclosed location in the Gaza Strip, denied access to any international help, the couple set up a protest tent across the road from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem 15 months ago. They never stopped fighting.

Dahlia Scheindlin, an international public opinion analyst and academic at Tel Aviv University, said: ”Everyone in this country is just two degrees of separation away from someone who was killed in a terror attack or killed in the army. There is a sense that his release means there is one more death that has been prevented, but on the other hand everybody in this country can relate to the relatives of those who were killed.”

A poll this week showed the Israeli public overwhelmingly supported the deal, Ms Scheindlin said, but within each person there were deeply conflicting feelings.

In answer to the question, ”Do you support the deal in which Gilad Shalit is to be released in exchange for 1027 terrorists?”, 79 per cent of Israelis polled said ”yes” and 14 per cent said ”no”. The poll was published in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. Half said they were concerned that the release of the Palestinian prisoners would harm security in Israel.

Ms Scheindlin said Sergeant Shalit’s parents were a major reason he had become such a part of Israeli consciousness.

”For at least the last two to three years of [Shalit's] five-year incarceration, the Israeli public blamed the government for his plight. They almost forgot that Hamas was holding him in contravention of international law, and this was because of the determination of his parents to lobby the government and make it their problem.”

But the pain and anger of those who have lost loved ones in terror attacks perpetrated by some of the prisoners being released is also deeply felt.

On Monday, Mr Netanyahu released a letter to the families of those killed in terrorist attacks.

”I know that the price is very heavy for you. I understand the difficulty to countenance that the evil people who perpetrated the appalling crimes against your loved ones will not pay the full price that they deserve,” he wrote. ”I belong to a bereaved family of the victims and fallen of terrorism. [My] brother was killed in the operation to rescue the Entebbe hostages.”

He said the decision to make the deal for Sergeant Shalit’s release ”was among the most difficult that I have ever made”.

For some, his words will not be enough. Much of the anger is focused on the release of the perpetrators of a 2001 Jerusalem pizza cafe bombing in which 15 people were killed. Then 21, Ahlam Tamimi directed the bomber to the cafe and has shown no remorse for the deaths.

That she is part of the prisoner swap is inconceivable to Arnold Roth, originally from Melbourne, who lost his 15-year-old daughter Malki in the bombing. ”This is a terrible day,” Mr Roth told the BBC.

Photo: Reuters

“Occupy” protests, inspired by demonstrations on Wall Street, have started in Australia and begun to spread around the world.

In Sydney, hundreds of people occupied a site in front of the nation’s central bank headquarters in the heart of the financial district, declaring it as “only the start” of their protest.

Elsewhere in Australia, about 100 people moved in to the city center of Brisbane for what they say is the start of their occupation. “Occupy Brisbane” organizer Thomas Brookes said the group was expecting more than 2,000 people to participate in the demonstration.

“We’re not moving, we’re occupying Brisbane and we’re occupying cities all around the world, it’s happening in Australia and New Zealand first,” Brookes said.

In New Zealand, between 500 and 600 people joined marches in the cities of Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch, Radio New Zealand reported.

“People like myself who work every day and at the end of the week I still have to make the decision whether to pay the bills or eat for the forthcoming week. I don’t see that as being right or fair,” Rob Read, from “Occupy Aotearoa,” told the station.

About 600 people have joined rallies in Tokyo and marched on the headquarters of TEPCO, the company responsible for Japan’s devastated nuclear reactor, according to Sky News Australia.

The protests, which loosely target the global financial system, are also expected to reach London, where demonstrators plan to occupy the heart of the capital’s financial center Saturday.

A number of campaign organizations have said they will support the “Occupy London Stock Exchange” protests, Sky News UK reported. A Facebook page on the protest has more than 13,000 followers, with more than 5,000 saying they will attend.

In a public statement “OccupyLSX” declared, “More than a million people have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of homes have been repossessed, while small businesses are struggling to survive. Yet bankers continue to make billions in profit and pay themselves enormous bonuses, even after we bailed them out.”

Supporter Kai Wargalla said, “We want to stand with the 99 percent — the overwhelming majority who value people over profit. We want to make our voices heard against greed, corruption and for a democratic, just society.”

On Wall Street, where the growing movement began, protesters at the make-shift “Occupy” encampment are planning a march from Lower Manhattan to Times Square on Saturday.

Other members of the group plan to march on a Chase Bank branch to close their accounts, myFOXny.com reported.

The protesters say they are concerned about what they call the financial sector’s lack of public accountability in light of the billions of dollars it received in public bailout money.

Photo: Jono Searle

At the end of the month, the doors of the old gym will be locked and the 50,000 items stored there, including wedding and graduation photos, trophies, satchels, gym vests and other school clothing, taken to a nearby incinerator.

For now, however, the belongings remain neatly arranged on tables to allow the handful of visitors who drop by each day to sift through them. It’s like a rummage sale, only with tags that indicate the item’s owner — some of them pupils from the nearby Okawa Elementary School — instead of a price.

The effects were recovered during mopping up operations on the south bank of the Kitakami River, in a community that was devastated by the March 11 tsunami.

While shutting the gym and burning its contents would appear to represent some kind of closure for disaster survivors, there are those who continue to search for possessions too precious to abandon.

Each day, a handful of parents and relatives of the more than 300 residents still missing in Ishinomaki’s Kahoku district can be seen digging through the mud or scouring Naburi Bay and nearby Nagazura Lagoon in search of their still unaccounted-for loved ones.

One such parent is Naomi Hiratsuka, a teacher whose daughter was among the 108 students and 12 teachers from Okawa Elementary who were swept away by the massive waves that flattened the riverside community.

Five of those children remained missing until last month, when fishermen pulled out the remains of a body in Naburi Bay, 5 km from the school.

Underwear on the badly damaged corpse convinced Hiratsuka, 37, and her husband, Shinichiro, 45, that it was their daughter, Koharu, who was due to graduate to her mother’s junior high school in April.

Last week, DNA test results confirmed their worst fears, and their daughter joined the 69 children and 11 teachers from the school who have been officially confirmed dead since the catastrophe.

The Hiratsukas will hold a wake and funeral for their daughter this weekend, something Hiratsuka said they were previously unable to even contemplate doing “without absolute confirmation” that the body was indeed their daughter.

Nonetheless, Hiratsuka has continued to assist in the daily searches, operating a mechanical digger — thanks to the license she obtained in May to operate heavy vehicles — and helping others whose loved ones remain missing.

“It took five months to find Koharu and since then not one body has been recovered,” said Hiratsuka, who applied for a heavy vehicle permit to speed up the search that she and her husband had previously conducted with shovels.

“The parents of the missing children are continuing their search in great pain. I know how they feel. That’s why I want to help.”

One of those parents is Miho Suzuki, whose daughter, Hana, 9, remains unaccounted for. Each day, Suzuki, 43, scours the land near her devastated home and prays at a shrine that has been erected in front of the skeletal remains of Okawa Elementary.

Grieving relatives leave soft drinks, cuddly toys and other items on the makeshift altar. Alongside a marble tombstone is a photo of the school taken from a hill neighboring the playground, which teachers controversially ignored as a place of refuge in favor of the bridge that spans the river 100 meters from the school.

As they scrambled toward the bridge, the tsunami swept in from the sea, sparing only 33 of the 108 children. One teacher fled up the hill with another child, but, stricken with guilt, later committed suicide.

The body of Suzuki’s son, Kento, 12, was recovered several days after the disaster.

Though bitter about the circumstances surrounding the children’s deaths, Suzuki leaves letters at the shrine addressed to her daughter and son.

One of those letters, addressed simply, “To cute, cute Hana,” reads: “Mommy and Daddy’s dream ended as just a dream. Hana, if you read this letter, please come home. Mommy and Daddy are waiting for you.”

Suzuki confided that the vigil has taken its toll. “At first, I couldn’t even recall her smiling face,” she said as she laid flowers at the shrine. “Coming here and knowing she is somewhere nearby is comforting. But I can’t rest until she returns home. No loving parent could.”

Another among those searching is Masaru Naganuma, who goes out daily in his small boat to look for his son, Koto, 8. Initially, he burrowed through the mud using a power shovel.

“To have to look for your child with heavy machinery is mortifying,” Naganuma told the local Kahoku Shimpo newspaper. “All I want is to see him once more.”

Yet, there are some who fear the missing children may never be seen again.

Last month, police decided to scale down their operations, leaving just three police officers and two diggers to search the area.

“My greatest fear is the discontinuance of searches by the police and parents,” said Hiratsuka, who delayed her planned return to work last month to continue digging for the missing kids.

“Some people say we are slowing our reconstruction efforts, that we should give up searching. We don’t want to hinder recovery, but we can’t just give up. I hope the police won’t, either.”

The three police officers who remain in the area are busy removing debris from Nagazura Lagoon in one final push to recover bodies, according to Kahoku police official Kunihiko Murakami.

“There is still a possibility that bodies will be found among the debris,” Murakami said, adding that many of the officers who were drafted nationwide to conduct searches in the six months that followed the disaster have already returned to their local municipalities.

“If necessary, we will increase the number of officers, but I think we did all we could have done in those first six months.”

The number of mounds of dirt and debris that litter the landscape bears witness to the extent of the searches. The only other structure that was left standing near the school is a clinic, whose interior has yet to be cleared of a wrecked car, a tractor and medical apparatus.

Anything else of personal value found among the ruins of this once-lovely corner of the northeast has been taken to the old gym, whose closure is imminent.

Kazumori Hirobe, a volunteer charged with managing the repository, said few residents drop by these days.

“There are those who don’t want to come, those who’ve since secured new things so they don’t need to come, and those who, sadly, are not able to come,” he said, adding that a Buddhist memorial ceremony has been proposed before the items are incinerated.

Hiratsuka, who found some of her daughter’s belongings at the repository — including a page from a journal that wrote about “Mommy’s birthday” shortly before the tsunami — believes many in the community will be relieved when the facility is finally closed.

“For many people, it’s difficult to keep hold of things that stir up memories of how things were. I think many will feel a sense of closure when those things are burned. But for some of us, that still won’t be the end.”

Photo: ROB GILHOOLY

“It makes good media. It’s the emotional pulling on the idea that radiation kills you. But you talk to our cancer patients: Radiation cures you.”

The nuclear expert sitting in front of me was dismissive about the fears surrounding the public’s perception of radiation. Gerry Thomas runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank at Imperial College London, and she knows more than most about the measurable effects of exposure to radiation.

The Tissue Bank collects and stores tumors from patients exposed to radioactive iodine in childhood after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union (present-day Ukraine) in April 1986.

While of course she won’t assert that radiation is safe — it can be terribly dangerous — she makes an important point: Radiation is natural.

Radiation is all around us. In the time it took me to write those five words, I had been bombarded by hundreds of cosmic rays, and the radioactive atoms in the air I breathed and the food I’ve eaten will have decayed in my body and released radiation. Thousands of gamma rays are streaming through me from the building I’m sitting in, and from the ground underneath.

This so-called background radiation is not something we worry about. Perhaps because we can’t see it, we don’t worry about it. And, of course, background radiation is very low level.

But here’s the deeper reason we don’t worry about it: We have evolved to cope with it.

Cancer patients at the Hammersmith Hospital in London where Dr. Thomas works, and at hospitals all over the world, are exposed to very high doses of radiation. Those levels are much higher than, say, the doses that workers at the crippled Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant are receiving.

Of course, with radiation therapy the dose is focused on the patients’ cancers, whereas at Fukushima the workers’ whole bodies are being exposed.

But even with cancer therapy, inevitably the surrounding tissue is exposed to radiation, too. If radiation is so dangerous, then oncologists should expect to see cancers developing in that surrounding tissue.

“Yet we don’t get a huge increase in secondary cancers as a result,” says Thomas.

So what’s going on? According to Thomas, the answer is simple: In some situations, radiation is less dangerous than we think.

After Chernobyl, excluding those who worked at the site itself to contain the disaster, the worst health effects were not directly due to exposure to radiation. In the wider, surrounding population, the most damaging health effects were psychological: depression, anxiety, thoughts of suicide.

Thomas wants to try and ensure that in Japan, post-Fukushima, a psychologically damaging level of fear about radiation doesn’t build up.

After the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, the Hyogo Institute for Traumatic Stress was set up to treat mental-health issues occurring among survivors, and Thomas is one of many experts who want Japan to take psychological issues more seriously.

Of course there are concerns about radiation in Japan, and those are understandable. But I thought of what Thomas said last month when I read a scientific paper that stood out from all the others discussing the damaging effects of ionizing radiation on the body and the measurements of radioactive cesium and iodine across Japan.

Gian Luigi Russo and colleagues at Italy’s National Research Council found that hospital workers exposed over months and years to radiation from X-rays at permitted levels, had undergone changes at a cellular level. These changes may even be positive. In other words, this low, regular exposure to radiation could be good for the health.

Russo took blood samples from 10 cardiologists who are exposed to around 4 millisieverts of radiation per year. The cardiologists use X-ray-guided surgery, also known as Interventional Radiology (IR).

X-rays are used so the surgeon can identify the precise location of the problem. It means the hospital workers are exposed to slightly above the dose they would receive naturally, but still well below the U.S. Code of Federal Regulation’s limit of 50 millisieverts per year.

When Russo’s team looked at the blood of the cardiologists, they found that it had the distinctive mark of cell damage — higher-than-expected amounts of hydrogen peroxide. Also, their white blood cells showed signs of decreased life-expectancy. However, the blood also contained glutathione, a protective antioxidant, at twice the normal levels. The results are published in the European Heart Journal (DOI reference: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehr263).

Russo’s is only a small sample, but this could be the first evidence that low doses of radiation can induce changes at a biochemical and cellular level. However, it remains to be seen whether the benefit of the dose outweighs the potential cost.

I’d love to know what Osamu “God of Manga” Tezuka would have made of all this. Tezuka, of course, created one of Japan’s most iconic contemporary cultural figures: Tetsuwan Atom, also known as Astro Boy.

The peace-loving android was nuclear-powered, and Tezuka had interesting views on radiation. In the 1949 manga “Metropolis,” he invented a radioactive metal he called Omotanium that had beneficial powers. How would he have responded to the ongoing disaster at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant?

Of course we don’t know, as he died — from stomach cancer — in 1989.

Photo: AP

The United World Colleges (UWC), whose Bosnian branch has accepted North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s grandson as a student, is an international network of schools and colleges founded in 1962.

The first school in the network, which has establishments in thirteen countries, was opened in south Wales.

The main goal of UWC schools is to offer educational experience ‘based on shared learning, collaboration and understanding’ between students and teachers from different cultures, its website said.

South African leader Nelson Mandela became a honorary president of the UWC in 1999.

Photo: AFP

After several failed attempts to convince their 41-year-old son to leave the nest, a Venetian couple have hired a lawyer in a last bid for domestic peace and quiet, Italian media have reported.

The parents, whose names were not published, were said to be exhausted by fending for their adult offspring, cooking his meals and doing his washing and ironing, according to the reports yesterday.
“We cannot do it any more. My wife is suffering from stress and had to be hospitalised,” said the father, who approached the legal department of a consumer association, ADICO, for help.

The son “has a good job but still lives at home. He demands that his clothes be washed and ironed and his meals prepared. He really has no intention of leaving.”

Reports said the son also had aggressive tendencies.

ADICO lawyer Andrea Camp said a letter was sent to the son, advising him to leave the house within six days or face legal action.

If he refuses, lawyers will ask a court to issue a protection order to the parents against their son.

ADICO says hundreds of Italian families face similar difficulty in getting rid of their adult children.

The latest couple turned to ADICO two weeks ago after hearing of a similar case in which the association had convinced a son to abandon the family cocoon – after which his parents changed the locks.

It’s not only Western leaders like Julia Gillard and Barack Obama who face fierce resistance from climate sceptics as they try to lay out policies to tackle global warming.

In China, where carbon emissions have surged despite tough government constraints and targets, President Hu Jintao is having to stare down claims that human-induced climate change is an elaborate American conspiracy.

”Global warming is a bogus proposition,” says Zhang Musheng, one of China’s most influential intellectuals and a close adviser to a powerful and hawkish general in the People’s Liberation Army, Liu Yuan.

Mr Zhang told the Herald that global warming was an American ruse to sell green energy technology and thereby claw its way out of its deep structural economic problems.

A year ago Mr Hu committed to lower the ”carbon intensity” of economic output by 40-45 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels. China appears on track to meet the target but that may still not be enough to save the world from destructive climate change, thanks to faster-than-expected Chinese economic growth.

A new study by the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency shows China now emits far more greenhouse emissions than any other country, with emissions doubling between 2003 and 2010.

China’s carbon emissions rose 10 per cent last year alone, to 9 billion tonnes, compared with 5.2 billion tonnes for the United States.

The report showed India’s emissions also rose rapidly, by 9 per cent, although its total emissions are still only one-fifth of China’s.

The most startling finding, however, is that China’s per capita emissions are now higher than several rich nations including France and Italy. China’s per capita emissions could even overtake the US within six years, the study said.

But they may never catch up with Australia. Australia’s total emissions plummeted by 8 per cent last year, according to the report, beginning to reverse a two-decade long rising trend. But Australia’s per capita emissions are the highest of any substantial economy at 18 tonnes.

In London on Thursday, the former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull praised China’s incentives for renewable energy, which has seen its installed wind and solar capacity double in each of the past six years.

These achievements have been lauded abroad but sullied at home by governance, efficiency and even environmental problems, leading to allegations that China has been duped.

Mr Zhang, whose father was secretary to China’s former premier Zhou Enlai, blasted Chinese policy makers for encouraging Chinese companies to buy foreign intellectual property in order to manufacture vast quantities of renewable energy equipment.

The Chinese-made equipment helps the environment in other nations while leaving China with only financial and environmental costs, he said.

”Lots of solar panels are made in China and the pollution is left in China but they are used overseas,” Mr Zhang said. ”The low-carbon economy, carbon politics and carbon taxes are actually driven by the West as the foundation for a new cycle of the virtual economy.”

Mr Zhang’s comments provide a window into a contemporary internal Communist Party dynamic where no leader can afford to be accused of making ”soft” compromises with American negotiators.

It helps explain how Mr Hu’s carbon commitment last year was overshadowed at the Copenhagen climate summit by China’s abrasive diplomacy and its refusal to submit to international monitoring.

Whether China can help avert a global climate disaster may hinge on whether its green policies can offset deep economic distortions and governance problems that tend to encourage resource-intensive investment.

”If the current trends in emissions by China and the industrialised countries including the US would continue for another seven years, China will overtake the US by 2017 as highest per capita emitter among the 25 largest emitting countries,” said the Netherlands report, which was sponsored by the European Commission and is based partly on BP energy consumption statistics.

Photo: Reuters