"X-Files" star David Duchovny leaves sex rehab

Actor David Duchovny, who plays a womanizing novelist on the cable television series "Californication," has completed a rehabilitation program for sex addiction, his attorney said on Monday. Duchovny, former star of the "X-Files" films and TV series, is married to actress Tea Leoni and they have two children. The actor's admission to a rehab facility for treatment of sex addiction was publicly revealed by his attorney, Stanton "Larry" Stein, in late August. In a statement on Monday, Stanton said Duchovny "has successfully completed rehabilitation."

"He is out and will very soon begin work on his new movie," Stanton said. - reuters

I want to believe he is cured.

Aphthous ulcers (Canker Sores)

Let's talk about something unpleasant: canker sores. Twenty percent (20%) of the general population has them, and so do I. They hurt like hell, but they go away on their own. For me, they happen a few times per year, sometimes I don't have them for a few years at a time. When I do get them, they go away on their own in a few weeks. I have two right now. One just healed after a week, but then, annoyingly, another is just starting. The pain makes me cranky.

They aren't contagious.

Causes:

Large sores one those which last more than two weeks can be a sign of some other disease, but the small ones, in otherwise healthy people, seem to be an auto-immune problem which may have many different triggers.

A common trigger is physical injury or damage to the mouth's protective coating of special cells, the oral mucosa. -  In my case, being so intent on a project that I forgot to eat or drink for 7 hours, probably did it.  The type of cells lining much of the mouth dry out and die if they are not kept moist by bodily secretions. [ See: Non-keratinizing stratified squamous epithelium (SSNKE).] Damage to the protective lining is also caused by toothpastes with sodium lauryl sulfate.  This detergent attacks the upper layers of the mucosa and denaturates the mucin layer, exposure of the underlying epithelium. In other words, it strips away your mouth's natural protection.

The damage in step 1 ramps up your body's immune system.

Fixes:

Salt water (a mild antiseptic - 1 tsp (5 g) of salt in 1 cup (250 mL) of warm
water, rinse & spit, don't drink!), mouthwash (listerine) and other safe mouth disinfectants like licorice root will give the mouth a chance to heal.  Deglycyrrhizinated licorice (DGL) seems to be the best.

Shooting the sore with a red laser pointer for 30 seconds per day will reduce pain immediately and effect good healing in 1-2 days. ( 632 nm and  670 nm lasers were tested, I'm not sure of the power used.)

Dow plunges 800 points amid global sell-off

The Dow Jones industrials skidded more than 800 points and fell below 10,000 for the first time in four years, while the credit markets remained under strain. Financial markets took a despairing view of the future Monday, seeing contagion in a credit crisis that threatens to cascade through economies globally despite government efforts to provide relief.Investors around the world have come to the sobering realization that the Bush administration's $700 billion rescue plan won't work quickly to unfreeze the credit markets. Global banks, hobbled by wrong-way bets on mortgage securities, remain starved for cash as credit has dried up.

That has sent stocks spiraling downward in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and driven investors to sink money into the relative safety of U.S. government debt. Fears about a global recession also caused oil to drop below $90 a barrel; and the benchmark index that gauges fear in the market jumped to the highest level in its 18-year history.

"The fact is people are scared and the only thing they're doing is selling," said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer's Investment Research. "Investors are cleaning out portfolios and getting rid of everything because nothing seems to be working."

The selling was so extreme that only 67 stocks rose on the NYSE—and 3,155 dropped. That's a telling sign considering the stock market is considered a leading economic indicator, with investors tending to buy and sell based on where they believe the economy will be in six to nine months.

Monday's steep decline on Wall Street indicates that investors are becoming more convinced that the country is leading a prolonged economic crisis that is spreading to other nations. Over the weekend, governments across Europe rushed to prop up failing banks, while the governments of Germany, Ireland and Greece also said they would guarantee bank deposits. - bb

Problem: A disease called "addicted to credit". Buy gold.

Head-to-toe hazards of the desk-bound body

Graphic is from computer world.

Sunspots Are Fewest Since 1954, Significance Is Unclear

The Sun has been strangely unblemished this year. On more than 200 days so far this year, no sunspots were spotted. That makes the Sun blanker this year than in any year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days.

The Sun goes through a regular 11-year cycle, and it is now emerging from the quietest part of the cycle, or solar minimum. But even for this phase it has been unusually quiet, with little roiling of the magnetic fields that induce sunspots.

“It’s starting with a murmur,” said David H. Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

As of Thursday, the 276th day of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., had counted 205 days without a sunspot.

In another sign of solar quiescence, scientists reported last month that the solar wind, a rush of charged particles continually spewed from the Sun at a million miles an hour, had diminished to its lowest level in 50 years.

Scientists are not sure why this minimum has been especially minimal, and the episode is even playing into the global warming debate. Some wonder if this could be the start of an extended period of solar indolence that would more than offset the warming effect of human-made carbon dioxide emissions. From the middle of the 17th century to the early 18th, a period known as the Maunder Minimum, sunspots were extremely rare, and the reduced activity coincided with lower temperatures in what is known as the Little Ice Age. - nytimes

Bank robber hires decoys on Craigslist, fools cops

In an elaborate robbery scheme that's one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities.

It gets better: He then escaped in a creek headed for the Skykomish River in an inner tube, and the cops are still looking for him. "A great amount of money" was taken, Monroe police said, but did not provide a dollar value.

It appears to have unfolded this way, according to a Seattle-based NBC affiliate: around 11:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, the robber, wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask went over to a guard who was overseeing the unloading of cash to the bank from the truck. He sprayed the guard with pepper spray, grabbed his bag of money, and fled the scene.

But here's the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery--wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

"I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour," one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

Authorities eventually found the getaway inner tube (a getaway inner tube!) and suspect that accomplices may have picked up the robber in a boat. According to the NBC affiliate, police hope to track him down by figuring out who posted the Craigslist ad in the first place. - cnet

Anthrax Preparedness In US To Involve Mailmen

Earlier this week the US government announced measures to boost the nation's preparedness against a potentia outdoor anthrax attack: using letter carriers or mailmen on a voluntary basis to deliver supplies and medicines to residents in communities during an emergency.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt, and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, have used their authority under law to enable the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that will allow eligible letter carriers to have medical kits with small amounts of antibiotics for themselves and their families to use in the event of an anthrax terrorist attack.

Should there be an outdoor anthrax attack, the antibiotics will protect emergency volunteers against the bacterium. The secretaries stressed that no imminent threat exists at the moment, but putting the legal framework in place now will ensure a speedy response is then possible if it should be needed. ... -  mednews

Confessions of a Gold Eater

Also referred to as ORMES (Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements) or ORMUS and m-state elements, and the newest theories in physics as they relate to this area of research assert that some elements on the periodic chart might be diatomic (two atoms) or small atomic cluster "condensates," which are known in the scientific community as "Bose-Einstein Condensates." They are becoming more widely known as "m-state" elements. These elements are widely found.

The elements are very superconductive and supplementing with it seems to boost the energy of the cells within your body, this facilitates repair and regeneration at a faster level than before, online sources produce these supplements; by chemical and electrical manipulation that reduce elements such as gold, silver, indium etc to this M-state. The products are then lab verified for safe consumption etc. My personal experience with it has been interesting to say the least, I feel great, full of energy, my libido has increased, I am able to focus and have a much better mental clarity than before. The most interesting effect is that my teeth, (two front molars) having been accidently chipped when I was seven, are actually re-growing! - ac

Gold ordinarily doesn't react with much at all, so it won't do any harm or good when you eat it. Not sure about this:

Monoatomic? Maybe. A superconductor? We hope to know soon. Is it real? Absolutely! ... Our White Powder Gold has been tested by the Department of Materials Characterization at a prominent English University.  ... White powder gold is made from pure gold. It is not made from volcanic ash or sea salt or crushed rock. We sell this powder in 1/2 ounce bottles and in 1 ounce bottles . It is suspended in water with no preservative...  ...  We would like to point out that since only a handful of human beings know how to produce a substance such as a white powder gold , the residue found at crop circles strongly suggests that they have an extra-terrestrial origin. - whitepowdergold

Someone should buy some and have it examined.

Outer solar system not as crowded as thought

A new finding has determined that the outer solar system appears not as crowded as some theories suggest, with astronomers unable to find small chunks of rock and ice in the region, which they were expecting to locate. The search in question, the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS), spent two years periodically photographing portions of the sky to look for small chunks of rock and ice orbiting beyond Neptune, in a region of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt.

The survey targeted Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) with sizes between 2 miles (3 km) and 17 miles (28 km). Since such objects are too small to see directly, the survey watched for stars to dim as KBOs passed in front of and occulted them.  ... The outer solar system hence appears not as crowded as some theories suggest, perhaps because small KBOs have already stuck together to form larger bodies or frequent collisions have ground down small KBOs into even smaller bits below the threshold of the survey. - phenom

Computer Problems Eat Hours and Hours of time.

RANTS:

- Don't buy an Acer 5610 laptop. They overheat and shut off without warning, screwing your entire operating system. ( At first I thought it was a virus, but the problem continues with a freshly installed OS. )

- Don't think Maxtor backup software will get you out of trouble if your computer crashes. If you have a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini external hard drive backing up your data, note: 1) DriveProtect is not compatible with SafetyDrill. If you encrypt your  external drive with Maxtor's software (DriveProtect) you won't be able to use Maxtor's software (SafetyDrill) to get your data back. 2) Save the Maxtor Manager software that comes on the OneTouch Mini on an external USB drive. They refuse to provide the software on their web site, despite complaints about this over a year old. You have to email them requesting it (and they don't auto reply).

- Don't expect to install Vista in the same time it takes to install Windows XP. The Windows Vista installation process may take several hours on some systems. I'm going back to XP Pro as soon as Maxtor sends me a link to the software I need.

Okay, this was exactly the video I needed to see right now. (Warning: strong language) I about laughed my arse off because I realized, watching someone else have a real honest to god hissy fit, that we are like junkies. We are addicts. We are sick. (See IAD).

Anger management

Freethought

Isn't all thought free? Who charges for it and where do they put the meter?

I've been asked to perform at Freethought Day in Old Sacramento, CA on Oct 12, so I'm doing some research:

Freethought, a philosophical view,  holds that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of science and logic. Freethinkers should not be influenced by emotion, authority, tradition, or any dogma. This view was promoted by the founder of Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama. Gautama, a spiritual teacher from ancient India who lived from 563 BC to 483 BC, instructed that teachings should only be accepted if they are shown to be true by our experience.

In the Kalama Sutta, also called Buddha's charter of free inquiry, he says:

"It is proper for you ... to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. ... Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; ... things lead to harm and ill, abandon them."

This was about 500 years before christ. About 2000 years after he said these things, freethought was in trouble. The year 1600 AD is seen as beginning of the era of modern freethought, marked by the execution in Italy of Giordano Bruno by the Holy Inquisition. Bruno was imprisoned for 7 years then burned at the stake by the church in part for believing the sun was the center of our solar system, something we all now know to be true.

Freethinkers tended to be liberal, espousing ideals such as racial, social, and sexual equality, and the abolition of slavery. As the fastest growing religious affiliation in the world is currently, "not religious", the time seems ripe for new congregations of freethinkers.

. Evidence for this recent development is the survey published by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York American Religious Identification Survey, 2001, by Barry A. Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keysar. This study finds a significant increase in the number of adult Americans who profess no religion. Today there are 29.4 million American adults who have no religious identification—an increase since 1990 from 8.16 percent to 14.17 percent. Moreover, the number of people who reside in a household whose members do not belong to a religious organization has likewise increased, from 46 percent in 1990 to 54 percent today.

It must be granted that a preponderance of the public (if often only nominally) still self-identifies as Christian-77 percent in 2001, in comparison with 86.7 percent in 1990. Yet here, too, this is a 9 percent decline. Today those with no religion are the third-largest minority, after Roman Catholics (50.9 million) and Baptists (33.8 million). - sechum

Foreclosures and the Right to Vote

The foreclosure crisis could do considerable damage to the nation’s voting system. More than a million people have lost their homes in the past two years. And because voter registration is based on people’s residences, they could face politically motivated challenges at the polls.

The problem may be especially acute in the presidential battleground states. In Ohio, more than 5 percent of home mortgages are seriously delinquent or in the foreclosure process, and there were more than 67,000 foreclosure actions in the first half of 2008. Michigan and Florida have also been hard hit.

There are a large number of advocacy groups and other programs that work to ensure that minorities, the disabled and students are able to cast ballots. Because the foreclosure crisis is so recent, not much work has been done to ensure that people who lose their homes do not also lose their chance to vote.

Many of the hardest-hit neighborhoods are low- income and minority areas, which tend to vote Democratic. That means officials have to be extra vigilant to ensure that Republicans do not use foreclosure lists to challenge voters. There was a dust-up recently in Michigan, after a progressive Web site quoted the Republican chairman of Macomb County as saying that his party planned to do just that. He and the party insist there are no such plans, but the Barack Obama campaign has filed suit to block foreclosure-based challenges. - nytimes

Do you want to live forever?

Slowing the Aging Process: Seven Biological Reasons we Grow Old

To what should one dedicate one's life? I get excited about the idea of hacking human biology to eliminate the effects of aging.  If I were to choose a new career path right now, working on one of these seven biological causes of aging would be worth at least the next 20 year's effort. All of these are fixable, which means death by old age is curable!

The seven types of aging damage proposed by de Grey.

1. Cancer-causing nuclear mutations/epimutations:

   These are changes to the nuclear DNA (nDNA), the molecule that contains our genetic information, or to proteins which bind to the nDNA. Certain mutations can lead to cancer, and, according to de Grey, non-cancerous mutations and epimutations do not contribute to aging within a normal lifespan, so cancer is the only endpoint of these types of damage that must be addressed.



2. Mitochondrial mutations:

   Mitochondria are components in our cells that are important for energy production. They contain their own genetic material, and mutations to their DNA can affect a cell’s ability to function properly. Indirectly, these mutations may accelerate many aspects of aging.



3. Intracellular junk:

   Our cells are constantly breaking down proteins and other molecules that are no longer useful or which can be harmful. Those molecules which can’t be digested simply accumulate as junk inside our cells. Atherosclerosis, macular degeneration and all kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer's disease) are associated with this problem.



4. Extracellular junk:

   Harmful junk protein can also accumulate outside of our cells. The amyloid plaque seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is one example.



5. Cell loss:

   Some of the cells in our bodies cannot be replaced, or can only be replaced very slowly - more slowly than they die. This decrease in cell number causes the heart to become weaker with age, and it also causes Parkinson's disease and impairs the immune system.



6. Cell senescence:

   This is a phenomenon where the cells are no longer able to divide, but also do not die and let others divide. They may also do other things that they’re not supposed to, like secreting proteins that could be harmful. Immune senescence and type 2 diabetes are caused by this.^{[citation needed]}



7. Extracellular crosslinks:

   Cells are held together by special linking proteins. When too many cross-links form between cells in a tissue, the tissue can lose its elasticity and cause problems including arteriosclerosis and presbyopia.^[7]

Aubrey de Grey, British researcher on aging, claims he has drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging. He provocatively proposes that the first human beings who will live to 1,000 years old have already been born.

A true maverick, Aubrey de Grey challenges the most basic assumption underlying the human condition -- that aging is inevitable. He argues instead that aging is a disease -- one that can be cured if it's approached as "an engineering problem." His plan calls for identifying all the components that cause human tissue to age, and designing remedies for each of them — forestalling disease and eventually pushing back death. He calls the approach Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).



With his astonishingly long beard, wiry frame and penchant for bold and cutting proclamations, de Grey is a magnet for controversy. A computer scientist, self-taught biogerontologist and researcher, he has co-authored journal articles with some of the most respected scientists in the field. - ted

Top Psychiatrist Didn’t Report Drug Makers’ Pay

One of the nation’s most influential psychiatrists earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007, failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and violated federal research rules, according to documents provided to Congressional investigators.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, is the most prominent figure to date in a series of disclosures that is shaking the world of academic medicine and seems likely to force broad changes in the relationships between doctors and drug makers.

In one telling example, Dr. Nemeroff signed a letter dated July 15, 2004, promising Emory administrators that he would earn less than $10,000 a year from GlaxoSmithKline to comply with federal rules. But on that day, he was at the Four Seasons Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyo., earning $3,000 of what would become $170,000 in income that year from that company — 17 times the figure he had agreed on.

The Congressional inquiry, led by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is systematically asking some of the nation’s leading researchers to provide their conflict-of-interest disclosures, and Mr. Grassley is comparing those documents with records of actual payments from drug companies. The records often conflict, sometimes starkly.

“After questioning about 20 doctors and research institutions, it looks like problems with transparency are everywhere,” Mr. Grassley said. “The current system for tracking financial relationships isn’t working.”

The findings suggest that universities are all but incapable of policing their faculty’s conflicts of interest. Almost every major medical school and medical society is now reassessing its relationships with drug and device makers. - nyt

Yet another conspiracy theory proven true. It all boils down to greed. Company profits are more important that human lives in too many cases.

Selective inactivation of micro-organisms with near-infrared femtosecond laser pulses

We demonstrate an unconventional and revolutionary method for selective inactivation of micro-organisms by using near-infrared femtosecond laser pulses. We show that if the wavelength and pulse width of the excitation femtosecond laser are appropriately selected, there exists a window in power density that enables us to achieve selective inactivation of target viruses and bacteria without causing cytotoxicity in mammalian cells. This strategy targets the mechanical (vibrational) properties of micro-organisms, and thus its antimicrobial efficacy is likely unaffected by genetic mutation in the micro-organisms. Such a method may be effective against a wide variety of drug resistant micro-organisms and has broad implications in disinfection as well as in the development of novel treatments for viral and bacterial pathogens. - iop

The above research was studied in part by a scientist from the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD.

Sounds a bit Raymond Royal Rife-ish to me.  Perhaps in the future we will be able to walk through a beam and have all harmful pathogens killed off.

Spermicidal and AIDS virus killer: Coke?

PSI: Don't use Coke as birth control. According to snopes, you'll get a yeast infection and by the time you try it, over 100,000 sperm are already swimming around in the uterus, already out of reach of the coke, even if you use the shake and fizz method. But yes, it does kill sperm.

A researcher who figured out that Coke explodes sperm and scientists who discovered that people will happily eat stale chips if they crunch loudly enough won alternative "Ig Nobel" prizes Thursday.

Other winners included physicists who found out that anything that can tangle, will tangle and a team of biologists who ascertained that dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas.

The Ig Nobels honor real research, but are meant as a funny alternative to next week's deadly serious Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, literature and peace.

Awarded by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humor magazine, the prizes are based on published research, some intended to be humorous but often not. Usually the "honored" researchers go along with the joke.

Deborah Anderson of Boston University Medical Center and colleagues were awarded the chemistry prize for a 1985 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found Coca-Cola kills sperm. She said she was serious in testing the soft drink because women were using it in a douche as a contraceptive and, later, to try to protect themselves from the AIDS virus. "It definitely wouldn't work as a contraceptive because sperm swims so fast," Anderson said. But Coke made with sugar quickly kills sperm, she said, probably because sperm soak it up. "The sperm just kind of explode," she said in a telephone interview. It kills the AIDS virus too, she said. ... - reuters

Anderson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University's School of Medicine, and her colleagues found that not only was Coca-Cola a spermicide, but that Diet Coke for some reason worked best. Their study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985. ... she does not recommend using Coke for birth control purposes. A group of Taiwanese doctors were honored for a similar study that found Coca-Cola and other soft drinks were not effective contraceptives. Anderson said the studies used different methodology. - abcnews

See improbable.com. According to the FDA, nonoxynol 9 (N-9) spemicide causes inflammation and actually increases the odds of transmission of HIV.

Does coke kill AIDS? Sure, the acid does it. So does saliva, lemon juice, chlorine in swimming pools, coconut oil, infrared femtosecond lasers with carefully selected wavelengths, ozone, and crocodile blood.

As far as my current understanding: The difficulty is that the HIV virus's RNA incorporates itself into your cells when it is spread by semen or blood. Once that happens, you can't kill it on contact.

Blood contains the highest concentration of the virus, followed closely by semen, followed by vaginal fluids. ...

Oral sex (mouth-penis, mouth-vagina): The risk from oral sex is very minimal as the mouth is an inhospitable environment for HIV, for several reasons. Saliva contains enzymes that break down the virus; also, the skin of the mouth is sturdier than in the anus or vagina. There are, however, a few documented cases where it appears that HIV was transmitted orally. These cases are all attributed to ejaculation in the mouth (i.e., exposure to semen, not exposure to vaginal fluid or pre-seminal fluid). Receiving oral sex is not risky because one is exposed only to saliva. - sfaf

Russian Teen Kill Best Friend with Tweezers after insult

Teenager stabbed best friend to death in Russia with a pair of TWEEZERS in a row over looks

A teenage girl has killed her best friend by stabbing her over 100 times with a pair of tweezers in a row over looks. Pretty Kristina Danilova, 18, murdered childhood pal Olga Samoilenko in a fit of rage after being told her she was ugly and would never get a boyfriend.  She pulled her eyebrow tweezers out of her make up bag and attacked her friend, who bled to death. ... Danilova told detectives: 'Olga remarked that I was ugly and would never ever find a boyfriend.   'How could I stay calm on hearing something like that from someone who I had always considered my best friend?' ... She said: 'I didn't mean to kill her, it happened accidentally.' - dailymail

US and India Nuke Deal

The nuclear deal between the United States and India raises major questions about the spread of nuclear weapons as well as illustrating India's new importance as a strategic American partner.

The deal was finally agreed by the US Senate on Wednesday, having previously been given approval by the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Under it, India is now able to receive supplies and technology for its growing nuclear power industry, ending a boycott imposed by nuclear supplier states (through the Nuclear Suppliers' Group) because it has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

India can keep and develop its nuclear weapons programme, but has to open up certain of its nuclear power plants to IAEA inspection. - bbc

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has arrived in India for talks on a civil nuclear co-operation deal.

The US Senate approved the deal on Wednesday, ending a three-decade ban on nuclear trade with Delhi... India says the deal is vital to meet civilian energy demands, but critics say it undermines efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons. - bbc