UK Tightens Screening of Foreign Docs

The UK is scaling up background checks on foreign doctors and other health workers in response to the revelation that eight suspects in the attempted London and Glasgow car bombings last weekend worked for the National Health Service, the Telegraph reports. PM Gordon Brown, in his first Question Time in the House of Commons, ordered a review of NHS recruitment.

Almost 90,000 doctors working in the UK were recruited from outside the EU. Prospects undergo rigorous language and clinical tests, but background screening covers only crimes committed in Britain. Yesterday a British cleric in Baghdad reported receiving a veiled warning of the attacks from an alleged Al-Qaeda leader: “Those who cure you will kill you,” he said, the Times reports. (More Gordon Brown stories.)