Review Urged for Background Check Agency

The federal agency that oversees background checks has been urged to improve its standards after having apparently given security clearance to Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 and wounded eight in a deadly rampage at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday. Rhode Island police warned Navy officials about Alexis’s behavior on business trip there in August, when he told police that he believed people were following him and “sending vibrations through his body.” Meanwhile, the top inspector at the federal Office of Personnel Management, which oversees background checks for roughly two million people a year in over 100 federal agencies, said in June that agency has an “alarmingly insufficient level of oversight.”