Its effects are likely to include: current overseas trainees being forced to return to their country of origin, incompletely trained; recruitment of doctors of lower calibre and poorer English language skills in some specialties; “tit for tat” regulations in other countries to exclude UK doctors from working overseas, with potentially profound adverse effects upon charitable work; the impossibility of setting up “links” which train doctors from developing countries; loss of goodwill internationally and justifiable legal claims of institutionalised racism.PROFESSOR GORDON N DUTTONDR KIRSTEEN J THOMPSONGLASGOW DR ANDREW PYOTT INVERNESS Carbon tax should replace income tax Sir: A century ago, a reforming left-of-centre government invented income tax. In essence, this means that doctors I have seen invest time, commitment and resources in the NHS stand to lose the opportunity to continue training here with no warning or chance to alter their plans. It will mean that doctors who have dedicated themselves to the NHS and begun to study for their UK postgraduate exams who were born in India will be second choice to a Polish doctor who has no experience of the NHS.I have profound concerns about this unjust shift which speaks volumes about the unfair way in which the immigration system operates in the UK and the high personal cost this has for individuals.DR J M PURCELLCARLISLESir: The new UK policy, which will effectively exclude most non-EU overseas doctors from training in the UK, is ill thought-out. IMGs are covered for this period with permit-free training visas and are subject to protection from British equal opportunities legislation.The two sudden changes, throwing the system into disarray, are that IMGs must now apply for a work permit with every job and may only be employed if trusts can prove that a UK- or EU-trained doctor cannot fill the vacancy. In the last two weeks the Department of Health has issued new rules about the immigration status of IMGs which will have a profound effect on the careers of these doctors.Presently, doctors working in the UK need to move frequently between training schemes, applying for jobs on perhaps an annual basis. New rules for overseas doctors are unfair and discriminatory

Sir: I work as a doctor in a district general hospital with many colleagues who are international medical graduates (IMGs), and so was very interested in your report of 31 March on immigration.
Working with doctors from India, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Mauritius, Nigeria, Kenya, and Poland, I am aware of the oversimplistic and biased way immigration is presented in the British media.

Provided you’re over 25 and don’t carry more than 50 bullets (surely enough for most daily needs) it’s your legal right to own an assault rifle. The theory that a well-armed society is a polite society does not yet appear to be working – and the cost of staying alive gets higher every day.t.sutcliffe independent.co.uk

More from Thomas Sutcliffe. You might have thought that if you were setting out to normalise a violently fissile society, widespread ownership of AK-47s would have been one of the things you might want to discourage – but apparently Saddam and Paul Bremer, the former American administrator, were of one mind on this matter. A report in The New York Times notes that since the mosque attack in Samarra at the end of February, the price for an AK-47 has more than doubled from $112 to $290, while bullets have gone up from 24 cents apiece to 33. It is a heat-seeking missile that locks on to heat-seekers.* As we approach the third anniversary of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue at least one economic indicator in Baghdad suggests things are getting worse, not better.

In the kitchen a porter wearing rubber gloves and a gas mask will slice a Dorset Naga into the vindaloo and nemesis will be gingerly carried towards the victim. The beauty of this punitive vegetable is that it targets only those who have, literally, been asking for it. I hope it is true, because it should prove an invaluable armament for restaurateurs faced with the drunken show-off who demands “the hottest curry you’ve got”. But if it is a hoax, one can only applaud the density of the back story – accessible on www.dorsetnaga.biz – which includes copies of the Southwest Bio-Labs lab report noting a Scoville Heat Unit reading of 876,000 (Tabasco Sauce is a relatively bland 2,500 to 5,000 SHU).

But either way you’ll probably find yourself succumbing to the charisma of the priest – the gnomic elusiveness of his aphorisms, the wit with which he sidesteps awkward paradoxes. He’s as much guru as maestro – and if you’re still sceptical I direct you to the title of his series: “In the Beginning Was the Sound”.Whether it makes sense to treat music as spiritual revelation is too large a question to resolve here – but at least we know it exists.Chilli to put the heat on show-offsThe announcement that a mail-order chilli firm has discovered the world’s hottest chilli, right, caused some scepticism because of its dateline – 1 April. Even if you’re a true believer you may recognise what the same Catholic dictionary describes as the besetting defect of the homily – “a tendency to lack of unity and continuity”. “When you play five notes,” he says, “if each note had a big ego it would want to be louder than the note before. And therefore I learnt from this a very simple fact, that no matter how great an individual you are, music teaches you that creativity only works in groups, and the expression of the group is very often larger than the sum of the parts.”If you seek a less numinous account of the psychological effects of music – like the neurologist who asks a question in the first lecture – you may be disappointed. The next, in a traditional parsonical manner, he’s drawing out the moral implications from a simple truth of musical composition.

At one moment he does a close reading of the opening two notes of the prelude to Tristan and Isolde – pointing out that the music commences not with a movement from A to F, but from silence to A. And the people best placed to judge the success of his enterprise are not going to be musicologists or neuroscientists but students of homiletics.
The purpose of the homily, as a Catholic dictionary defines it, is to “explain the literal and evolve the spiritual meaning” of a sacred text Barenboim promises to do both. Barenboim, a believer in the power of music to instruct us about life, rather than simply distract us from it, is not so much giving lectures as delivering sermons. What does become clear fairly early on though is that this is a quasi-religious event – a form of spiritual attendance for an essentially secular age. I’m not sure yet whether this was damage limitation or a kind of striptease flirtation. It could be either, after all – insurance against the potential accusation that he’d not scratched the surface of his subject or an implicit promise that he will succeed where others have failed.