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US President Barack Obama has announced changes to US intelligence gathering and sharing, to prevent a recurrence of the Christmas Day plane bomb plot. In a national address, he said the terror watch list would be boosted and security risk data better distributed. Hundreds more air marshals will be recruited, screening at airports improved and visa rules reviewed. Mr Obama criticised "systemic" intelligence failings over the plot, but said: "The buck stops with me." The US failed to "connect and understand" intelligence it had prior to the failed attack on the Detroit-bound airliner, he said. Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is charged with the attempted murder of 290 people, and five other counts. Mr Abdulmutallab, 23, is to make his first appearance in federal court on Friday in Detroit for a hearing to determine if he stays in custody. Announcing the conclusions of a review of intelligence failures uncovered by a White House inquiry, President Obama said the US government "had the information scattered throughout the system to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack". Mr Abdulmutallab's name was on a US database of about 550,000 suspected terrorists. However, it was not on a list that would have subjected him to additional security screening or kept him from boarding the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. "Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had," President Obama said. He said he was ordering an immediate strengthening of the terrorist watch list, information on security risks would be distributed more widely, and analysis of that information would be improved. Also among more than a dozen new measures are improved screening technology at US airports, the recruitment of hundreds more air marshals and a review of the issuing of US visas. The report revealed that a misspelling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name had led the State Department to believe that he did not have a valid US visa - which he did. Speaking after Mr Obama, US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said hundreds of more sophisticated screening scanners would be deployed at US airports and that foreign airports would also be encouraged to overhaul and strengthen their equipment and procedures. While many of the barriers to sharing intelligence have been reduced, there have also been new layers of bureaucracy added to the system, correspondents say. While he did not announce any large-scale reform, Mr Obama declared that there is a long-term challenge in making sure all the vast amount of information that is now collected by intelligence and security agencies is properly processed. But, our correspondent adds, there are bound to be questions, not least from Mr Obama's political opponents, over whether this response is enough. The president's remark that in the end the buck stops with him is an acknowledgement that this is being seen very much as another test of him too, our correspondent adds. Earlier on Thursday it was reported that the alleged bomber met a radical US Muslim cleric after being recruited by al-Qaeda in London. Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi said Mr Abdulmutallab met Anwar al-Awlaki in the cleric's ancestral home province of Shabwa, having been recruited while a student at the University College London (UCL). Mr Awlaki has been linked to an attack by a US Army major on the Fort Hood base in Texas in November, in which 13 people died. In his remarks on Thursday, President Obama said that although the US was at war with the al-Qaeda, it did not mean America should succumb to a "siege mentality". He said his administration would work to persuade Muslims around the world that al-Qaeda's policies and aims were bankrupt and produced only misery.