mordant wit

THE US and the European Union are embroiled in a row over biometric passports that may soon make it much harder for people to travel across the Atlantic.

The US has stipulated that any passport issued after October 2005 carried by a foreign visitor must include a biometric chip. These new passports are intended to increase security by including data encoding the owner's facial characteristics, fingerprints or iris scans, stored on a chip embedded in the document. This should make it harder to fake a passport, and also speed up border controls.

The EU has agreed to issue its citizens with biometric passports, but wants the deadline extended to August 2006 to give it more time to address what it says are serious security and interoperability issues. The US is unlikely to extend its deadline, as it has already agreed to postpone introduction of the new passport from 2004 until 2005, at Europe's request.