Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff disclosed the effective date of the initiative in an interview with The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department was planning to announce the change on Wednesday.

Chertoff said the change was a crucial next step to helping ensure the nation's security.

"Each of these steps raises the bar to an attack. None of this is perfect. None of them is foolproof. But we're always better off when we build higher levels of security," he said.

"Right now, there are 8,000 different state and local entities in the U.S. issuing birth certificates and driver's licenses," Chertoff said. Having to distinguish phony from real in so many different documents "puts an enormous burden on our Customs and Border inspectors," he said.

In a few cases, other documents still may be used for air entry into the U.S. by some frequent travelers between the U.S. and Canada, members of the American military on official business and some U.S. merchant mariners.

Under a separate program, Homeland Security plans to require all travelers entering the U.S. by land or sea, including Americans, to show passports or an alternative security identification card when entering the U.S. starting as early as January 2008.

The Homeland Security Department estimates that about one in four Americans has a passport. Some people have balked at the $97 price tag.

The Sept. 11 Commission said in its report, "For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons."

The commission recommended strengthening security of travel documents. A 2004 law passed by Congress mandated the change to require passports as the only acceptable travel document, with few exceptions, but the exact date had been in question.

Canadian officials and some members of Congress from border states have expressed concern that the changes could interfere with travel and commerce.

Chertoff said his agency's data revealed that in September 2006, 90 percent of passengers leaving from Canadian airports had passports. The department estimated that 69 percent of U.S. air travelers to Canada, 58 percent of U.S. travelers to Mexico, and 75 percent of U.S. travelers to the Caribbean hold passports.

"Could James Bond and Q come up with a fake passport?" Chertoff asked, referring to the fictional British spy and his espionage agency's technical genius. Of course, he replied, because "nothing is completely perfect."

Still, he said, with new technology, it is increasingly difficult to forge passports, and having just one document to scrutinize should make inspection easier for both inspectors and travelers.

The Social Democratic and Labour party attempted to table an amendment to the legislation setting up the Stormont assembly at Westminster this week.

The party wants the police ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, to have the authority to investigate complaints against MI5.

The amendment was disallowed on a technicality but is likely to be reintroduced in the coming weeks.

MI5 is due to assume responsibility for national security in Northern Ireland next year, bringing it into line with the division of powers elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

But the handover is provoking political tensions in a divided society more concerned about the agency's use of informers during the Troubles than the threat of al-Qaida suicide bombers.

The implication that MI5 will focus chiefly on dissident republican paramilitaries and leave the monitoring of loyalist groups to the Police Service of Northern Ireland - because they are not deemed to constitute a threat to the state - has further angered nationalists.

The secret funding of MI5's Northern Ireland office has been condemned by the SDLP's leader, Mark Durkan, as "perverse and damaging".

In addition, the scale of the agency's new building - nearing completion inside palace army barracks in Holywood, east of Belfast - has heightened suspicions about the extent of its role.

In one heavily-edited section of the Intelligence and Security Committee's annual report earlier this summer, a paragraph noted: "The new [MI5] headquarters in Belfast, to which the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) has contributed £***, will be constructed at a total cost of about £***.

"The NIO has also met programme running costs for the next two years of £*** and £*** respectively."

Ms O'Loan has also expressed "significant concerns" about the handover and is urging that MI5 should be legally required to provide access to intelligence records for misconduct investigations.

In her annual report to parliament, she warned: "Where there is a complaint of collusion by the police... access to intelligence is essential.

"It is vitally important that my office retains an ability to access relevant information and intelligence matters."

This week Eddie McGrady, the SDLP MP, described the expansion of MI5's remit as a "retrograde step" since "the government's own Organised Crime Taskforce has conceded [that] organised criminality and paramilitarism are two sides of the one coin".

Only one force was required in the province, he maintained.

An SDLP spokesman added: "It's been confirmed to us that MI5 are not interested in taking on loyalism. That's institutional bias. How are they meant to create confidence in a new [political] beginning? "Even under the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, in London, complaints can only be brought by those who have been put under surveillance, not by anybody let down by MI5," the spokesman continued.

"That means Osama bin Laden can complain but not the relatives of the victims of the Omagh bomb who have been told by the police that MI5 did not pass on the warnings of bomb threats."

The Northern Ireland Office defended the costs. "From 2007, national security arrangements in Northern Ireland will be brought into line with those for the rest of the UK," a spokesman said.

"Some of the cost for the transfer of intelligence lead is being provided by the NIO."

MI5's overt involvement has become such a sensitive issue that a four-page annexe of the recent St Andrew's agreement - which set out a "road map" towards the restoration of devolution - related to the agency.

The document declared that the "great majority of national security agents will be run by the PSNI".

It also set out five key principles, including that "the PSNI will be informed of all security service counter-terrorist investigations" and that "all security service intelligence relating to terrorism [in NI] will be visible to the PSNI".

The percentage of MI5's budget spent on combating Irish terrorism has dropped in recent years and now stands at around 17%.

Bedfordshire are the first force to use the equipment, which is being distributed among the forces in Essex, Hertfordshire, Lancashire, North Wales, Northamptonshire, West Midlands and West Yorkshire, as well as to British Transport Police and the Metropolitan Police, over the next two months.

Officers will scan a vehicle's number plates using a special camera that checks if the car is subject to an offence, like being uninsured.

If the driver does not convince police he is giving them a correct name, they will fingerprint him and verify his identity on the spot, instead of taking him to the police station.

Police Minister Tony McNulty said: "The new technology will speed up the time it takes for police to identify individuals at the roadside, enabling them to spend more time on the frontline and reducing any inconvenience for innocent members of the public."

Under the pilot, codenamed Lantern, police officers will be able to check the fingerprints from both index fingers of the suspect - with their permission - against a central computer database, with a response within a few minutes.

"The handheld, capture device is little bigger than a PDA," said Chris Wheeler, head of fingerprint identification at the Police Information Technology Organisation PITO.

"Screening on the street means they [police] can check an identity and verify it."

Currently an officer has to arrest a person and take them to a custody suite to fingerprint them.

The device will be used with the Automatic Number Plate Recognition team, who identify vehicles of interest.

If a vehicle is stopped, police will be able to identify the driver and passengers. At present about 60% of drivers stopped do not give their true identity.

Bedfordshire Police said officers using the device in Luton on Wednesday had arrested a man suspected of being an illegal immigrant and a woman for driving a stolen car.

Inspector Steve Rawlings said it takes two sets of fingerprints and the fingerprints are not retained.

"The encounter can be 15 minutes on the roadside rather than three hours in the police station," he said.

The device has an accuracy of 94-95% and will be used for identification purposes only, say police, and there are electronic safeguards to prevent misuse.

It sends encrypted data to the national ID system using GPRS - a wireless system used by many mobile phones.

More than 6.5 million fingerprints are cross-referenced and sent back to the officer.

Mark Wallace, who represents the civil liberties group the Freedom Association, told BBC Radio Five Live that he had "concerns" about the scheme.

"I don't think we should be reassured by the fact that at the moment it's voluntary and at the moment they won't be recorded," he said.

"Both of those things are actually only happening in the trial because the laws haven't been passed to do this on a national basis compulsorily and with recording."

On November 1, Alexander Litvinenko, a 43-year-old Russian who used to work for the FSB, (the post-Soviet version of the KGB), had lunch at Itsu, a cheap-and-cheerful Japanese eatery, with an Italian spycatcher. By that evening, he was feeling so ill he was admitted to hospital. Doctors wasted 10 days trying to treat him for food poisoning. His condition deteriorated - hair falling out, difficulty speaking, white blood cells disappearing, unable to eat, even nourishment from a drip causing him to vomit. It was only when they listened to his pleas to investigate whether he had been poisoned that doctors realised Litvinenko's body contained three times the fatal dose of thallium, a tasteless, odourless killer used in rat poison until, in the 1970s, it was banned as too dangerous. They are now trying to neutralise the slow-acting poison; but it may be four weeks before it is clear whether the ex-secret service man will live.

Litvinenko's friends in London have been quick to accuse the Kremlin of being behind this poisoning. They say Russia wanted to stop Litvinenko investigating the assassination last month of another high-profile critic of the Russian government - his friend, the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. They believe the Kremlin was also to blame for Politkovskaya being shot outside her Moscow apartment door.

The first British instinct is to laugh off these accusations. For Litvinenko's friends in London are a coalition of avowed enemies of the Kremlin. They range from a London-based human-rights activist called Alex Goldfarb to a London-based envoy for separatists fighting Russian rule in Chechnya, Akhmed Zakayev (Litvinenko's neighbour in north London), to the exiled and London-based oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, the highest-profile opponent of President Vladimir Putin, in whose Mayfair offices the rest of the group can often be seen. Berezovsky and Zakayev won political asylum in Britain after the Russian government failed to prove its claims that there was a case for both men to face criminal charges (in Berezovsky's case, for fraud; in Zakayev's, for war crimes) at home.

But there is a precedent for Litvinenko's poisoning. In 1978, operatives from one of the Soviet Union's satellite states, Bulgaria, decided to bump off Georgy Markov, a diplomat who had defected to Britain. In true James Bond fashion, his assassin prodded a ricin pellet under the defector's skin from the point of a doctored umbrella while he stood in a bus queue. Markov, who felt a sharp pain as the pellet entered his body, died after three days. When Bulgaria's Communist regime collapsed a decade later, a stock of special assassination umbrellas was discovered at the interior ministry in Sofia.

A cultural preference for the more absurd kind of murder has run through stories of KGB activity over the years, in keeping with the agency's fondness for smear and destabilisation campaigns in the countries in which it operated while the Soviet Union was a worldwide superpower. Even today, foreigners who deal regularly with Russia quickly learn to give at least some credence to the regular dark stories of dirty tricks by murky and usually unnamed "forces".

Many of the latest FSB stories have a London component because, since the 1990s, Britain's oligarch-friendly tax laws have made London the home-in-exile of choice for any Russian with money to burn. It is not just Berezovsky, with his homes in central London and a manicured high-security estate in Surrey. London has become home to so many Russians that it is known jocularly as Moskva na Temze - Moscow-on-Thames - and the streets of Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Belgravia ring with the voices of wealthy Russian ladies who lunch. British public schools and universities are full of posh Sashas and Pashas. With more Russians than ever before packing into our country, espionage levels are said to be at their highest, too, to monitor the newcomers.

In 2006, any story accusing the Russian secret services of dark deeds leads in one direction - to President Putin, an ex-KGB man whose job before he started running Russia in 2000 was running the FSB. All such allegations are intended to prove that Putin has given the FSB back almost all the powers of the Soviet KGB.

Litvinenko's and Berezovksy's friends, together with the actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave, have spent the past few years campaigning to prove that Putin came to power as a result of a deeply cynical FSB plot in the autumn of 1999. This, they say, involved blowing up apartment blocks all around Russia, wrongly blaming the attacks on Chechen separatists, and playing on Russian fears of the fierce Muslim Chechens both to start a new war in Chechnya and to win Putin the presidential elections. Litvinenko's book, Blowing Up Russia, details this claim. The ex-operative, who Russia says was removed from the FSB for corruption, claims he left because he did not want to carry out an FSB order to assassinate the man who was then Putin's political Enemy Number One - Berezovsky.

Moscow, in turn, hints that some of the more exotic crimes sometimes laid at its door are the work of "foreign connections". These hints seem to suggest that Berezovsky might be mischievously talking up a series of unconnected events into a froth of imaginary conspiracy.

Until now, this web of allegation and counter-allegation has been thought simply too strange to win many headlines in the British media. Yet now the British public is becoming uneasily aware of just how many other lurid stories there are about poisonings, shootings and helicopter accidents afflicting enemies of the Kremlin worldwide.

In the winter of 2004, the pro-western candidate for Ukraine's presidency, Victor Yushchenko, was poisoned with dioxin, a drug that thickened his film-star features into an elephant-man mask and nearly killed him. The poisoning has often been blamed on pro-Moscow secret service operatives. In the autumn of 2004, Politkovskaya, the journalist, said she had been poisoned aboard the plane she was taking south to the Chechen frontier, hoping to help negotiate a peaceful end to the hostage drama at Beslan school. In the summer of 2004, a Chechen separatist leader called Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was assassinated in Qatar; two Russians were arrested for the killing, though Moscow denied any connection. Earlier that summer, as Putin jailed Russia's richest oligarch, his political opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on fraud charges that the billionaire says were politically motivated, a helicopter carrying Khodorkovsky's British lawyer, Stephen Curtis, crashed on the English south coast. Curtis had said shortly before the crash that if he died mysteriously, "it would not be an accident".

I was at the London party where Politkovskaya shocked the British human-rights great and good by describing how she was slipped a knock-out drug on the plane south. She woke up in hospital several days later - too late for the Beslan children, who had by then been killed in their hundreds in a botched rescue attempt. What she remembered of the experience was the three men she had noticed in the plane, staring at her with the "eyes of enemies". She blamed the Russian secret services for poisoning her. It was impossible not to believe what this fearless truth-teller said.

It was in the 1990s that Russia's super-rich began to take an interest in Britain, as they fell out with the powers that be in Moscow and found London a friendly home. Since Putin came to power in 2000 and began crossing swords with more and more of the irrepressible oligarchs who had got too rich and powerful under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, all wealthy people who fear they too might fall foul of the Kremlin - even those who, like Roman Abramovich of Chelsea football club fame, are currently on friendly terms with Moscow - make a point of having a bolt-hole over here.

What is most instantly noticeable about this immigration is the way it is pushing up London house prices way beyond the apparent logic of what the market can sustain. To the great joy of estate agents, rich Russians like to knock several lofts together to make enough lateral space for themselves and their staff and the expensive simplicity of their high-end interior decor; they are happy to drop millions for the right living space.

Russians are taking over the gossip columns, too, as they become a flamboyant and accepted part of London life. Photographers love Natalia Vodianova, Russian model wife of socialite Justin Portman. The married Abramovich's "friendship" with the pretty student daughter of another Russian billionaire with a London home has hogged plenty of inches in recent weeks, as have his occasional London football parties at Chelsea for his Moscow entourage and their visiting wives, all in fur coats and glittering with diamonds. Even the older, less photogenic Berezovsky, who makes his money these days by trading in London property, has a glamorous young wife and the pair are snapped at society events such as days out at Goodwood, in hats and tail-coats, escorted by the PR guru Tim Bell.

But the reporting of the Litvinenko case has brought the darker side of the Russian picture into focus. It brings the British, for the first time, within elbow-rubbing distance of the political struggles of Russians. This week's glimpse at the ugly underside of Moscow politics has been enough to jolt a lot of people here out of their innocent British belief that conspiracy theories are only for crackpots. Is it now time to start being frightened that the deadly and secretive skirmishes that have come to characterise life in Russia are spilling over into the UK?

He said they were justified in shooting once they were fired upon.

As the plainclothes Atlanta police officers approached the house about 7pm yesterday local time, a woman inside started shooting, striking each of them, said Officer Joe Cobb, a police spokesman.

One was hit in the arm, another in a thigh and the third in a shoulder. The officers were taken to a hospital for treatment, and all three were conscious and alert, police said.

Sarah Dozier, identified as a niece of the woman, told WAGA-TV that there were never any drugs at the house.

"My aunt was in good health. I'm sure she panicked when they kicked that door down," Dozier said.

"There was no reason they had to go in there and shoot her down like a dog."

Rev Markel Hutchins, a civil rights leader, said Johnston's family deserves an apology.

"Of the police brutality cases we've had, this is the most egregious because of the woman's age," Hutchins said.

Hutchins said he would try to meet with Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington and would also meet with lawyers.

The Kremlin owns a major stake in Gazprom and its subsidiaries and many believe the gas giant's recent media buying spree is part of an ongoing attempt by president Vladimir Putin to reduce press freedom in the country before the 2008 presidential elections.
This week Moscow journalist Boris Stomakhin was sentenced to five years in prison for his coverage of the Russian army's behaviour during the conflict in Chechnya. Human rights groups called the sentence "unfathomable".

Nina Ognianova, from the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, condemned the sentence and said: "We are seeing fewer and fewer journalists who can provide reliable and truthful reporting on Chechnya."

Last month, Reporters Without Borders ranked Russia 148th out of 168 countries in its World Press Freedom index.