France and Italy fail to meet passport deadline

France and Italy failed to meet a U.S.- imposed deadline Wednesday to start issuing passports with digital photos, a measure required to ensure continued visafree entry to the United States, of * cials said. Holders of passports issued after Wednesday without the digital photo will have to apply for a visa. The French Foreign Ministry said its new passports will be ready in Paris by the end of the year, and in the rest of the country in the * rst three months of 2006. The Italian Foreign Ministry and U.S. Embassy in Rome said only * ve cities, accounting for about 10% of the Italian population, were readywith new passports.

The digital- photo requirement applies only to new passports. Holders of a machine- readable passport will still qualify for the waiver program, which allows citizens from 27 nations to enter the United States without a visa.

Halloween riles some in Europe

Nine Austrian mayors urged their citizens to boycott Halloween, which has become increasingly popular in Europe. Rankweil Mayor Hans Kohler said Halloween is a “ bad American habit” that has “ nothing to do with our culture.” Other critics say the holiday is the epitome of crass, U.S.- style commercialism and clashes with the spirit of All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1. The Rev. Giordano Frosini, a Roman Catholic theologian in Italy, denounced the holiday as a “ manifestation of neopaganism” and an expression of American cultural supremacy. Still, it’s big business. Halloween celebrations in Britain rival those in the United States, and Germans alone spend nearly $170 million on Halloween.

U.N. wants twice as much earthquake aid

The United Nations nearly doubled its appeal for donations for victims of the South Asia earthquake to about $550 million, and urged governments to provide funds quickly. “ The scale of this tragedy almost de * es our darkest imagination,” U.N. Secretary-General Ko * Annan told a donors conference in Geneva. The United States doubled its commitment, to $100 million. The Oct. 8 quake centered in the mountains of northeastern Pakistan left 79,000 people dead and 3.3. million homeless.

Russian convicted of killing air controller

A Swiss court in Zurich sentenced Russian architect Vitaly Kaloyev to eight years in prison for stabbing to death an air traf * c controller who Kaloyev blamed for the deaths of his wife and children in a plane crash in July 2002. Kaloyev, 49, acknowledged that he must have killed Peter Nielsen in February 2004, but he said he could not remember the slaying. Kaloyev’s lawyers pleaded for manslaughter. The court agreed with prosecutor Ulrich Weder that the killing was premeditated homicide but fell short of murder because Kaloyev had not acted out of malice. Nielsen was the only controller on duty when a mid- air collision killed Kaloyev’s family in Swiss-controlled airspace over Germany.