•David

Plan is to issue a travel advisory for every country in the world, classifying each country into 1 of 4 categories:

1. exercise normal precautions
2. exercise increased caution
3. reconsider travel
4. don't go there (or in the State Dept's words: do not travel - which would be an advisory, not obligatory as with North Korea)

At a State Department press conference, reporters tried to find out what the status of Worldwide Cautions (for critical events like the killing of bin Laden) would be under the news system, but could get no straight answer.

Another issue raised by reporters was: how will countries with different levels of advisories in different regions - like Mexico - be handled? No straight answer to that either.

The proposed system looks a lot to me like the system currently used by the UK FCO - the problem with which is you need to look each country up by name to find level of alert. That's not user-friendly, especially for such potentially important information.