Conde Nast Traveler announced the results of its 2005 Readers´ Choice Awards.
Top U.S. cities in the U.S. are:
San Francisco, Santa Fe and Charleston, SC;
Tops in the Americas are:
Vancouver, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Buenos Aires.
Europe´s three top cities were all in Italy:
Florence, Rome and Venice, in that order.
Bangkok took the top prize in Asia;
Sydney, the Pacific Rim; and
Cape Town, South Africa in Africa and the Middle East.
The results were compiled using the votes of some 28,000 travelers.
The State Department plans to begin issuing electronic passports in December. They will be imbedded with a chip capable of storing digitized data such as name, date and place of birth, gender, passport issuance and expiration dates, number and photo of bearer.
A digital signature will protect the data from alteration and mitigate the threat of photo substitution.
The Departments of State and Homeland Security issued a joint press release on Sept. 1, 2005 revising the date by which passports will be required for air and sea travel to the United States from Mexico, Canada, Bermuda, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
The original proposal called for passports for travel from Bermuda, the Caribbean and Latin America to the United States by December 31, 2005, with Mexico and Canada to follow in December, 2006. The date has been aligned for air and sea travel from the entire Western Hemisphere and is now December 31, 2006.
