Gavin Newsom's Next Trip

Well, whaddya know -- sorry for misrepresenting the accuracy of the SFWall gossip: Gavin Newsom is in fact going to Japan! According to press secretary Peter Ragone (so take it with a grain of salt), Newsom is leaving tomorrow and coming back on Tuesday -- hope he'll have a chance to catch cousin Joanna Newsom's Saturday Osaka show while he's there.

Gavin's trip is occasioned by the 50th anniversary of San Francisco's sister city relationship with Osaka, and he's going with a delegation of 45 people, including Jeff Adachi and Ross Mirkarimi (we know, we know, with a name like Mirkarimi, we thought he was Japanese too -- but he's Iranian/Russian. He's going because Japantown is in District 5.)

This is Newsom's second international trip in a month (he went to Davos three weeks ago), and his fourth sister-city trip since 2004 (he went to Manila in November, Shanghai and Cork, Ireland in 2005). We look forward to Gavin's trip to one of our other sister cities, Abidjan, in the war-torn Cote d'Ivoire!