• We sure do love Pennsylvania politics. Someone started a fire at the Mount Carmel office of State Rep. Robert Belfanti Jr. Belfanti is unopposed in the primary and general elections, and had no idea why someone would try to burn his office down. Meanwhile, the South Philadelphia campaign office of Pennsylvania state House candidate Christian DiCicco, the son of City Councilman Frank DiCicco, was burglarized yesterday. There's a little disparity between the two Inquirer articles about the damage and losses; one article says ten paintings were slashed, the other says eight. One mentions a missing camera, while the other mentions that the telephone wires were cut. Both agree that a leather couch was also slashed, and that several campaign documents were missing, including recent poll results. Interestingly enough, a $500 radio, a flat-screen TV, and two laptop computers were not taken. DiCicco is already casting blame for the crime on electricians union leader John Dougherty. Dougherty supports DiCicco's opponent, State Rep. Bill Keller. The office is a South Philadelphia art gallery owned by Jim Gallo, who said he'd received several recent telephone calls from Keller supporters about the fact that he was letting Christian use the space. "'They said I should choose carefully between the candidates in this race,' Gallo said. 'The exact words were, "You don't want to wind up on the wrong side."'" Yep, it's election time in Philly, all right!
• Yesterday, a municipal court judge reduced the charges and bail of 17-year-old Zahir Boddy-Johnson of North Philadelphia, who is accused of shooting a Philadelphia Housing Authority police officer last month. The victim of the shooting, his wife, and colleagues were outraged by the decision, and the District Attorney's Office said that it planned to re-arrest Boddy-Johnson on the attempted charges.
• The campaign to keep the Barnes Foundation from moving its $6 billion art collection from Lower Merion Township to Philadelphia headed back to court yesterday morning, as attorneys for Montgomery County and a group of art patrons and residents argued to have the case reopened.
• Starting this summer, a Michigan company will begin shipping funeral caskets with the logos and colors of eight major-league baseball teams—including the Phillies. The website is www.eternalimage.net.
• A former University of Pennsylvania professor plans to appeal a ruling that sent him to prison for sexually assaulting a Penn graduate student in 2002. He denies raping the victim, but if we're reading the article right, he originally entered a no-contest plea, and even read a 15-minute apology to the victim, her family, his family and friends, and the Penn community. He said he has had a rebirth since the assault. McIntosh was head of Penn's Head Injury Research Center. Maybe he has a head injury of his own to worry about?
• The sixth of the suspects in the planned attack on Fort Dix could get less than two years in prison at his sentencing next week, but federal prosecutors are arguing he deserves a far longer sentence, and to bolster their arguments they're making public for the first time more than 75 pages of conversations secretly recorded by one of two FBI informants who infiltrated the group.

Image Credit: Flickr user izik