‘LOVE’ returns: Philadelphia park gets its sculpture back

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — “LOVE” returned to Philadelphia on Tuesday, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

The famous 1976 Robert Indiana sculpture was brought back to its namesake downtown park on a flatbed truck after making a number of stops at parks and statues along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway before the reinstallation.

School children cheered and those gathered spontaneously sang the fight song for the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles as a forklift placed the sculpture atop a pedestal.

Susan Murphy had the day off from work and came to the park to see the sculpture reinstalled. She played the Beatles “All You Need is Love” on her iPhone and sang along with her new pal Caitlin Night, who swung by take photos of what she called “the symbol of our city.”

“This is what we are known for, and it’s wonderful to have the ‘LOVE’ back,” Murphy said. “The city seemed empty without it.”

The sculpture was temporarily installed at nearby City Hall in 2016 while Love Park was going through a renovation.

It was taken out of view a year ago for repairs ahead of the park’s reopening.

The perennial tourist attraction and engagement photo backdrop looks a bit different. It’s been repainted to the original colors of red, green and purple that the artist originally used. At some point over the decades, the purple had been repainted blue.

Bomber gets life in prison for New York, New Jersey attacks

NEW YORK (AP) — A New Jersey man who set off small bombs in two states, including a pressure cooker device that blasted shrapnel across a New York City block, was sentenced Tuesday to multiple terms of life in prison by a judge who repeatedly called it a miracle nobody was killed.

Ahmad Khan Rahimi, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, was criticized by a prosecutor for failing to show remorse and was scolded by a victim for not apologizing to the 30 people he injured.

U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman in Manhattan said it was hard to reconcile the “reasonable enough” man he saw in court with the terrorist who tried to kill as many people as he could when he left his home early the morning of Sept. 17, 2016, with two pressure-cooker explosives and a bag full of smaller bombs.

“You sound like most people and yet your actions are totally at odds with your voice,” Berman said.

“We saw videos,” he said, referencing multiple videos at his fall trial that showed Rahimi dragging bombs in two suitcases and a backpack through Manhattan streets, setting one down a half hour before it exploded in the upscale Chelsea neighborhood and another a few blocks away that was discovered and disabled before it could explode.

Immigrant cleared in killing pleads not guilty to gun counts

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A Mexican man acquitted of murder in a San Francisco shooting that ignited a national immigration debate pleaded not guilty Tuesday to U.S. gun charges.

Federal prosecutors charged Jose Ines Garcia Zarate with two counts of illegal gun possession in November after jurors in California court found him not guilty of killing Kate Steinle in 2015. The charges are similar to a conviction that the jury did return — being a felon in possession of a gun — leading to a three-year jail sentence.

Garcia Zarate’s attorneys, J. Tony Serra and Maria Belyi, argue that the federal charges are politically motivated and are asking for the case to be thrown out. Short of dismissal, they say the two federal charges should be combined into one.

Garcia Zarate acknowledged holding the gun that killed Steinle but said it fired accidentally when he found it wrapped in a T-shirt under a bench on a popular San Francisco pier, where she was walking with her father.

President Donald Trump and others in his administration have repeatedly pointed to Steinle’s death as a reason for toughening the country’s immigration policies. Garcia Zarate was living in the country illegally and had been deported five times before the shooting.