protest outside the Chicago Cubs and Arizona Diamondbacks game at Wrigley Field Thursday drew an estimated 100 protesters and led to one fan tearing up his ticket to the game

A protest outside the Chicago Cubs and Arizona Diamondbacks game at Wrigley Field Thursday drew an estimated 100 protesters and led to one fan tearing up his ticket to the game.”Arizona has legalized racial profiling. I cannot in good conscience go into this game,” Paul D’Amato told a Chicago Sun-Times reporter outside the ballpark. He then ripped the ticket he’d bought to see the Cubs take on the Arizona Diamondbacks into pieces.

Demonstrators accused Diamondbacks management of supporting the Arizona Republican Party, which is behind the controversial bill”AMERICA, there is no doubt about it; the Arizona Diamondbacks are one of the top contributors to the Republican machine in Arizona that have unanimously voted for the draconian Arizona State Proposition SB1070,” La Nueva Raza reports. “This bill will encourage the open racial profiling of ‘brown people’ in a state that has already been racially profiling immigrants for years beginning in the early 2000s when Sheriff Dever and his wife allowed and oftentimes encouraged Arizonan ranchers to ‘hunt down’ border crossers in Cochise County.”

ESPN reporter's stalker gets 3 years in prison

LOS ANGELES An Illinois insurance executive who secretly shot nude videos of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews was sentenced Monday to 2 1/2 years in prison after giving a tearful apology that was harshly rebuked by his victim.Michael David Barrett pleaded guilty in December to interstate stalking after prosecutors accused him of following the reporter to at least three cities and shooting the videos through hotel peepholes.

Barrett, 48, of suburban Chicago, agreed to a 27-month prison sentence after pleading guilty but it was up to the judge to decide how long he would actually serve.Andrews urged the judge at the hearing for a harsher sentence and said she fears for her life every time she enters a hotel.”You violated me and you violated all women,” Andrews told Barrett. “You are a sexual predator, a sexual deviant and they should lock you up.”After the sentencing, she said, “Thirty months isn’t enough.”Barrett admitted renting hotel rooms next to Andrews three times and shooting two videos of her while she was naked. He was accused of posting the videos online and trying to sell them to Los Angeles-based celebrity gossip site TMZ last year.U.S. District Judge Manuel Real said he gave Barrett the maximum sentence under the law.

“The victim, Andrews, will be suffering with this problem for the rest of her life,” Real said. “There is no life sentence that can be imposed upon him, except his own guilt.”Barrett cried as he addressed Andrews in court, saying he would spend the rest of his life regaining the respect of his friends and family and atoning for his mistakes.”There are no words to tell Ms. Andrews how sorry I am for what I’ve done to her,” he said. “I hope someday she can forgive me.”Andrews, visibly nervous as she spoke, said she had no sympathy for Barrett’s claim he was publicly humiliated.”It’s my body on the Internet,” she said. “I’m being traumatized every single day for what he did. … This will never be over for me.”Barrett, who has until May 3 to surrender, was ordered to have supervised probation for three years after his release, during which he will be prohibited from contacting Andrews, her family or friends.

He will not be allowed to stay in a hotel without approval of a probation officer and if he accepts employment somewhere, Andrews will be notified. Barrett was also ordered to pay $5,000 in fines and $7,366 in restitution, but the judge said further restitution may be imposed to compensate ESPN.Barrett’s lawyer, David Willingham, said his client is undergoing psychological treatment and “has sought the path of redemption.””Mr. Barrett has lost everything he built throughout his life,” Willingham said. “He’s lost his career, his fiancee and his life savings. He knows that he brought this on himself.”Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have agreed not to pursue further charges against Barrett. However, he could face criminal action in other states stemming from other videos he allegedly shot of unsuspecting nude women through peepholes.

Andrews’ attorney, Marshall Grossman, has said there could be as many as a dozen other women that Barrett taped.A sentencing memo filed last month in federal court says Barrett uploaded videos of 16 other women to an online account.Barrett also allegedly conducted 30 Internet background checks that can produce birthdays and home addresses, the document said. The filing did not name the other alleged victims or say what information he obtained or how he may have used it.Prosecutors claim that 32 videos provided by DailyMotion.com show Barrett “victimized approximately 16 other women in almost precisely the same way that he victimized” Andrews. They did not identify the women.

Andrews testified in December that Barrett’s actions had a devastating impact on her and her family because she is constantly reminded that his videos appeared online and is subjected to taunts from sports fans when she works as a sideline reporter.Andrews has agreed to appear on the new season of ABC-TV’s “Dancing with the Stars” – an offer she said ABC made before the stalking allegations. She said she doesn’t want to seclude herself from the public eye because other victims would get the wrong message.”I did nothing wrong. Just trying to live my life,” she said.”I had to deal with a lot of people who said I deserved it, that I had played to a certain audience.”Her attorney said she will not file a lawsuit against Barrett.(AP)

JAPAN was warned of the possibility of 10ft waves early today as a tsunami swept across the Pacific after the huge earthquake that struck Chile early yesterday

JAPAN was warned of the possibility of 10ft waves early today as a tsunami swept across the Pacific after the huge earthquake that struck Chile early yesterday. The first 12ft tsunami waves generated by the earthquake hit French Polynesia and the Chatham Islands in New Zealand. On an island off Chile the high waves swamped a village with five people dying and 11 missing but elsewhere there were no reports of damage though authorities warned that higher tides could come later. Waves of up to 6ft hit Hawaii at about midday local time, washing over a low-lying park near the city of Hilo.In Chile itself, hours after the pulverising shock of the magnitude 8.8 earthquake, rippled across the southern Andes, ministers in Santiago, the Chilean capital, said they did not expect the toll to rise much above the official toll of 214.

It seemed that a combination of strict building regulations in Chile and tsunami alarms throughout much of the region had averted what President Michelle Bachelet had initially called a “catastrophe”. The worst damage was inflicted on Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city and the closest to the quake’s epicentre 70 miles out to sea. First reports described screams and cries from the ruins of a 15-storey building.

Alejandra Gouet, a television reporter in Concepcion, said: “There isn’t a street without damage.” Other reports spoke of buildings on fire across the city. The death toll, however, rose more slowly than had been expected at the outset. In the capital of Santiago, 200 miles from the epicentre, Bachelet warned that “we undoubtedly can’t rule out more deaths and injuries” but emphasised: “The system is functioning.” Huge waves pounded Chile’s Juan Fernandez archipelago, which includes the island where Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor, was marooned in the 18th century, inspiring the novel Robinson Crusoe. Chile’s Easter Island, a world heritage site famed for its monumental Polynesian statues, was among the areas deemed most at risk. Tsunami warnings were issued to at least 59 nations and Pacific territories.

Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, said waves reaching Hawaii could be the largest to hit the islands since 1964. People had left the coast and petrol stations were jammed. On Tahiti traffic was banned from going within 500 yards of the sea. Central Chile was severely affected by the earthquake, which struck at 3.34am and was followed by violent aftershocks. Much of the country lost power, water supplies and communications. It was one of the most powerful tremors recorded in a region plagued for centuries by seismic upheaval. Concepcion was destroyed by earthquakes or tsunamis five times between 1570 and 1751, when the city was moved to a different location on the Bio-Bio river. It was destroyed again in 1835.

Charlotte Mountford, a Briton living in Santiago, said the tremor lasted about 30 seconds. “We crouched in bathtub on 14th floor while things smashed around us,” she wrote on the Twitter networking site. “Was terrifying.” John Grace, a British mining consultant, 54, said: “I have lived in Santiago 15 years and never felt anything like this earthquake before. It was by far the worst. I have a TV attached to the wall in my bedroom and it just collapsed.”

Claire Cunningham, 29, an IT consultant from Bromley, south London, added: “I am in Santiago on holiday with my husband, Tom. Our hotel room just rattled and rattled for a good minute. I thought the ceiling was about to cave in. It was horrifying. “We went down to the street and discovered that a TV mast had collapsed. There was concrete everywhere. If I had been under that at the time, I am sure I would have been killed.” The earthquake damaged 1.5m houses in Chile, one third of them seriously. Cars overturned, roads were split by fissures and the country suffered more than 100 aftershocks many of them stronger than five on the Richter scale.

On May 22, 1960, southern Chile was hit by the most powerful earthquake recorded, at a magnitude of 9.5. At least 1,600 people died. As a result, almost every large building constructed in Chile can withstand tremors. Yesterday’s earthquake was much more powerful than the 7.0 tremor that killed an estimated 230,000 people in Haiti in January, but the wealth Chile derives from being the world’s third-largest copper producer proved a significant barrier against mass destruction. “Chile is not Haiti,” noted one reporter. “The building codes are quite strict.”

SYDNEY Energy giant PetroChina Co. Ltd. has pulled out of a $40 billion deal to buy natural gas from a project off Australia

SYDNEY Energy giant PetroChina Co. Ltd. has pulled out of a $40 billion deal to buy natural gas from a project off Australia, leaving Woodside Petroleum Ltd. looking for new customers.Reasons for letting the preliminary agreement lapse were not given, but analysts said Tuesday it was probably because PetroChina had become dissatisfied with the cost in the two years since the deal was signed.Woodside informed Australia’s stock exchange on Monday that an early stage agreement for the Browse Basin liquefied natural gas project off Western Australia state had not been settled by a Dec. 31 deadline and had now lapsed.A spokesman for PetroChina Ltd. in Beijing, Liu Weijiang, said on Tuesday he had no information on the deal and asked a reporter to call again later.Under the September 2007 agreement, PetroChina would potentially buy up to three million metric tons (3.3 million tons) of LNG per year from the project for up to 20 years.At the time, it was one of Australia’s largest export deals with an estimated worth of AU$45 billion ($40 billion).Since then, deals between prospective developers of the massive gas reserves on Australia’s so-called Northwest Shelf and customers have accelerated, with companies in China, Japan and South Korea signing on to multibillion dollar, two-decade agreements last year.The lapse of the PetroChina deal means that the terms, including price, for a large chunk of the Brown Basin gas are once again fully open to negotiation.

“The deal was good at the time, but in the past two years things have been changing rapidly,” said Peter Kopetz, energy analyst with Western Australia-based State One Stockbroking.PetroChina would probably look for other sources of gas, said Yang Wei, an oil industry analyst at Guotai Junan Securities in Shanghai.”I think it’s probably that the price is not right. It’s too expensive,” he said.PetroChina in August reached a $41 billion deal to buy natural gas from another project in the same region, that is being developed by Chevron.Chinese energy companies have signed a multibillion-dollar string of deals to import oil and gas from the Gulf, Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere to feed the demands of the country’s rapidly growing economy.Woodside had hoped the Browse project would be in production by 2012, but the company said Monday this timeline was no longer realistic, and a final investment decision by partners including Woodside, Chevron, BHP Billiton and Royal Dutch Shell would not be made until mid-2012.

Woodside said an agreement for CPC Corporation Taiwan to buy up to three million metric tons (3.3 million tons) of LNG per year for up to 20 years from the Browse project was still in place, and the company was looking for more customers.”Woodside remains in ongoing discussions with other Asia-Pacific LNG customers in relation to potential sales from its portfolio of Australian LNG developments, including the Browse project,” Woodside said in a statement.Woodside shares closed just shy of 1 percent higher on Tuesday at AU$47.97.(AP)