A mysterious substance that Russian Olympic medalist Oksana Grishuk, 36, found in her drink during a business meeting in California tested positive for the date rape drug GHB, police said on Tuesday. The skater, who won Olympic gold for ice-dancing in 1994 and 1998 while performing under the name Pasha Grishuk, discovered what looked to be a partially dissolved pill in her glass of wine on April 12. “She was attending a business meeting with at least one other man” at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort in Dana Point, 97km south of Los Angeles, an Orange County sheriff spokesman said. “She started feeling weird and sick and, when she went to drink from her wine glass, she noticed a partially dissolved pill,” he said. “She poured the rest of the drink out of the glass, took the pill out and called the police.”
■ UNITED STATES
‘Beautiful Bulldog’ crowned
Buddy is a sleeping beauty. Reddish brown, he’s usually asleep on his back, snoring loudly with his large tongue lolling out. He was wide-awake on Monday, though, when he was crowned winner of a “Beautiful Bulldog” contest in Des Moines, Iowa. “He doesn’t have a good stamina to him ... he’s been laying around all winter,” said George DuBois from Ankeny, Iowa, who owns Buddy with his wife, Cindy. “Just in the last 10, 15 days we’ve done some walking. We’ve been getting in shape for this.” The DuBois’ three-year-old dog was among 50 bulldogs from mostly midwestern states who came to compete. The contest honors Drake University’s mascot.
■ UNITED STATES
Alligator found in kitchen
Authorities say an Oldsmar, Florida, woman found a 2.4m alligator prowling in her kitchen late on Monday night. Sandra Frosti, 69, says the alligator must have pushed through the screen door on the back porch and then walked through an open sliding glass door at her home in Oldsmar, just north of Tampa. The alligator apparently then strolled through the living room, down a hall and into the kitchen. A trapper removed the alligator.
■ MEXICO
Hitler ad ordered off the air
The country’s top electoral body ordered broadcasters to stop running a controversial TV ad on Monday that compares a firebrand leftist leading a siege of Congress to dictators Hitler and Pinochet. The TV ad, funded by a Mexican businessman angry at a blockade of Congress by opposition lawmakers trying to derail an oil reform plan, says the antics of protest leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are endangering democracy. Leftists seized Congress podiums on April 10 to block a government proposal to lower barriers to private investment in the oil sector, controlled by the state since 1938.
■ UNITED STATES
Droopy pants bill killed
A Louisiana Senate panel in Baton Rouge rejected a bill on Tuesday that would make it a crime to wear one’s pants too low. Senator Derrick Shepherd’s bill would have made it illegal to wear, in public, clothing that “intentionally exposes undergarments or intentionally exposes any portion of the pubic hair, cleft of the buttocks or genitals.” Violators would have faced a fine of up to US$175 and eight days of community service. Senator Yvonne Dorsey, a Democrat, said she disliked the look of baggy pants but added, “when we begin to take the freedom of speech away ... I think we’re doing something that’s just not right.”
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