MALIBU, California (Reuters) – Greg Louganis is plunging into a new role as a mentor to U.S. Olympic divers in a sport dominated by China, and to do the job the four-time gold medalist is relying on tricks he learned from handling show dogs.

Louganis is one of the last U.S. divers to triumph at the Olympics, and many call him the best diver ever. At the 1988 Games in Seoul, South Korea, he hit his head on the springboard in a preliminary round and had stitches, but went on to win.

, June 14 (Reuters) – Greg Louganis is
plunging into a new role as a mentor to U.S. Olympic divers in a
sport dominated by China, and to do the job the four-time gold
medallist is relying on tricks he learned from handling show
dogs.

Louganis is one of the last U.S. divers to triumph at the
Olympics, and many call him the best diver ever. At the 1988
Games in Seoul, South Korea, he hit his head on the springboard
in a preliminary round and had stitches, but went on to win.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Two men were ordered on Friday to stand trial on assault and battery charges stemming from the brutal beating of a San Francisco Giants fan outside of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on opening day last year.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge found sufficient evidence for Louie Sanchez, 30, and Marvin Norwood, 31, to be tried on charges of mayhem, assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury and battery with serious bodily injury.

By Alex Dobuzinskis

(Reuters) – San Francisco Giants all-star infielder Pablo Sandoval is under investigation in connection with a possible sexual assault on a woman in Northern California, and the case is expected to be turned over to prosecutors, police said on Saturday.

Sandoval, a 25-year-old third baseman and fan favorite nicknamed “Kung Fu Panda,” was at a resort in Aptos, California, with a woman who says he sexually assaulted her there, said Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s spokeswoman April Skalland.

By Alex Dobuzinskis

(Reuters) – The Jackson, Mississippi, school district has agreed to stop shackling students to fixed objects, after it was sued for handcuffing pupils to railings and poles at a school for troubled children, officials said on Friday.

The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Jackson Public Schools in 2011 over its treatment of students at the district’s Capital City Alternative School. Students at that campus have been suspended or expelled from other schools.

LOS ANGELES, May 25 (Reuters) – With Americans packing up
for travel over the Memorial Day weekend, one coastal hot spot
in Southern California is winning praise as the best U.S. beach
in an annual ranking from a Florida professor.

San Diego’s Coronado tops the list from “Dr. Beach,”
otherwise known as Stephen Leatherman, director of the
laboratory for coastal research at Florida International
University.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Ronald Reagan’s foundation expressed outrage on Monday at a British company’s auction of what it says is a vial of the late U.S. president’s blood taken at the hospital where he was treated after a 1981 assassination attempt.

PFC Auctions, a company based in Guernsey in the United Kingdom, announced on Sunday that it would sell the vial of blood in an online auction set to end on Thursday.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The USS Iowa, which ferried the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt across the perilous Atlantic waters to a historic meeting with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in the dark days of World War Two, will have to be towed to its final port call.

The battleship saw combat in the Pacific, survived a devastating explosion in a gun turret, and even a snub from the city of San Francisco. At the end of its final voyage, the storied warship will have a permanent mooring in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The USS Iowa, which ferried the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt across the perilous Atlantic waters to a historic meeting with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in the dark days of World War Two, will have to be towed to its final port call.

The battleship saw combat in the Pacific, survived a devastating explosion in a gun turret, and even a snub from the city of San Francisco. At the end of its final voyage, the storied warship will have a permanent mooring in Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The parents of two Chinese graduate students slain near the University of Southern California last month have filed a wrongful death lawsuit accusing the school of misrepresenting the area as safe and failing to provide security patrols.

The 15-page lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court comes just over a month after Ming Qu and Ying Wu, both 23, were fatally shot as they were sitting in a 2003 BMW car that had been double-parked.