Jose Antonio Gomez

Canadian Olympic Assn. officials reacted angrily Wednesday to the announcement that a shotputter from Calgary, Georgette Reed, tested positive at the Pan American Games for a banned stimulant in her multivitamin tablets.

Canadian Olympic Assn. officials reacted angrily Wednesday to the announcement that a shotputter from Calgary, Georgette Reed, tested positive at the Pan American Games for a banned stimulant in her multivitamin tablets.

The Sockers' opening day of training camp provided Coach Ron Newman with two puzzles: How to keep three foreign players with the league-allotted one new visa, and how to fill the scoring void created by the departures of Waad Hirmez (43 goals last year), Paul Wright (38) and Branko Segota (26). There are three strong candidates for the visa: Soviet midfielder Alex Khapsalis, Nigerian forward John Olu Molomo and Spanish midfielder Jose Antonio Gomez.

The Sockers begin defense of their championship today (9 a.m. at Folsom's) when Coach Ron Newman opens training camp for his 12th indoor season with only eight players signed. Another, Thompson Usiyan, will fly in tonight. The Sockers acquired Usiyan in a trade with St. Louis for disgruntled midfielder Branko Segota. Usiyan is expected to sign a contract upon his arrival. "We've already discussed what we're going to pay him and he has agreed," Newman said.

Fire swept through an overcrowded prison in northern Chile early Monday, killing 26 inmates who suffocated or were burned inside their sleeping quarters, authorities said. The government and inmates gave sharply conflicting reports about the cause of the fire. Authorities said the fire began when rebellious inmates set mattresses and blankets ablaze near their dormitory door.

In the medals race that has been waged by the region's two sports superpowers, the United States and Cuba, there has been a tendency to overlook 37 other countries from North, South and Central America and the Caribbean that also sent athletes to compete in the Pan American Games.

The Pan American Games race that no one talks about but everyone watches is getting closer, and it appears that the United States will pass Cuba in the gold medal count Saturday. Ever since Alberto Cuba won the marathon, the Games' first event on Aug. 3, Cuba has won the bulk of the gold medals. Now, while U.S. officials have spent a week downplaying the significance of the medal race, they can't resist noticing that Americans are gaining ground.

U.S. Olympic Committee officials attempted Tuesday to defuse another Pan American Games drug-testing controversy, saying that they are satisfied that alleged inconsistencies in the drug-testing procedure during the first 10 days of competition have been resolved. USOC President Robert Helmick said that he sent a letter Monday detailing his concerns about irregularities in the drug-testing protocol to Pan American Sports Organization (PAS0) President Mario Vasquez Rana of Mexico.

Cooing softly in baby talk, German Viasus gently uses a toothbrush to bathe the little animal he has raised since infancy and then pampers it with a fresh meal of mango, bananas and melon. The object of his affection? A beetle the size of a hamster with a hard, shiny shell and 2-inch-long horns. Viasus, 36, is a Colombian entrepreneur who is exploiting the beetle-mania sweeping Japan by raising and exporting hundreds of the creepy-crawlies every month.

Iraq's capital erupted in violence again Thursday when suicide bombers crashed an explosives-laden sedan into a police station in the city's worst slum, killing eight other people, just after a Spanish diplomat was chased down and shot in the head outside his home. Late in the day, two U.S. soldiers on routine patrol with the 1st Armored Division were killed and four were wounded in an attack in the same neighborhood where the bombing occurred, a military spokeswoman said today.