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Froid High School senior Roxie Britton got to choose the class colors, senior class motto and graduation speaker.

And it’s not just because her dad is the superintendent. She was the lone graduate from Froid High this year.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer spoke at Britton’s graduation Sunday, drawing a crowd of about 200 in a town that has fewer than 200 residents, said Superintendent Roger Britton.

“The governor being here brought people that were not just from this community,” he said Tuesday.

Police say a 50-year-old man living in his mother’s home killed a transvestite prostitute with a garden hoe after bringing him back to the house, police said Wednesday.

John Freeman of Northridge was arrested Sunday on suspicion of murder.

Freeman’s mother was out of town when he allegedly picked up the 31-year-old transvestite prostitute Sunday morning and brought him to his mother’s house in the 19000 block of Kingsbury Road.

The victim wore women’s clothing to Freeman’s house but was naked at the time of the beating, police said.

The two apparently began arguing inside the house and ended up in the backyard, where Freeman allegedly attacked the victim with his fists, feet and a hoe.

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings “were against our expectations,” said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

“We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use,” he said. “What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.”

Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin’s previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.

Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.

Tashkin’s study, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex and neighborhood.

They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied.

French workers are the world’s biggest whiners, according to a study published Monday which said the Irish complain least about their lot.

Britons come second to their Gallic cousins in the moaning stakes, followed by Sweden, the United States and Australia. Japanese workers have the lowest morale, but don’t complain so much.

“It is interesting to note that after France, Britain and Sweden, the world’s biggest workplace whingers are Americans, despite their having by far the highest levels of income,” said FDS chief Charlotte Cornish.

A 62-year-old woman was sentenced to three years in prison for locking her grandson inside a dog kennel every night for three years while she went to work as a jail counselor.

Under a plea bargain, June Candelario was also sentenced Friday to one year of probation.

“I cannot imagine any society that would say it is just and fair to inflict this harm on a child that cannot protect himself,” Adams County District Court Judge Harlan Bockman said.

Candelario, a former state trooper, put the boy in a 4 foot by 3 foot (1.2 by 1 meter) kennel each day at 4 p.m. and let him out hours later when she returned from work, authorities said.

She pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit child abuse that resulted in bodily harm and a misdemeanor count of child abuse.

The Oregon Senate has approved a bill allowing some women convicted of misdemeanor prostitution to be eligible for a state teaching license.

Supporter Sen. Margaret Carter, a Portland Democrat, invoked the gospel of redemption and forgiveness, and the sins of judgment.

Carter had pushed a similar bill last session but withdrew it when it appeared it would not pass the then-Republican-run House. Some Democrats had problems with it as well.

Decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis by the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission.

The conviction would have to be at least five years old for a woman to be considered for a teaching license or other work in a school.

A Texas mother who claims the family dog tore off her baby son’s genitals has been arrested and accused of mutilating the boy herself with a sharp instrument.

Katherine Nadal is now awaiting a court hearing on custody of the boy. She has been charged with injury to a child and is being held on $100,000 bail.

Child-welfare authorities said she told social workers she woke up from a nap in March to find that her small dachshund had attacked her son. But police said a veterinarian and a doctor have agreed the dog did not cause the injuries.

A father chained and locked up his 19-year-old son for three weeks for marrying against the family’s wishes in eastern India, a police officer said Friday.

Police rescued Raghu Amin Mollah from his father’s house Thursday on the outskirts of Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal state, said Joy Biswas, a police officer who took part in the operation.

“Yes, he was kept in a room locked and chained,” Biswas told The Associated Press.

The father, Abed Ali Mollah, has been arrested and charged with illegally detaining and torturing his son for 21 days, he said.

Biswas said Abed Ali Mollah opposed his son’s marriage to Shahnaz Khatun, 18, because of enmity between the two families.