“Bob Marsh is not the monster people think he is. He has had a number of things go awry for him,” said Victoria Kennedy of Fond du Lac. “He is a little more than a little mental. He needs to go to a mental health facility. He really needs help.”

Robert W. Marsh, 39, currently in jail, will stand trial on charges of disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, criminal damage to property and possession of marijuana. Fond du Lac County Circuit Court Judge Robert Wirtz set a trial date of May 14 when Marsh appeared in court Tuesday.

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.

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 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.

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.