(AP) — Government research links indoor tanning by teenagers with other risks including binge drinking, unhealthy dieting and sexual activity.

Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found other behaviors were also more common among high school students who use sun lamps or indoor tanning beds than teens who don’t. That included drug use among girls and smoking among boys.

Those results are in a CDC analysis of 2009-11 national surveys. The report was published online Wednesday in the journal JAMA Dermatology.

About 1 in 5 high school girls reported indoor tanning in 2011, down from earlier years. It was less common among boys.

Skin cancer is linked with tanning and the most serious kind, melanoma, is rare but increasing in teens.

(AP) — Two police officers in an oil-rich West Texas city spent weeks competing to see who could take the most cardboard signs away from homeless people.

Panhandling doesn’t violate any law in the city of Midland.

Nearly two months after the Midland Police Department learned of the game, the two officers were suspended for three days without pay. That’s according to findings of the internal affairs investigation obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request.

Advocate groups immediately blasted the department’s handling, suggesting that the punishment wasn’t harsh enough and that the probe should have been made public much earlier.

Police Chief Price Robinson said the actions were an isolated incident in a department of 186 officers and didn’t deserve a harsher punishment.

(AP) — Lawyers representing a San Diego family have filed a lawsuit against Petco Animal Supplies Inc., saying a 10-year-old boy died from rat-bite fever contracted from a male rat purchased at one of the national chain’s stores.

Attorney John Gomez told The Associated Press on Tuesday that his firm filed the lawsuit in San Diego County on Monday seeking an unspecified amount for the suffering endured by the Pankey family, whose son, Aidan, died June 12, 2013, hours after being rushed to the hospital with severe stomach pains.

The San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office has confirmed the cause of the boy’s death was an infection from a rat.

The retailer in a statement expressed its condolences. Petco says safety is a top priority and it was looking into the matter.

(AP) — Authorities say a 12-year-old Pittsburgh girl who got out of her father’s SUV to pose for photos with a boy after her first date was struck and killed by the vehicle.

Police say that Shamera Harris’ parents were getting out of the vehicle to take the picture when it rolled backward around 8 p.m. Sunday. They say 53-year-old Richard Benton was charged with DUI after refusing a breath test following the accident.

He was arraigned Monday. Court records didn’t list his attorney and his home phone was continually busy.

Police say Benton told them he thought the vehicle was in park before he got out.

Authorities say the SUV dragged the girl about 50 feet before striking a tree. Police say that Benton smelled of alcohol and slurred his words.

(AP) — Stanford University researchers say a cluster of children in California have developed a rare, polio-like syndrome within the past year that quickly paralyzed one or more of the children’s arms or legs.

Stanford’s Dr. Keith Van Haren says about 20 cases have been identified in California in the past year and a half and they’re the only ones in the U.S.

Van Haren says the five cases he studied had been vaccinated against polio. He plans to talk to the media about the illness Monday evening from Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.

Dr. Jane Seward of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions that the research is still underway in California, and there are a variety of infectious diseases that can cause childhood paralysis.

(AP) — Two Missouri students who went toe-to-toe for 66 rounds in the annual Jackson County spelling bee aren’t quite finished after event organizers ran out of words for the contest.

25 students started the championship round Saturday, but only two remained after 19 rounds.

From there, fifth-grader Sophia Hoffman of Lee’s Summit and Kush Sharma, a seventh-grader from Kansas City, buzzed through the list of words provided by the national bee, as well as 20 others plucked from the dictionary.

At about 2 p.m. — five hours after the contest started — bee officials decided not to pull more words from the dictionary and instead decided to continue the competition March 8 at an undetermined library location.

(AP) — Facebook is buying mobile messaging service WhatsApp for up to $19 billion in cash and stock, by far the company’s largest acquisition.

The world’s biggest social networking company said Thursday that it is paying $12 billion in Facebook stock and $4 billion in cash for WhatsApp. In addition, the app’s founders and employees will be granted $3 billion in restricted stock that will vest over four years after the deal closes.

Facebook says it is keeping WhatsApp as a separate service, just as it did with Instagram, which it bought for about $715.3 million.

WhatsApp has more than 450 million monthly active users. In comparison, Twitter had 241 million users at the end of 2014.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says WhatsApp is on path to reach a billion users.

(AP) — Police say the body of a missing 10-year-old girl has been found in southwest Missouri.

Police Chief Springfield Police Chief Paul Williams says search crews found a body they believe is Hailey Owens inside a suspect’s Springfield home on Wednesday.

Witnesses told police that Hailey was taken by a man in a pickup truck Tuesday evening.

Forty-five-year-old grade school coach Craig Michael Wood is jailed on suspicion of first-degree murder in Hailey’s disappearance. Wood was arrested late Tuesday inside a vehicle parked outside his house. Formal charges have not been filed.

The Springfield School District says Wood is a coach and teacher’s aide at a school for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Hailey did not attend that school, and Williams says the two apparently didn’t know each other.

(AP) — A Michigan woman who pleaded no contest to pulling off a cancer scam has been sentenced to one year in jail that will be served at the same time as another prison sentence.

Sara Ylen (WHY’-len) of Lexington accepted thousands of dollars from supporters and was treated by a hospice service for two years after claiming to have cancer. Authorities say it was an extraordinary lie: No doctor has stepped forward to even suggest she had cancer.

Ylen appeared Wednesday in Sanilac County court, 90 miles northeast of Detroit. A no-contest plea is treated like a regular conviction for the purpose of a sentence.

In a separate case, Ylen was last month sentenced to a minimum of five years in prison for falsely accusing two men of raping her.

(AP) — Authorities say the body of a 12-year-old boy has been discovered in a vacant lot in New Mexico, and an arrest has been made in the case.

The Valencia County Sheriff’s Office says the body was found Tuesday afternoon in a field just west of Los Lunas.

On Wednesday, the Office of the Medical Investigator was scheduled to conduct an autopsy on the boy, who hasn’t been identified. His cause of death remains unknown.

Deputies say an arrest has been made in connection with the death.