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One winner will be picked after 30 days on February 1, 2008. I will make a blog entry about the winner on the same date.

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U.K.

When you hear of someone drinking themselves to death, most of us assume it's alcohol-related. But that wasn't the case for a 35-year-old man from the U.K.

An investigation into how Shaun McNamara died revealed that he drank himself to death after consuming too much water. His body was found on the floor of his bathroom last September.

At first, doctors thought McNamara had suffered a heart attack. It was not until an autopsy revealed that he had downed so much fluid, so fast, that his brain had swollen, the Mail reported.

"In 35 years as a pathologist I have never come across such a case," said Dr. Ian Reed, who carried out the autopsy.

Water intoxication, also known as hyponatremia, normally is linked to marathon runners' drinking too much water after a race. When this happens, there is so much water in the body that it dilutes vital minerals such as sodium down to dangerous levels. This can lead to confusion, headaches and in extreme cases fatal swelling of the brain, according to the report.

LOS ANGELES

This idea must have come from some people who been high. The city that popularized the fast food drive-thru has a new innovation: 24-hour medical marijuana vending machines.

Patients suffering from chronic pain, loss of appetite and other ailments that marijuana is said to alleviate can get their pot with a dose of convenience at the Herbal Nutrition Center, where a large machine will dole out the drug around the clock.

"Convenient access, lower prices, safety, anonymity," inventor and owner Vincent Mehdizadeh said, extolling the benefits of the machine.

But federal drug agents say the invention may need unplugging.

"Somebody owns (it), it's on a property and somebody fills it," said DEA Special Agent Jose Martinez. "Once we find out where it's at, we'll look into it and see if they're violating laws."

At least three dispensaries in the city, including two belonging to Mehdizadeh, have installed vending machines to distribute the drug to people who carry cards authorizing marijuana use.

Mehdizadeh said he spent seven months to develop and patent the black, armored box, which he calls the "PVM," or prescription vending machine.

A sliding fence protects the tinted windows of his dispensary, barely distinguishing it from a busy thoroughfare of strip malls, automobile dealers and furniture shops. A box resembling a large refrigerator stands inside the nearly empty shop, near a few shelves stocked with vitamins and herbs.

A guard in a black T-shirt emblazoned with the word "Security" on the front stands at the door. A poster of Bob Marley decorates a back room.

The computerized machine requires fingerprint identification and a prepaid card with a magnetic stripe. Once the card and fingerprint are verified, a bright green envelope with the pot drops down a slot.

Mehdizadeh says any user approved for medical marijuana and registered in a computer database at his dispensaries can pre-purchase the drug and then use the machine to pick up.

The process provides convenience and privacy for users who may otherwise feel uncomfortable about buying marijuana, Mehdizadeh said.

At the Timothy Leary Medical Dispensary in the San Fernando Valley, the vending machine is accessible only during business hours. An employee there said the machine was introduced about five months ago, and provides speedy service.

"It helps a lot of patients who are in a lot of pain and don't want to wait around to get help," Robert Schwartz said. "It's been working out great."

Mehdizadeh said he sought the advice of doctors, and decided to limit the amount of marijuana per user to an ounce per week. Each purchase from the machine yields 1/8th or 2/8th of an ounce. By eliminating a vendor behind the counter, he said, the machine offers users lower drug prices. The 1/8th ounce packet would cost about $40 -- $20 lower than the average price at other dispensaries.

A spokesman for a marijuana advocacy group said the machine also benefits dispensary owners.

"It limits the number of workers in the store in the event of a raid, and it'll make it harder for theft," said Nathan Sands, of The Compassionate Coalition.

Marijuana use is illegal under federal law, which does not recognize the medical marijuana laws in California and 11 other states.

The Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal agencies have been actively shutting down major medical marijuana dispensaries throughout the state over the last two years and charging their operators with felony distribution charges.

Mehdizadeh said the Herbal Nutrition Center was the target of a federal raid in December. He said no arrests were made and no charges have been filed against him.

Kris Hermes, a spokesman for advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, said the machine might benefit those who already know how much and what strain of marijuana they're looking for. But he said others will want to see and smell the drug before they buy it.

A man who said he has been authorized to use medical marijuana as part of his anger management therapy said the vending machine's security measures would at least protect against illicit use of the drug.

"You have kids that want to get high and that's not what marijuana is for," Robert Miko said. "It's to medicate."

SLOVENIA

You have to watch what you are served in Slovenia hospital canteens. A human tongue has been served up in a hospital canteen's chicken risotto, and bosses reckon it was accidentally dropped into the food by a doctor.

Slovenian officials are investigating after a doctor complained about a strange piece of meat on his plate.

The doctor insisted it was not chicken and after some intense bickering it was sent away for tests — and found to be part of a human tongue.

Inspectors have closed the canteen in Izola, southern Slovenia, to review hygiene standards.

Bosses believe a doctor could have unwittingly dropped the tongue in the food after treating a patient.

A hospital spokesman insisted: "I can say clearly that we have never used patients' parts in any of our dishes." 

CALIFORNIA

A woman advertised on the popular classified ads site Craigslist for an assassin to kill the wife of a man with whom she'd had an affair, authorities said Saturday.

The ad by Ann Marie Linscott, 49, was posted in November as a generic request for somebody to perform a "freelance" job, court documents said. Her true intention was communicated only to those who e-mailed her seeking additional information about the job, the Craigslist CEO said.

Linscott offered $5,000 for the hit, had the name and work address of the woman she wanted dead, and described successful candidates as "silent assassins," according to agents and court documents.

"I've seen some screwy things, but I've personally never heard of anything like this," said Drew Parenti, special agent in charge of the Sacramento FBI office. "For a person to advertise openly for a hit man on Craigslist."

Agents arrested Linscott, whom they say went by Ann Marie and used the simple alias "Marie," on Thursday at her home in Grand Rapids, Mich. Federal prosecutors will ask a judge on Tuesday to make her stand trial in Northern California, where Butte County authorities worked with the FBI to identify the victim and her husband.

Eradicate a female

Linscott is accused of asking people who responded to her ad to "eradicate a female living in Oroville, California," and she provided additional information on the intended victim, including her physical description, age and employment address. On two separate occasions following the November ad posting, she offered payment of $5,000 upon completion of "the eradication task," according to court documents.

"Out of 550 million classified ads posted over 12 years, this is the first such incident that we're aware of," Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "But again, the ad itself was generic, and we're not a party to subsequent private e-mail communications."

Buckmaster said the arrest demonstrated the vigilance of Craigslist users, who are urged to report fraud and scams on the site to keep it clean.

It's not the first alleged crime ever solicited over the popular online bulletin board. There have been instances of ads posted by prostitutes and a Minnesota woman was killed last year after responding to an ad for a baby sitter. However, authorities and company officials say the murder-for-hire scheme appears to be the first of its kind.

The intended victim and her husband have not been identified, but Parenti said the man acknowledged meeting Linscott through an online college course over two years ago.

Parenti said the two forged an intimate relationship online and met at a hotel room for two days in Reno, Nev., in 2005. Linscott also had met him near the couple's home, about 70 miles north of the state capital, last spring. They continued to communicate by phone and e-mail.

Google is about to close the source of income for a significant number of people. In a recent move Google is planning to introduce a system to detect a form of domain registration abuse known as domain kiting. In so doing, the company stands to lose millions in advertising revenue, though it may gain far more in user trust and goodwill.

Registrants of Internet domains generally have a five-day grace period between the time a domain is registered and the time payment for the domain is due. This five-day period is used by domain profiteers for domain tasting -- testing the ad revenue generated at a given domain and then returning unprofitable domains -- and for domain kiting -- deleting newly registered domains within the grace period then immediately re-registering them to reset the grace period and postpone payment.

Because domain kiting is essentially a perpetual motion scheme for domain tasting, curtailing kiting will limit tasting. In January 2007, VeriSign said that among the top 10 domain registrars, 95% of all deleted .com and .net domain names were the result of domain tasting.

"We have long discouraged domain kiting as a practice," Google said. "In order to more effectively deter it, we are launching a new domain kiting detection system. If we determine that a domain is being kited, we will not allow Google ads to appear on the site. We believe that this policy will have a positive impact for users and domain purchasers across the Web."

As of Feb. 11 2008, Google plans to begin blocking AdSense for Domains ads from appearing on kited domains. The company did not provide further details about how its kiting detection system will work.

Google's AdSense for Domains program allows domain registrants to generate Web pages full of ads where no Web site content yet exists. The idea is that putting ads on these "parked domains" provides a useful service to online visitors who would otherwise encounter error pages or "site coming soon" notices. Typically, these pages full of ads perform best when they're associated with and relevant to a domain name someone is likely to type directly into a browser's address bar. Critics of the practice consider such pages little more than spam or doorways to malware.

In June 2007, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN), the organization that oversees the domain name system, issued a report on the possible consequences of domain tasting, including the destabilization of the domain name system, greater consumer confusion, increased costs and burdens on legitimate registrants, and the facilitation of trademark abuse and criminal activity.

Two months later, ICANN solicited feedback from the Internet community about domain tasting, an inquiry that hinted at possible willingness to curb abuses.

Google has had to contend with the problems ICANN foresaw. Having stepped up its involvement over the past two years in keeping its index free of spam sites, malware sites, and trademark exploiters of various sorts, Google appears to have finally come to the conclusion that the revenue generated by catering to domain profiteers isn't worth the cost.

INDIANA

Kids are Kids for doing stupid stuffs. Two fourth-grade boys mimicking a scene from the movie "A Christmas Story" wound up with their tongues stuck to a frozen flagpole.

Gavin Dempsey and James Alexander were serving on flag duty at Jackson Elementary School Friday morning, with the job of raising and lowering the school's flags. They decided to see if their tongues really would stick to the cold metal.

"I decided to try it because I thought all of the TV shows were lies, but turns out I was wrong," Gavin said.

Karen Alexander, James' mother , said her son told her he got the idea from the movie, which is based on stories about a boy growing up in the northwest Indiana community of Hammond in the 1940s.

"I can't believe he did it, but they learned their lesson," she said.

James said he plans to eat a lot of ice cream to help nurse his wound.

"When you're young, you're just messing around," he said.

Billie Dempsey, Gavin's mom, said a nurse called them to tell them the boys' tongues were bleeding.

"The nurse asked them, 'OK, who double-dog dared who?"' Billie Dempsey said, a reference to a phrase that a character in the movie used to dare another child to stick his tongue to the pole.