A crazed 14-year-old girl from Hong Kong had to be subdued by police with pepper spray, after she attacked her dear old ma with a knife and wooden pole and chased her around their flat. This must rate as the Godzilla of all teen strops.

The mother had - clearly ill-advisedly - decided to confiscate her daughter's mobile phone. She ended up barricaded in her bedroom for her trouble, with the frenzied adolescent hacking at the door a la Jack Nicholson. Mercifully, the authorities intervened at that point.

Indeed, the Internet was recently awash with grisly stories about a woman who battered her boyfriend to death with said device after he apparently objected to her illegal downloading and rubbed her entire MP3 archive.

Happily, that particular yarn was a hoax, although it didn't stop one UK broadsheet catching a nasty case of the "House of Horrors" in the headline department (OK, it was a throwaway diary piece in The Times).

Details of the Hong Kong terror ordeal are at present sketchy, although what facts we do have certainly contain the ring of truth - just ask anyone who has ever tried to surgically remove a PS2 from a teenager's grasp without back-up in the form of water-cannon and attack dogs.

The would-be matricide, btw, will not be charged and social services are dealing with the matter. ®