All of the following stories are true.

ROME — Some Italian doctors say excessive text messaging could lead to acute tendonitis, especially for the country's text-obsessed young people. Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Il Messaggero wrote that a 13-year-old girl in the northern Italian city of Savona needed treatment from an orthopedic specialist after typing at least 100 messages a day. She was prescribed anti-inflammatory medicine and instructed to rest her hands. Thirty-seven percent of Italian children are “cell phone addicts,” according to a recent study conducted for children's rights group Telefono Azzurro. Irritability and mood swings were other symptoms linked to very frequent cell phone use among the young.

CHICAGO — Mobile devices are among the most common items left in taxi cabs worldwide, according to a survey of 1000 taxi drivers conducted by Pointsec Mobile Technologies. An estimated 11,300 laptop computers, 31,400 hand-held computers and 200,000 mobile telephones were left in cabs of taxi companies in Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain and the U.S during the past six months. The U.S. company polled in the survey, a major Chicago cab company, reported the highest number of losses per taxi of all firms studied, both in mobile phones (3.42 per cab) and PDAs/pocket PCs (0.86 per cab). Most of the items were returned to their owners, cab drivers said. Four out of five mobile phones and 19 out of every 20 computers found their way back, they said.

GREAT BRITAIN — A British government adviser says radiation from hands-free mobile phones can be reduced to virtually zero by a small, cheap magnetic bead, the BBC reports. Professor Lawrie Challis, chairman of the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme, said clipping a ferrite bead on kits stops the radio waves traveling up the wire and into the head. The beads, which often measure less than half an inch in diameter, are commonly used to stop data interference in computers.

GREAT BRITAIN — Video phones are being used in the latest craze among violent thugs in Britain, The Sun reports. “Happy slappers” hit strangers across the face while a friend stands by to record the incident to post on the Internet or send to another mobile phone. Some say the pranksters have carried the joke too far, though. One hundred incidents were logged in London alone, with reports of pranksters drop-kicking strangers' in the spine and robberies. In one case, an 18-year old on the Underground train was asked if he was having a nice day and then was slapped. His 15-year-old sister was punched in the face. Transport cops said: “This is not fun. It is assault.”