The Crazy World!!!

Couple allegedly neglected baby while spending 12-hour gaming sessions at Internet café.

Prius Online

Sometimes, stories about video game addiction are alarmist malarkey to bump up ratings. Other times, they're just flat-out tragic: The Next Web reports that a couple in South Korea has been arrested for allegedly allowing their prematurely born baby to starve to death while they were busy tending to a virtual kid at an Internet café.

The couple reportedly fed their baby only once a day between 12-hour stretches of play-time with a popular role-playing game called Prius Online, in which they were busy raising a virtual kid. The autopsy report of their baby showed the death was a result of a long period of malnutrition.

"The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life, because they didn't have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby," said South Korean police officer Chung Jin-won. "They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby."

This of course isn't the first report of online and game addiction leading to tragic results in South Korea -- back in 2005, a gamer who played StarCraft for 50 hours straight died after suffering cardiac arrest. They even opened the "Jump Up Internet Addiction" school -- a boot camp of sorts for people suffering online and gaming addiction -- in South Korea in 2007.

German doctors have revealed photographs of the smallest premature baby boy to have survived against incredible odds after being born at 25 weeks weighing just over half a pound.

A boy weighing only 275 grams after being born at University Hospital Goettingen in Germany is the world's lightest ever to have survived a premature birth

The baby, who doctors dubbed "Tom Thumb" was less than the length of a sheet of A-4 paper and weighed a fraction over 9.7 ounces (275 grams) when he was born by Caesarean section 15 weeks prematurely at the University of Medicine at Göttingen in western Germany in June 2009.

For 24 hours a day, the child was in an incubator and hooked up to feeding tubes, breathing tubes, a heart monitor, a catheter and a plethora of electronic devices to monitor every vital sign as he faced risks of cerebral haemorrhage or organ failure.

In December, the baby was finally pronounced "stable" after achieving a weight of 8.2lbs - considered an average birth weight in Germany.

Now, nine months after his birth, doctors have allowed the unnamed boy's parents to take him to the family home in Eighsfeld, central Germany, after ruling that he is strong enough to survive.

Officials from Göttingen hospital said that, having checked all available records of premature births worldwide, they were unable to find a viable birth of a boy at a lower weight. Three girls - including one born in the US at just 244 grams - had survived lower birth weights. The smallest boy previously recorded weighed 10.4 ounces.

Dr Stephan Seeliger, an expert on premature babies, said: "I spoke to the parents about the birth beforehand - whether we should go for it or not. In the end, I said: 'Good thing we did it!'"