UPDATE: This story now appears to be a hoax. Thank you “Legal Mexican” for bringing it to our attention.

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An eighth grader was accosted in her middle school hallway for simply completing an assignment. Her teacher assigned the students to make either past or present protest signs, hers were against illegal immigration which apparently was not well received by her peers.

ATHENS, Texas (AP) - An East Texas girl who made an anti-illegal immigration sign for a U.S. history class says she was beaten by other students.

Her sign said: “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration.”

The father of 13-year-old Melanie Bowers of Athens says he’s keeping her out of classes until probably next week until the situation is resolved.

As a class project, students made “protest signs” about past and current issues.

The count of children removed from Warren Jeff’s polygamous sect compound has risen to over 400, and stories are starting to come out that life wasn’t exactly some idyllic religious experience there. Rather, many of the women and children that lived on the sprawling Texas ranch may have stayed out of fear of punishment, or even death:

he 16-year-old girl whose call for help sparked a massive raid at a polygamous sect’s compound in west Texas said her spiritual husband would “beat and hurt” her whenever he got angry - sometimes choking her and once breaking her ribs.

During these attacks, another woman in the home held her infant child, the girl said in March 29 calls to an unnamed family violence shelter.

The new details about the call that led to an unprecedented evacuation of children from the sect’s YFZ Ranch near Eldorado are laid out in a chilling affidavit released Tuesday by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

We think we might have drawn the line at, oh, one snake in our son’s room. But “Snake Boy” Bokamosho Nthelang, a 15-year-old in South Africa, has turned his bedroom into a snake sanctuary housing 150 of the slithering reptiles, several of which are poisonous. And wouldn’t you know it, Nthelang keeps getting bitten by them:

He has been bitten twice before, once by a cobra and once by a puffadder.

After the previous two incidents all the dangerous snakes were removed from his house by the department of environment and conservation.

Last week Nthelang, from Mothibistad near Kuruman, was admitted to Kimberley Medi-Clinic after he was bitten by yet another lethal snake.

Spokesperson for the ministry of environment and conservation, Les Abrahams, said that during a previous visit to the boy’s home, they found that the youngster was fascinated by the reptiles.

“We will consider giving him formal training in snake handling in the future. However, no permission has been given to him to keep all the snakes.”

Is it just us or are there more and more stories of teen violence lately? This one involves two teenage girls in Los Angeles who were part of a scheme to rob a taxi cab. When the cab driver took off to escape, he crashed the car and the girls were killed.

The two 17-year-old girls had flagged down the cab early Tuesday and asked to be taken to a nearby housing project, where one girl said her boyfriend would come and pay the fare, police said.

Instead, a man shoved a handgun through the taxi window and grabbed a GPS system off the dashboard, Officer Jason Lee said. Hernandez sped away and called police after seeing a car chasing him, Lee said.

“One of the females pulled out a box cutter and began cutting the taxi cab driver, and that’s what caused him to crash,” Officer April Harding said.