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A teenager from New Zealand has saved herself from a shark attack by hitting the fish with her body-board.

Fourteen-year-old Lydiawas playing in chest-high water with her brother when she noticed the 1.5m shark swimming next to her. She said she wasn't sure what the shark was at first, but bashed it with her body-board to try and make it go away.

The shark managed to bite Laura's hip through her wet suit, before eventually swimming off. The attack happened off Oreti beach on New Zealand's south island on Monday.

Experts say it was probably a broad-nosed seven gilled shark.

Short sharp hit

Laura said: "I wasn't quite sure what it was. But I looked towards my brother's face and he was just shocked. I looked at my side and just saw this massive grey thing...so, I just hit it with one short sharp hit of the Boogie board."

Jess Worth and Ellen Dewin Zambia

European Safer Internet Day (SID) is supported by countries throughout Europe and during the week, a range of activities will be taking place across the continent to help protect young people online.

The theme for SID ‘10 is ‘Think Before You Post’ and we hope you will help us to make the whole week (from Monday 8th February – Friday 12th February 2010) a week for raising awareness at Horbury School.

Safer Internet Day is on Tuesday 8th February.

Safer Internet Day is supported by CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre), Thinkuknow and several other organisations.

SID is all about raising the awareness of online safety, as young people need to be made aware of what they can do to protect themselves online.

On the Horbury CyberMentors Website there are plenty of resources (videos, useful tips etc) that can be viewed and downloaded. We are sure you will agree with us that the messages the videos portray are quite frightening.
Reported by Oliver Farrell (Morocco)

Brought to us by James Cameron, the director of Terminator and Titanic, Avatar takes us to an extraordinary world beyond imagination, where the reluctant hero embarks on an epic adventure.

The human race discovers a new planet named Pandora with a new discovery of an expensive rock found under the ground, but the humans are not alone: the NA’ VI rule Pandora’s land.  We enter the NA’VI world through the eyes of Jake Sulley (Sam Worthington), a former marine confined to a wheelchair, who takes on his twin brother’s avatar and discovers unbelievable things: he realises the humans are destroying everything through obsessing over a rock for money.  In order to get what they want they have to take the home of the innocent NA’VI people, by learning everything from a female NA’VI the beautiful Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) he falls in love and fights for his future life.

This is a ‘must see’ film; it may be blue but it’s realistic. The graphics of the NA’VI people are unbelievably great and some of them were actual people! The scenery of avatar were out of this world; legendary floating mountains, aluminous settings of trees and animals, the spirits that floated around of Ewya that looked like squids and light bulbs.

The Avatar adventure is a blast; if you don’t see it you will regret it.

Sophie Platts (Zambia)

A woman who was taking an art class at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has accidentally fallen into a Picasso painting and damaged it.
The painting called The Actor sustained a vertical tear of about six inches (15cm) in the lower right-hand corner.
But the damage did not affect the "focal point of the composition" and should be repaired for an exhibition later this year, the museum said.
The painting was 105 years old and was worth 50 million but now it’s only half (30 million).
 
The unusually large canvas, measuring 6ft by 4ft (1.8m by 1.2m) and which depicts an acrobat posed against an abstracted backdrop, was damaged on Friday.
 
By Sophie Platts
Zambia
Year 10

Horbury Schools CyberMentors are privileged to be involved in the BBC News School Report.

This gives Horbury School the opportunity to ‘make the news’, the BBC News School Report allows groups of students in schools to make the news. The project consists of four practice days in the run up to 11th March (the actual report day). All the reports/videos on the practice days are and will be available on the school website for staff, students and the public to view. On the actual day the school website will ‘link’ to the BBC who will be featuring some of the content schools produce on their website and on TV and radio. We have just completed our first practice day (video can be seen here), which we feel was a great success, not only to the students involved but to the school as well.

As a group on our first practice day ‘we’ made the news!

Our next practice day is on the 4th of February and we want the ‘Horbury School Community’ to make the news! We urge staff and students to contact us so we can arrange to feature your items/interviews/reports on our site (and maybe even the BBC).

Report by Oliver Farrell (Morocco)

Beat Bullying!

A girl named Beth Ellis was bullied and got death threats via cyber bullying, she got beat up and the bullies even invited her friends to watch. When she went on Facebook she found out about a hate group about her and that was the final straw, she got the police involved, the group was removed and the bullying stopped.

Conner Tann wasn’t so lucky. He was an intelligent boy who wore glasses and spoke with a little stutter, immediately he became a target of bullying and it was common for him to come home in tears from the bullying. After a few times him mum went into the school and sorted it out. He quickly made a small group of friends and played with them after school. Then in a tragic accident he hung himself in the woods while playing on the swings.

So the moral is tell people about being bullied don’t keep quiet.

(Well done to this student from Zambia who gains 50 housepoints for writing this story!)
 

The bad weather continued this morning as a night of sleet and light snow made the conditions absolutely terrible this morning. The roads were very slippery and many buses got stuck especially in the Netherton and Middlestown area.

Despite this, Horbury School remained open and students and staff showed that it takes a bit more than snow to beat us! The forecast today is for more snow although it will be light and this is set to continue for the next couple of days before turning a little warmer. The long term trend is for more poor weather and this may continue until March.

Last night, there were many reports that we would be shut mainly due to a mistake by Ridings FM who displayed an old page on their web site saying we were closed. The first place that you should check is our school website which will be updated regularly.