Emma Watson: Harry Potter actress banned from driving for six months for speeding
She did not attend the five-minute hearing.Watson shot to fame in 2001 with the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, alongside fellow child stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint.She starred in eight Potter films in total, before going on to appear in movies such as Beauty and the Beast, The Bling Ring and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.Watson's last film role was in the 2019 remake of Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig.
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ITV News
36 minutes ago
- ITV News
Rise in foreign states silencing dissidents in UK going 'unchecked', MPs warn
Foreign states are becoming bolder in their attempts to silence dissidents in the UK and the government must take stronger action, parliamentarians have warned. In a report published on Wednesday, the Joint Committee on Human Rights said transnational repression had increased in recent years, with foreign states using online harassment, lawsuits and physical violence to intimidate people in the UK. MI5 investigations into threats from other states have increased 48% since 2022, the report said, while committee chairman Lord David Alton warned the rise was 'going unchecked'. He said: 'This risks undermining the UK's ability to protect the human rights of its citizens and those who have sought safety within its borders. 'We have seen prominent cases of Hong Kongers with bounties placed on their heads, Iran intimidating journalists – but evidence submitted to the inquiry suggest this may be the tip of the iceberg.' The warning comes amid rising concern about transnational repression, including reports that China has offered rewards for people turning in pro-democracy Hong Kong activists based in the UK. Last month, Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee warned that Iran had attempted to kidnap or murder at least 15 UK-based people since 2022. Meanwhile Russia has also targeted dissidents including the attempt to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal with Novichok in 2018. While the cross-party human rights committee said China, Russia and Iran were the 'most flagrant' perpetrators of transnational repression in the UK, it highlighted evidence suggesting a string of other countries including India, Rwanda, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had sought to target people in Britain. MPs and peers said they had also received 'substantial' evidence of intimidation by the Eritrean government, including surveillance of anti-government activists and infiltration of community groups and churches in an effort to isolate opponents of the regime. The committee went on to criticise Interpol, saying the organisation had refused to acknowledge misuse of 'red notices' – international requests for an arrest – to harass dissidents or take any steps to address this. Almost half of the 6,550 public red notices currently in circulation have been issued at Russia's request. Lord Alton said: 'We want to see a two-pronged approach from the government. More needs to be done to give support and protection to the individuals and communities most at risk of transnational repression. 'We also want to see transnational repression prioritised in diplomatic relations and leadership at an international level to tackle the misuse and exploitation of systems of justice to silence and intimidate.' As well as pressing Interpol for action on abuse of red notices, the committee urged the government to provide more training on transnational repression for police officers in the UK and greater protection from vexatious lawsuits known as Slapps (strategic lawsuits against public participation). The committee also called for China to be placed in the highest tier of the foreign influence registration scheme that came into effect last month, saying its omission risked 'undermining the credibility and coherence' of the scheme given the extent of Chinese transnational repression. An Interpol spokesperson said: 'Every year, thousands of the world's most serious criminals are arrested thanks to Interpol's systems. "Children are saved from sexual exploitation and terrorists, cyber criminals and traffickers are brought to justice. 'Interpol knows red notices are powerful tools for law enforcement co-operation, which is why we have robust processes for ensuring that all Interpol notices and diffusions comply with our rules. 'Our constitution forbids Interpol from undertaking activities of a political, military, religious or racial character and all our databases and activities must also comply with the universal declaration for human rights.' A Home Office spokesperson said: 'We take the threat of transnational repression extremely seriously. "Any attempts by a foreign state to coerce, intimidate, harass, or harm individuals on UK soil are considered a threat to our national security and sovereignty, and will not be tolerated. 'The committee's review echoes many of the same findings and recommendations from the Defending Democracy Taskforce report on TNR, published in May, and we are already taking action arising from those recommendations to further strengthen our response.'
STV News
2 hours ago
- STV News
Teen who wanted to carry out 'Doomsday' mass shooting at school to be sentenced
An Edinburgh teenager who wanted to carry out a mass shooting at his own school is to be sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow. Felix Winter, now aged 18, repeatedly spoke about carrying out an attack at his secondary, referring to the day he would 'clear it out' as 'Doomsday'. Jurors previously heard the teenager 'idolised' the killers behind the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado in the United States in 1999, which saw 12 students and a teacher gunned down. A major police investigation began in the summer of 2023 after a photo circulated on social media showing Winter at school in full combat gear, carrying an imitation gun, which caused panic among pupils and parents. He had already been referred to a UK-wide anti-terrorism programme aimed at preventing radicalisation. He also held racist and pro-Nazi views. Winter pleaded guilty to a breach of the peace and a charge under the Terrorism Act. His offending took place between June 2022 and July 2023. Defence KC Shelach McCall told the court in March that a professor who assessed her client found a 'serious link' between his autism and his behaviour, arguing it was his condition – rather than extremism – that drove his obsession with school shootings. Ms McCall said Winter had made a 'marked improvement' since his offending. She said: 'He has expressed regret and recognises that he didn't previously appreciate how his behaviour was impacting on others. 'He accepts in the context of his plea of guilty and his remarks about school shootings in 2022, him dressing in that costume and carrying that in a school would generate alarm to those who came upon it but this was not his intent.' Winter will appear at the High Court in Glasgow on Wednesday, July 30. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
Spectator
3 hours ago
- Spectator
I'm writing a novel without using AI – and I can prove it
Everyone's seen stories about the creep of AI into art of all kinds. Recently the people behind the music-fabrication website Suno have been making outrageous statements to the effect that people don't enjoy learning musical instruments and writing their own songs, so why not let AI do it for them? This is very new, very disturbing and very consequential. I could talk about graphic art and video and film-making, but you'll know what's been going on there. I'll just cut to the chase and get to how AI tools are impacting and will continue to impact the writing of fiction. I anticipate a future in which human authorship will need to be proven. A few years ago I simply wouldn't have believed that this landscape could be possible. In 2017, a team called Botnik fed the seven Harry Potter novels through their predictive text keyboard, resulting in a chapter from a new Harry Potter story: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. With some human selection what emerged were extracts such as: ''If you two can't clump happily, I'm going to get aggressive,' confessed the reasonable Hermione.' 'To Harry, Ron was a loud, slow, and soft bird.' Things have come on since then. Now, if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other engines to write about the moon landings in the style of Finnegans Wake, which I have done, it will produce something pretty plausible, possibly not better than you could have done yourself given an hour or two, but rather compensated for by the fact that it took two seconds. As a result, novelists are already writing novels with AI. Are they as good as human novels? No, not yet. It's a process, probably, of gradual supplantation. First the writer uses AI to brainstorm ideas, then gets the AI to write a scene based on the most promising idea, then gets AI to supply a whole chapter, then the whole of the book. Gradually human oversight is reduced and then eliminated. In 2024 the winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, admitted that she had written her novel with the help of artificial intelligence, though this confession was made after she received the prize money. She was praised for her honesty. Perhaps the majority of serious current novelists are experimenting with it, because it is just too tempting. I would guess that in future most novels will be written with AI help, because authors have deadlines, they are weak, and they fear the blank screen. There are people out there saying: never fear, AI writing is just autocomplete on steroids, it will never have emotions, it will never write creatively, it will never be original and it will never truly engage a human reader. I used to say things like that. Now I don't. AI probably can't think and probably isn't conscious – although Geoffrey Hinton, who helped make it, argues that it can and is – but that doesn't matter. All it needs to do is convincingly mimic thought and consciousness, as well as mimicking creativity and originality. After all, who's more likely to be original, a human or a machine that has access to every book every written? Is there anything new under the sun? If there is, won't an infinitely resourced machine be able to shine its own light on it? That's when human novelists will be completely, irrevocably superseded. The terrifying thing is it doesn't matter if AI machine novelists are not very good, or even if they never get as good as a human writer, since for a majority of people they will be good enough. They will out-compete, and out-autocomplete, human writers, just as AI bands are mimicking human bands with enough success to suck revenue away from human musicians on Spotify. Writers' livelihoods are at stake because consumers won't care enough. Except… what if there is a market for novels if they are demonstrably written by humans? What if there is, in ten years' time, a market for an artisan novel, quaintly written on the premise that no machine had a hand or a robotic arm in its creation? How, though, could this be proven? It's possible at the moment to detect AI text, but only if the writer has been careless, and the tools to do so are clunky and sometimes inaccurate. After generating the text, the writer can 'humanise' it, either by hand, or by employing a humanising program. So I'm proposing something. I want to write one of the world's first provably, demonstrably non-AI-assisted novels. And this is how I'm going to do it. In fact, this is how I have already started doing it. During every writing session I livestream my desktop and have an additional camera on my workspace and keyboard. I have a main novel file, some character files, a plot file and a scrap file. I may also have other files. All these files are in one folder and accessible to pull out. This bringing up of files from the main folder is viewable on screen. There is no access to the internet, and certainly nothing AI-generated. At the end of each writing session in Google Docs, I save a named version. At the next writing session I open Google Docs and identify that last version at the top of the list, date- and time-stamped as it is, demonstrating that it is the last version I worked on and hasn't been altered. Then I go back to Google Docs and start working, live-streaming and recording. At the end of the session I save the version so I can return to it. This protocol I call Maximal Human Authorship Protocol or MaxHAP. It, or something like it, is going to be required in future, because if we don't have it, no one will ever be able to say again, and be believed: 'I'm a writer.' Does that matter? It matters to me, because I've been writing for a long time, and writing is among the things I value most in the world. I want to protect the notion of a verifiably human author, of the dignity of that author. In future, the writer will have only a little dignity. Let's not make it none.
