Emma Watson is BANNED from driving after being caught doing 38mph in 30 zone - her fourth speeding offence in two years
The 35-year-old Harry Potter actress was sentenced at High Wycombe Magistrates' Court today after admitting to driving at 38mph in a 30mph zone.
The offence was captured by a speed camera on a restricted road in the city where Watson has been studying for a doctorate at Oxford University.
Court records confirm the actress was behind the wheel of a £30,000 Audi S3 at the time of the incident.
This is not Watson's first brush with motoring misfortune. In February of last year, her Audi was impounded by police after she parked illegally outside the Rose and Crown pub in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The car had been left blocking the entrance to a car park, trapping a pizza restaurant manager's vehicle inside for over three hours.
The manager, who had just finished a 12-hour shift, was eventually forced to call the police after being unable to locate the car's owner.
Watson emerged from the pub as the vehicle was being towed, but her appeals were unsuccessful. She was issued a £192 fine.
Watson rose to fame playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series from 2001 to 2011 and later starred in 2019's Little Women.
She has since taken a step back from Hollywood, focusing instead on her academic pursuits and personal life.
At Oxford, she has been spotted coxing the New College women's third rowing team and is reportedly dating fellow student Kieran Brown, who recently completed his own doctorate.
The pair were seen kissing at a Gail's Bakery in Oxford last year.
Watson has also made headlines for her public support of trans rights, in contrast to Harry Potter author JK Rowling's controversial views on the issue. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Watson wrote: 'Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren't who they say they are.'
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BBC News
28 minutes ago
- BBC News
How Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath found their sound - and invented heavy metal
If you saw Black Sabbath's first ever gig, you wouldn't have recognised in 1968, they had the decidedly less sinister name of The Polka Tulk Blues Band, and came complete with a saxophonist and bottleneck guitar player.A year later, they'd slimmed down, found a new name and invented heavy metal. Few bands are so inextricably linked with a musical genre, but Sabbath set the template for everyone from Motörhead and AC/DC to Metallica and Guns 'n' the way, singer Ozzy Osbourne, who has died at the age of 76, became one of rock's most influential figures, with an electrifying and unpredictable stage presence and an almost mythological intake of drugs."If anyone has lived the debauched rock 'n' roll lifestyle," he once admitted, "I suppose it's me."So how did these four working class musicians from Aston, Birmingham rewrite the rules of rock? According to Osbourne, it was a visceral reaction to the "hippy-dippy" songs like San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) that saturated the airwaves after 1967's Summer Of Love."Flowers in your hair? Do me a favour," he seethed in his 2010 autobiography. "The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones you threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of 53 'cos you'd worked yourself to death."Teaming up with guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, Osbourne's initial idea was to put a Brummie spin on the bluesy sound of Fleetwood band's first name, Polka Tulk, was inspired by a brand of talcum powder his mum ditching the saxophone, they rebranded as Earth, taking as many gigs as they could manage, and even blagging a few extras."Whenever a big name band was coming to town, we'd load up the van with all our stuff and then just wait outside the venue on the off-chance they might not show up," Osbourne later worked... but only once, when the band were asked to stand in for an absent Jethro Tull. "And after that, all the bookers knew our name," Ozzy said. That opportunistic streak also steered them towards their signature just so happened that the band's rehearsal space was directly opposite a cinema that showed all-night horror audiences flock to these shows, the band conjured a plan."Tony said, "Don't you think it's strange how people pay money to get frightened? Why don't we start writing horror music?" Osbourne told music journalist Pete Paphides in 2005. "And that's what happened."The musicians metamorphosed into their final form: Adopting the name Black Sabbath, after a low-budget Boris Karloff film of the same name, they started writing lyrics that dabbled in death, black magic and mental suit the material, the music needed to get heavier, too. Ward slowed down the tempo. Iommi turned up the volume. Osbourne developed an aggressive vocal wail that always seemed to be teetering on the precipice of it was Iommi's guitar playing that really set Sabbath apart. His riffs leapt from the amplifier and hit the audience square in the chest with taurine was a sound he developed by necessity. When he was 17, Iommi was working in a sheet metal factory when he lost the tips of his two middle fingers in an industrial accident. Although surgeons tried to reattach them, they had gone black by the time he reached hospital. It looked like the end of his guitar career. Obituary: Wild life of rock's 'prince of darkness'Did Osbourne really bite the head off a live bat?'There will never be another Ozzy': Rock royalty pays tribute "The doctors said: 'The best thing for you to do is to pack up, really. Get another job, do something else'," Iommi wrote in his autobiography, Iron to prove them wrong, he melted down a fairy liquid bottle to make protective thimbles for his fingers, and slackened his guitar strings so he wouldn't have to apply too much pressure on the fretboard to create a months of painful practice, he learned a new style of playing – using his two good fingers to lay down chords, and adding vibrato to thicken the sound. That stripped-back, detuned growl became the basis of heavy metal."I had never heard that style of playing," said Tom Allan, who engineered Sabbath's self-titled debut album in 1969."I couldn't really fathom it. I didn't really get it. You never heard anything like that on the radio." The record was grim and sludgy – partly because the band had recorded it in just two days, with limited weren't sure what to make of it. Writing in Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs said the album had been "hyped as a rockin' ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap... They're not that bad, but that's about all the credit you can give them."The supposedly satanic imagery sparked a moral panic in the mainstream press, which intensified when it was discovered that the album's title track contained a chord progression known as the Devil's Interval, which had been banned by the church in the Middle the press didn't realise was that Black Sabbath, the song, had been written as a warning of the dangers of satanism, after Ward had fallen asleep reading books on the occult and woken up to see a ghostly, hooded figure standing at the end of his bed."It frightened the pissing life out of me," he later the truth, the controversy sold records and attracted legions of the band returned to their hotel to find 20 black-clad satanists holding candles and chanting outside their room. To get rid of them, Osbourne blew out the flames and sang Happy Birthday. Still, Sabbath leaned into their reputation, writing darker material and gaining a reputation as hellraisers as the 70s wore the music was never as basic or one-note as their image second album, Paranoid, marked a seismic leap in songcraft, from the visceral anti-war anthem War Pigs, to the creeping intensity of the title track, via the sci-fi horror of Iron Man, and the ghostly balladry of Planet kept up the pace on 1971's Master of Reality, with Osbourne describing Children Of The Grave as "the most kick-ass song we'd ever recorded".Vol 4, released in 1972, is sometimes overlooked because of its lack of a big radio single, but it also contains some of the band's best and most varied documents their descent into drug abuse with a depth-charge guitar riff; while St Vitus' Dance is a surprisingly tender piece of advice to a heartbroken friend, and Laguna Sunrise is a bucolic instrumental. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, meanwhile, was written as a furious critique of a music industry that had written them off."The people who have crippled you / You want to see them burn."After 55 years, and hundreds of imitators, the revelatory shock of Sabbath's sound has dimmed. How else do you explain Osbourne and Iommi performing Paranoid at Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee in 2002?But the power of those songs, from Iommi's brainsplitting riffs to Osbourne's insistent vocal wail, is he inducted Black Sabbath to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Lars Ulrich of Metallica said, "if there was no Black Sabbath, hard rock and heavy metal would be shaped very differently"."When it comes to defining a genre within the world of heavy music," he said, "Sabbath stand alone."Writing after the band's penultimate farewell show in 2017, Osbourne said he was humbled by the acclaim."I never dreamed we would be here 49 years later," he said."But when I think about all of it, the best thing about being in Black Sabbath after all these years is that the music has held up." Five essential Ozzy Osbourne songs 1) ParanoidWritten as a last-minute "filler" for Black Sabbath's second album, the group accidentally created their biggest hit: The story of a man battling his inner voices, set to one of rock's most powerful riffs."Every now and then you get a song from nowhere," said Osbourne. "It's a gift." 2) Crazy TrainThe song that launched Osbourne's solo career, it's almost atypically upbeat - shrugging off Cold War paranoia and declaring: "Maybe it's not too late to learn how to love." It's only the maniacal laughter in the fading bars that suggests this outlook is the purview of a madman. 3) Sabbath Bloody SabbathSabbath's reputation for darkness means their melodic capabilities were often overlooked. But Osbourne was a passionate admirer of the Beatles, and you can hear their influence on the pastoral chorus of this song, before Tony Iommi powers in with a growling guitar line. John Lennon would undoubtedly have approved of Osbourne's seething critique of the music industry, summed up in the line: "Bog blast all of you." 4) ChangesSabbath revealed their soft underbelly on this 1972 piano ballad, written about a break-up that drummer Bill Ward was experiencing. "I thought the song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it," said Osbourne, who later reworked it as a duet with his daughter, Kelly, and scored a UK number one the week before Christmas 2003. 5) Mr CrowleyInspired by notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, this track from 1980's Blizzard of Ozz allowed Osbourne to play up to his mock-satanic image. But is also helped him escape from the shadow of Black Sabbath, with a swirling, heavy-psychedelic sound, capped off by a blistering solo from his new foil, guitar virtuoso Randy listening: War Pigs and Iron Man are all-time classics; while Diary of a Madman and Suicide Solution are crucial chapters in Osbourne's solo songbook. Also check out Patient Number 9, the title track of his final album, which ended his career on a high.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
James Bond star Rory Kinnear reveals extreme lengths the producers take to keep who will play the next 007 secret
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Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
'Everyone's on edge': Epping braces for another hotel protest
Tracey's cheese toastie is getting cold. She's explaining to me how hacked off she is about the asylum hotel in Epping, there is a lot to get off her chest. This Essex commuter town has seen a series of protests around the Bell Hotel where asylum seekers have been housed for the past few years. The catalyst last week was an Ethiopian man, who had only recently arrived on a small boat, appearing in court charged with three counts of sexual assault on a local girl. Tracey was in the crowd demonstrating last Thursday when things turned violent, with some protesters clashing with police. Eight officers suffered injuries along with two hotel employees. Tracey told Sky News: "I've been here since I was four years old, I'm sixty now and we've never had any trouble like this before. "I'm sick to the skin of it all, I can't wait for it all to be over. "Everyone's on edge now. There's a lot of hostility so I think they (the migrants) should go. "I'm not a racist and I'm not prejudiced but this has just gone too far for this town. "You shouldn't relocate them, you should send them back to where they came from, simple as that. "Then it will be restored, the peace." She's angry at the government's response and the way she feels communities have not been listened to. She told Sky News: "They are going to have a lot of protests on their hands if they don't do anything about it. "So watch this space!" She went back to her cheese toastie and chips. Essex Police officers are preparing for another demonstration in Epping later with a march planned from the hotel to the council offices, where local politicians are due to discuss the problems. The chief constable has promised that his officers will facilitate peaceful protest while warning troublemakers they will be robustly dealt with. As we walked along the main shopping street with our camera, a man wound down the window of his partner's Mini and shouted about the violence last week. We asked him to stop and explain what he meant. It turned out Keith was at the protest too, his son was arrested and charged with criminal damage. "My son is actually going to court because he shook the Bell hotel sign and they are trying to do him with criminal damage," he said. "If they arrest somebody there will be five people to take their place," he warned - suggesting that people will show up regardless. "It will go on until it stops, it'll stop when they (the migrants) get moved out." Not everyone feels the same way - another woman who did not want to give her name said she strongly disagreed with the protests at the hotel. She told us: "I don't think an angry mob outside somewhere where people are staying within our community is the right way to go about it. "They could be demonstrating outside the Home Office." It is a divisive issue that the government clearly can't solve quickly. They are aiming to stop using hotels to house asylum seekers by 2029. Very few people in Epping feel they can wait that long. They want solutions now.
