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Rioting and looting spread across London on Monday as hooded youths set buildings and cars ablaze, smashed shop windows and hurled bottles and stones at police in a third night of violence in Britain's worst unrest in decades.

British lawmakers said on Friday it was likely News Corp's James Murdoch would be recalled to clarify details about evidence on phone hacking he gave to a parliamentary committee, following claims his testimony was "mistaken."

The British judge leading the government-backed probe into illegal eavesdropping by journalists will start ordering people to testify and hand over documents "as soon as possible," he said Thursday, as the inquiry launched.

International Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge puts London 2012's readiness for the Games on a par with Sydney 2000 and Beijing 2008.

Look across the Atlantic today and you might spot the U.S. military’s future. As the Pentagon prepares to cut spending, the British Defense Ministry is apparently well on its way toward slashing its budget, with plans to reduce the size of its Army to levels not seen since around the 19th century.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown charged Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers hired “known criminals” to obtain information about him, and a senior police official said he was sure his own phone was hacked, as a mounting scandal threatened to further damage Murdoch’s media empire.

HSBC said that it is to cut around 700 jobs from its retail-banking operations in the U.K., ahead of major regulatory reforms that are set to affect the domestic industry's advisory business.

Personal details about Tony Blair that appear online were apparently not hacked from the former British prime minister's computer systems, but from the email account of a former staffer.

The most recent statistics according to the IE6 Countdown shows that the world as a whole is at 10.9% usage on IE6. The United States, Turkey, Canada, Brazil, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and the UK are at the top (bottom) of the list with under 3% of overall browsers running as IE6. Norway leads everyone at 0.4% and their neighbors in Finland are at 0.8%.

Uh oh, Skype's experiencing its second big outage in the space of just a couple of weeks, as we're hearing reports from the UK, Netherlands, and yes, even Bulgaria, claiming the online communications service is down. Our own Skype clients are currently unable to move past the "Connecting..." status note, both on Mac OS X and Windows 7.