Newspapers, Phone-hacking Scandal | featured news

"It was the kind of place you get out of and you never want to go back again." That's how one former reporter describes the News of the World newsroom under editor Rebekah Brooks, the ferociously ambitious titian-haired executive who ran Britain's top-selling Sunday tabloid from 2000 to 2003.

News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch apologized for the phone-hacking scandal ignited by revelations about his News of the World newspaper in an advertisement to appear Saturday in British newspapers.

Rebekah Brooks has resigned as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's embattled British newspapers. She is the biggest casualty so far in the phone hacking scandal at a Sunday British tabloid.

Rupert Murdoch on Thursday caved in to pressure from Britain's parliament to answer questions over alleged crimes at one of his newspapers and denied that News Corp was drawing up plans to separate its newspaper holdings.

Media titan Rupert Murdoch and his son James defied the British Parliament Thursday and refused to appear next week before a committee investigating phone hacking and bribery by employees of their newspapers. The committee said it had issued summonses to the Murdochs, setting up an extraordinary confrontation between one of Britain’s most powerful men and a Parliament once seen as easily bent to his will.

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.