London, News Corp | featured news

Rupert Murdoch protégé Rebekah Brooks was charged Tuesday with conspiracy over alleged illegal payments to a Ministry of Defence employee, London's Metropolitan Police said Tuesday.

UK news channel Sky News said Thursday it had authorized its journalists to hack into the e-mail of individual members of the public on two occasions.

Rebekah Brooks, a former top executive with Rupert Murdoch’s News International, was among six people arrested Tuesday in one of the largest police sweeps yet in the long-running phone-hacking scandal, British news media reported.

James Murdoch, the executive at the epicenter of the phone hacking scandal at his father's British newspapers, is stepping down as executive chairman of News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper arm, the company announced Wednesday.

Police investigating Britain's phone-hacking scandal made another arrest Friday, keeping up the pressure on Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Officers from Scotland Yard arrested a 47-year-old woman early Friday morning in Essex, a county just east of London. Police said she was the 17th person to be arrested as part of Operation Weeting, the official investigation into phone hacking.