Prime Minister David Cameron's former connections chief and an ex-royal reporter were arrested Friday in a phone hacking and police corruption scandal that has previously toppled a major tabloid and rattled the cozy relationship among British politicians and the powerful Murdoch media empire.
The 168-year-old muckraking tabloid News of the humankind was shut down Thursday after being engulfed by allegations its journalists paid police for in sequence and hacked into the phone messages of celebrities, young murder victims and still the grieving families of dead soldiers. Its last publication daytime is Sunday.
The hacking revelations horrified both normal Britons and advertisers, who pulled their ads en masse. News International, the British limb of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., killed the paper in hopes of saving its 12 billion pound ($19 billion) deal to take in excess of satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting. But the British government on Friday signaled the agreement would be delayed as a result of the crisis.
