Hugh Grant says police want talk to him on hacking (AP)

LONDON – Actor Hugh Grant says police have asked him to testify at an inquiry into allegations that a tabloid newspaper hacked into the phones of newsmakers, including celebrities and a murder victim.

The actor has often claimed he believes his phone was hacked by News of the World. He told Sky News on Wednesday that he was happy to work with police but also backed calls for an independent inquiry.

Grant wrote an article in The New Statesman earlier this year revealing that he secretly taped a conversation with former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan, who admitted that the tabloid employed people to hack into mobile phones.

The scandal has accelerated this week, raising calls for executives at News Corp., which owns the paper, to resign.

Pressure on Murdoch over new hacking allegation

LONDON | Tue Jul 5, 2011 7:12am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the alleged hacking of a murdered schoolgirl's voicemail by the News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, as the scandal closed in on a top News Corp executive and Murdoch protegee.

That the prime minister should find time to comment while on a visit to troops in Afghanistan was a measure of the uproar at home over suggestions that the tabloid might have hampered police and added to the torment of the family of a 13-year-old, abducted in 2002, whose killer was convicted only last month.

Among those facing new questions about their conduct is Rebekah Brooks, now head of News Corp's British newspaper arm and editor of the newspaper at the time of the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler -- one of Britain's highest profile crimes in years.

Brooks has until now figured only indirectly in inquiries by police into the hacking of mobile phone mailboxes by journalists and investigators employed by the News of the World.

The escalation of the scandal comes at a key moment in parent company News Corp's planned multi-billion-dollar takeover of BSkyB, due to be approved by the government after a final consultation this week.

Cameron, speaking to journalists on a visit to Afghanistan, said on Tuesday: "On the question about the really appalling allegations about the telephone of Milly Dowler, if they are true, this is a truly dreadful act."

A lawyer for the Dowler family said on Monday he had learned from police that the schoolgirl's voicemail messages had been hacked while police were searching for her. [ID:nL6E71425S] Her killer, a man with a record of other sex attacks, was found guilty of her murder last week.

British media have said a newspaper investigator not only listened in to messages left on the teenager's phone after she went missing but may also have deleted some to make space for more -- potentially misleading police and giving false hope to her family that she was still alive and at liberty.

Brooks, the editor at the time, is now chief executive of News International, News Corp's British newspaper arm. Her successor at the News of the World Andy Coulson, an ex-spokesman for Cameron, resigned from the paper over the hacking affair in 2007 and this year quit Cameron's office as the scandal grew.

Cameron, who is close to Brooks and the Murdoch family, has been at pains to keep the hacking scandal separate from a government decision to approve News Corp's planned multi-billion-dollar takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

A final public consultation on the matter ends on Friday and is expected to result in a green light from the government, although the latest development has led to renewed calls from opposition politicians to halt the merger.

BSkyB shares traded down 0.6 percent at 845 pence by 0843 GMT, underperforming a flat European media index.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

Pressure on Murdoch over new hacking allegation (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the alleged hacking of a murdered schoolgirl's voicemail by the News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, as the scandal closed in on a top News Corp executive and Murdoch protegee.

That the prime minister should find time to comment while on a visit to troops in Afghanistan was a measure of the uproar at home over suggestions that the tabloid might have hampered police and added to the torment of the family of a 13-year-old, abducted in 2002, whose killer was convicted only last month.

Among those facing new questions about their conduct is Rebekah Brooks, now head of News Corp's British newspaper arm and editor of the newspaper at the time of the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler -- one of Britain's highest profile crimes in years.

Brooks has until now figured only indirectly in inquiries by police into the hacking of mobile phone mailboxes by journalists and investigators employed by the News of the World.

The escalation of the scandal comes at a key moment in parent company News Corp's planned multi-billion-dollar takeover of BSkyB, due to be approved by the government after a final consultation this week.

Cameron, speaking to journalists on a visit to Afghanistan, said on Tuesday: "On the question about the really appalling allegations about the telephone of Milly Dowler, if they are true, this is a truly dreadful act."

A lawyer for the Dowler family said on Monday he had learned from police that the schoolgirl's voicemail messages had been hacked while police were searching for her. [ID:nL6E71425S] Her killer, a man with a record of other sex attacks, was found guilty of her murder last week.

British media have said a newspaper investigator not only listened in to messages left on the teenager's phone after she went missing but may also have deleted some to make space for more -- potentially misleading police and giving false hope to her family that she was still alive and at liberty.

Brooks, the editor at the time, is now chief executive of News International, News Corp's British newspaper arm. Her successor at the News of the World Andy Coulson, an ex-spokesman for Cameron, resigned from the paper over the hacking affair in 2007 and this year quit Cameron's office as the scandal grew.

Cameron, who is close to Brooks and the Murdoch family, has been at pains to keep the hacking scandal separate from a government decision to approve News Corp's planned multi-billion-dollar takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

A final public consultation on the matter ends on Friday and is expected to result in a green light from the government, although the latest development has led to renewed calls from opposition politicians to halt the merger.

BSkyB shares traded down 0.6 percent at 845 pence by 0843 GMT, underperforming a flat European media index.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

Hacking into slain girl's phone shocks UK leader (AP)

LONDON – Prime Minister David Cameron said Tuesday he is shocked by allegations that a British tabloid hacked into the cellphone of a murdered schoolgirl after she went missing.

"If they are true, this is a truly dreadful act and a truly dreadful situation," Cameron said about the latest hacking allegations against the News of the World.

"What I've read in the papers is quite, quite shocking, that someone could do this actually knowing that the police were trying to find this person and trying to find out what happened," he added.

The prime minister spoke while on a brief trip to Afghanistan as the phone hacking scandal in Britain deepened with claims that the tabloid's intrusion into the missing girl's voicemail system may have disrupted the U.K. police investigation.

The case involves charges that the newspaper's representatives broke into the voicemail of 13-year-old Milly Dowler when she was first reported missing in 2002. She was later murdered by a nightclub doorman.

Lawyer Mark Lewis, representing Dowler's family, said he plans to sue the tabloid, which is at the center of the long-running scandal that involves widespread hacking into the voicemail systems of celebrities, sports figures and aides working with the royal family.

Lewis said the parents were given hope that their daughter was alive because messages on her phone had been deleted — allegedly by the tabloid's representative.

"It is distress heaped upon tragedy to learn that the News of the World had no humanity at such a terrible time," he said. "The fact that they were prepared to act in such a heinous way that could have jeopardized the police investigation and give them false hope is despicable."

The tabloid's publisher, News International, released a statement Monday saying the matter is of grave concern and promising to cooperate with investigators. The publishers have already apologized and reached financial settlements in a number of phone hacking cases.

A private investigator and a royal editor who worked for News of the World were jailed in 2007 for tapping the phones of royal household staff. Five more people have been arrested since a fresh police investigation began in January.

___

David Stringer in Kabul contributed to this article

China under suspicion in U.S. for Lockheed hacking (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Suspicion that some individual or entity in China was behind a recent cyber attack on Lockheed Martin is growing among experts and agencies looking into the incident.

"It's unclear at this point precisely who conducted the attacks, but given past history with these sorts of things, there's a strong tendency to look east. The Far East, in fact, and a country that not so long ago hosted the Olympics," said one U.S. official who asked for anonymity, but was reluctant to point the finger at China by name.

Official and private U.S. cyber-security told Reuters that forensic tracing of attacks like the one that caused Lockheed temporarily to instruct employees to curb remote access to company networks was notoriously difficult, and that clever hackers usually lay elaborate false trails to cover their tracks.

But a U.S. official familiar with progress on the investigation said there was increasing suspicion the Lockheed hack originated with "someone in China."

Likewise, Google said on Wednesday that it had reason to believe that a hacker attack targeting some of its Gmail account holders appeared to originate in China.

The Chinese government rejected Google's allegations, saying that accusations that China fomented hacking "have ulterior motives" and that it was "unacceptable" for the company to blame Beijing.

On Thursday, Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said he had nothing to add on the issue beyond "authoritative" denial issued earlier in the day by the Foreign Ministry in Beijing.

Lockheed said in a press statement that on May 21, the company detected what it described as a "significant and tenacious attack" on its networks. The company said it detected the attack "almost immediately," took "aggressive actions" to protect its systems and succeeded in insuring that no data of any kind was compromised.

People familiar with the Lockheed hacking attempt said that hackers managed to get into the defense contractor's networks using data stolen in March by hackers which could be used to reduce the effectiveness of SecureID tokens produced by EMC Corp . The tokens are widely used by companies to give their employees secure remote access to computer networks.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Paul Eckert; Editing by Sandra Maler)