London:
The British police on Friday arrested a former editor of The News of the World who is also a former senior aide to Prime Minister David Cameron, and rearrested the newspaper's former royal editor. The arrests deepened the crisis swirling around Rupert Murdoch's media empire in Britain over allegations of phone hacking and corruption.
Struggling to contain the biggest scandal since he took office more than a year ago, Mr. Cameron announced two separate inquiries into the revelations, saying "no stone will be left unturned." He also said that he would have accepted the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International who is at the center of the phone hacking scandal, when she offered it earlier this week.
Ms. Brooks, who presided over The News of the World when the hacking took place, spoke to staff members of the paper Friday afternoon, telling them she was "angry at the people who did this and feel bitterly betrayed," according to Twitter accounts of the meeting, and said she had no plans to resign. She said that Thursday's decision to shut the paper down was based on the conviction that it faced another two years of trouble, and that the brand had become "toxic" to advertisers.
Saying "this is not exactly the best time of my life," she said she did not expect to be arrested, participants said, but that there was worse to come in the police investigation into the hacking.
However, News International announced after the meeting that Ms. Brooks had been removed from an internal committee dealing with the scandal, and that her lieutenants on the committee would report directly to Joel I. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor who is overseeing the cleanup effort for News Corporation, the parent of News International.
Scotland Yard said in a statement that Andy Coulson, Mr. Cameron's former director of communications, had been interviewed at a police station in south London and was "currently in custody." Police also said that Clive Goodman had been arrested on Friday; he was once one of Mr. Coulson's top reporters, and served a four-month jail term in 2007 in connection with earlier inquiries into phone hacking.
Neither the arrests nor Mr. Cameron's vow to rein in the press seemed to contain the fast-spreading scandal. The Guardian reported on Friday that the police were investigating reports that an executive with News International, the British arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, had tried to delete millions of e-mails from a News of the World archive "in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard's inquiry" into the affair.
News International had maintained as late as December in a trial in Scotland that the archive did not exist, the Guardian reported, saying that it had been lost when it was shipped to Mumbai, India. An executive later apologized to the court, saying News International could account for e-mails going back to 2005 and had not lost any. But now the police have evidence that before the admission that the archive existed, there was an effort by a News International executive to destroy much of the archive before it was handed over, The Guardian said.
If the new allegations are borne out, The Guardian said, they could bear on Mr. Murdoch's proposed $12 billion purchase of British Sky Broadcasting, which requires for government approval that the company pass a "fit and proper person" test.
On Friday the chairman of Ofcom, Britain's media regulatory agency, sent a letter to John Whittingdale, M.P., the chairman of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, saying the agency was "writing to the relevant authorities to highlight our duties in relation to Fit and Proper," and that it was "very conscious of the level of concern about these matters in Parliament and in the country more widely."
The Ofcom letter, coming after days of reticence from the regulator, suggested Ofcom officials had acted to spare the agency from the harsh criticism that has been focused on other oversight bodies caught up in the phone hacking scandal, including those that are responsible for monitoring the police and the press.
Earlier on Friday, Mr. Cameron told his news conference that the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body set up by Britain's press, had been "completely absent" from the phone hacking scandal, showing it to "ineffective and lacking in rigor," and needed replacing by a new body that would be "independent of the press." Similar criticism has been focused in recent days on the main police oversight body, the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
The possible destruction of evidence could also have a bearing on lawsuits brought against The News of the World by people whose phones were hacked. Lawyers for the claimants said that if it is proven that News International destroyed evidence, the company could lose a critical defense.
Normally, the absence of documents can be cited as evidence that something did not happen. Now, lawyers can argue, the judge should infer only that the documents were destroyed. The document destruction could also bolster arguments that the claimants are entitled to punitive damages, the lawyers said.
The Murdoch family announced on Thursday that it would shut down The News of the World, the tabloid weekly newspaper at the center of the scandal, in a move that seemed calculated to help protect the BSkyB deal. Members of the British public had until Friday to make their views on the deal known to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The BBC said that some 256,000 individuals had lodged objections, many of them in recent days, and that it may take the government months to sift through them.
Before the phone hacking crisis exploded this week, Mr. Hunt had been expected to approve the deal, possibly as soon as this week. The police actions on Friday brought a new dimension to the scandal, turning it from one of claim and counterclaim to a question of criminal charges. While Mr. Coulson's arrest had been expected, the detention of Mr. Goodman came as more of a surprise, British reporters said.
Police said that Mr. Goodman, 53, was seized in an early morning raid on his home in Surrey, outside London, on suspicion of corruption linked to illicit payments to police officers. He was The News of the World's royal reporter when he was previously arrested with Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator and a central figure in the scandal. The men were accused of hacking into the voice mail of members of the royal household. Mr. Goodman now works as a freelance reporter, the Press Association news agency said.
A police statement said that Mr. Coulson, 43, was arrested "on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications" and "on suspicion of corruption allegations." It said he had been interviewed by officers investigating illegal payments to police officers and phone hacking.
The arrests came as the prime minister scrambled desperately to contain the fallout from the scandal, and to focus public attention on measures being taken to investigate it. But they were certain to draw renewed taunts by Mr. Cameron's critics that he showed flawed judgment in hiring Mr. Coulson in 2007. In the past, the prime minister has always vouched for Mr. Coulson's integrity and said that he believed Mr. Coulson's assurances that he had done nothing wrong.
The repercussions from the crisis also spread to the question of media regulation.
At a hastily convened news conference to unveil his plans for inquiries, Mr. Cameron proposed an extraordinary tightening of limits on the behavior of the freewheeling British press, which prides itself on investigative prowess far beyond the tabloid titillation with which some of its titles are associated.
Mr. Cameron spoke with rare candor about the darker practices that have been common in the British press, and particularly at tabloids like The News of the World, whose power to destroy reputations was widely feared among politicians, celebrities and others in the public eye.
The prime minister said he would ask the panel of inquiry that he plans to appoint to make a sweeping review of "the culture, the practices and the ethics" of the country's newspapers. But he also acknowledged that politicians have traditionally failed to speak up about press abuses for fear of alienating media barons with the power to wreck their careers or their parties' electoral prospects.
He described the relationship between politicians and newspapers like The News of the World as "too close, too cozy," and said that politicians should "stop trying to curry favor with the press" and should stand ready to speak out when they saw abuses.
In addition to separate police investigations into payments alleged to have been made by newspapers to corrupt officers, Mr. Cameron said he would convene two inquiries. One, led by a judge, would interview witnesses under oath and investigate how the phone hacking scandal took root and how an earlier police inquiry in 2006 "failed so abysmally." The other would look more broadly into "the culture and ethics" of the British press.
But he repeated that the police investigation currently under way would have to be concluded before a judge could begin taking his own evidence. He said an inquiry into the workings of the press could begin this summer and lead to a new system of regulation that should be "independent of the press so that the public will know that newspapers will never again be solely responsible for policing themselves."
At his news conference, Mr. Cameron said the decision to hire Mr. Coulson was "mine and mine alone and I take full responsibility for it." But in response to a question, he declined to apologize for his actions.
He was also asked about Ms. Brooks, who has said she knew nothing about the phone hacking. Despite repeated calls for her resignation, she has retained the confidence of the Murdoch family.
Mr. Miliband has called for her resignation and has urged Mr. Cameron to do the same.
The prime minister said on Friday that it was not his job to make such determinations, but there had been reports that Ms. Brooks had offered to resign. "In this situation I would have taken it," he said.
The remark seemed to be closest he has come to supporting the ouster of Ms. Brooks, reportedly a personal friend, and thus implicitly criticizing the Murdoch family for defending her.
According to a person familiar with the possible charges against Mr. Coulson, e-mails recently turned over to the police from The News of the World linked him and half a dozen other people, including high-ranking editors, to payments to the police "in the six figures."
The payments were said to be not just for news tips, a standard tabloid practice despite its illegality, but also for substantial information, including confidential documents held by the police. Not only would any arrests be a blow to News International, but the company also faces the awkward prospect that any current or former News of the World employee facing prison might be tempted to argue, with specific examples, that wrongdoing was widespread at the paper.
They may have a rich trove to draw upon. Sean Hoare, a former News of the World reporter who was first to say publicly that Mr. Coulson was aware of the hacking, said Friday that for years managers at the tabloid tried to make reporters take the fall for practices they encouraged. Mr. Coulson's arrest shows that "the people who really should be ashamed of themselves are management. People were under such intimidation that they were expected to break the law."