Rupert Murdoch and son James to appear at journalistic ethics inquiry

Rupert Murdoch and his son James will appear before an independent British inquiry into journalistic ethics next week called in the wake of a long-running phone hacking scandal generated by the defunct tabloid News of the World.

The Associated Press, citing the Leveson Inquiry website, reported that Murdoch would appear on Wednesday and possibly Thursday.

James, until February executive chairman of News Corp's UK newspaper subsidiary, News International, which published News of the World — would appear on Tuesday. He quit amid questions about what he knew about phone hacking.

Earlier this month, the 39-year-old also quit as chairman of BSkyB, the British pay-television giant in which his father's company has a 39 percent stake, although he remains deputy chief operating officer of News Corp., headquartered in New York.

The news came as police said they made three more arrests in connection with an investigation into alleged bribery of police and officials, including a journalist from The Sun newspaper, owned by Murdoch's News Corp., according to CNN.

The Sun is Britain's best-selling daily tabloid.

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An anonymous AP source identified the journalist as Duncan Larcombe, the Sun's 36-year-old royal editor, while police said only that a 36-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of corruption and conspiracy.

Larcombe has testified at the Leveson inquiry that he had never paid a police officer for a story or hacked computers while at the Sun.

A 42-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman also were arrested at their home address in Lancashire in northern England, CNN wrote.

The arrests, which police said were the result of information passed on from a management and standards committee at News Corp., are only the latest in a series in connection with three linked inquiries into alleged phone and e-mail hacking, and illegal payments to police.

The British government set up the Leveson Inquiry, an independent investigation led by a judge, in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, while two separate parliamentary committees also are looking into media conduct.

According to Agence France-Presse, Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian owner of The Independent and London's Evening Standard newspapers, and Aidan Barclay, the owner of The Daily Telegraph broadsheet, will also give evidence to the ethics inquiry on Monday.

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