The scandal cost him one of his most lucrative titles — the tabloid News of the World — and resulted in possible criminal charges for his trusted lieutenant Rebekah Brooks and the arrest of a dozen reporters on his beloved Sun newspaper.

Now, Murdoch appears to be fighting back.

He and his son James were in the U.K. this week to face the Leveson inquiry, a judicial investigation into press standards, begun last year in the wake of revelations that journalists at Murdoch’s U.K. titles illegally hacked the voice mails of prominent public figures.

This time, he and his family appear to have turned on the British establishment, pressuring Prime Minister David Cameron and putting a key minister in the spotlight over a controversial business deal.

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That headline, from London’s Daily Mail, summed up the two-tiered conclusion of a new report from the British think tank Demos, which found that in England 1) “religious people are more active citizens (who) volunteer more, donate more to charity and are more likely to campaign on political issues,” and 2) “religious people are more likely to be politically progressive (people who) put a greater value on equality than the non-religious, are more likely to be welcoming of immigrants as neighbors (and) more likely to put themselves on the left of the political spectrum.”

These findings are important to America for two reasons.

First, they tell us that, contrary to evidence in the United States, the intersection of religion and politics doesn’t have to be fraught with hypocrisy. Britain is a Christian-dominated country, and the Christian Bible is filled with liberal economic sentiment. It makes perfect sense, then, that the more devoutly loyal to that Bible one is, the more progressive one would be on economics.

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The Brookses were arrested, along with four others, "on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice." This was the second time Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the Sun and the now-shuttered News of the World, had been arrested -- the last time it was for conspiring to intercept communications, or "phone hacking" -- and this arrest suggests that News International's extensive efforts to cover up their unethical practices may end up damaging the company just as much as the unethical practices did.

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Morgan edited the Daily Mirror, a competitor to Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and the Sun, from 1995-2004, when he was sacked for printing fake photographs and a hoax story on the front page of the paper. No one alleges that phone-hacking was as widespread at Morgan's Mirror as it was at the News Corp. papers, but Morgan has written of listening to a voice-mail message left by Paul McCartney on his ex-wife Heather Mills' phone, and said, in past statements, that basically "everyone" in the British press listened to celebrity voice mails.

The Guardian helpfully liveblogged Morgan's entire appearance. Asked why the Mirror employed private detectives, Morgan played dumb:

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News Corp is negotiating a settlement with the family of murdered teenager Milly Dowler which will likely cost News Corp and Rupert Murdoch millions of pounds. Even if the class action suit doesn't materialize, News Corp also has the Justice Department to worry about:

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Andy Coulson resigned from the now-defunct tabloid early in 2007 after a reporter and a private investigator were jailed for hacking into the voicemails of royal staff.

Six months later he was hired as communications chief to Cameron, then Britain's opposition leader. Cameron became prime minister in May 2010.

The BBC, without giving its source, reported that Coulson continued to receive severance pay amounting to several hundred thousand dollars from the paper until the end of 2007, and also kept his health care plan and company car.

Coulson denied knowing about phone hacking, but resigned from Downing St. in January after police reopened their inquiry into wrongdoing at the paper.

Last month he was arrested and questioned by detectives investigating allegations the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper illegally eavesdropped on the voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians and even murder victims.

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As the week began, a letter emerged alleging that senior News Corp. editors routinely discussed phone hacking -- suggesting that executives likely knew about their newspapers' illegal eavesdropping on voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians and crime victims. That revelation called into question whether Murdoch's son James, a senior executive, misled Parliament in his recent testimony, when he said he was unaware of the practice.

Then on Thursday, U.K. officials arrested a Hollywood correspondent for News of the World. The reporter had worked as the paper's Los Angeles based editor. That brought the scandal tantalizingly close to U.S. law enforcement, although the Guardian indicated that the alleged misdeeds took place in the U.K., before the suspect had arrived state-side.

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Acting chief Tim Godwin issued a statement Wednesday that said while the milestone is significant, the investigation is ongoing. He urged the public to turn in anyone involved in the disorder.

"Don't let them get away with it," he said.

UK police have arrested more than 3,000 people over riots that erupted Aug. 6 in north London and flared for four nights across the capital and other English cities.

The huge numbers and public anger has sparked concerns that judges were handing out sentences that were disproportionate. Some of the concerns centered around two men in northwestern England, who were handed stiff jail terms for inciting disorder through social networking sites.

Cheshire Police said Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, both received 4-year sentences for using Facebook to "organize and orchestrate" disorder.

Blackshaw used the social networking site to create an event -- with a date, time and location -- for "massive Northwich lootin.'"

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The letter ... names names. As everyone has come to realize, every News of the World executive (many of whom went on to other jobs at Murdoch's News International -- or in the government!) knew about, endorsed or directly authorized illegal voice-mail hacking and all the rest. Specifically implicated this time: Andy Coulson, then the paper's editor, who was hired to be Prime Minister David Cameron's communications director last year. Coulson resigned in January and was arrested last month.

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The heavy, political, proto-punk, power pop-soul nastiness of the Equals was birthed from the mad mind of Eddy Grant, a Guyanan transplant whose parents emigrated to London in the early 1960s. After building a guitar in shop class, Grant, dyed-blond hair and all, went roaming the streets of London, where he eventually found his future bandmates -- a white English-born rhythm section, and a pair of black brothers from Jamaica, who split guitar and lead vocals.

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In a colloquial, stream-of-consciousness essay, Brand is quick to acknowledge that (as a movie-star expat) he may not be the most qualified to comment on Britain's domestic chaos. But he doesn't let his physical and material distance from the rioters hold him back -- and he offers a stinging critique of Prime Minister David Cameron's government.

"I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities," he writes, adding:

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Across the country, more than 1,700 people have been arrested. Courts in London, Birmingham and Manchester stayed open through a second night to deal with hundreds of alleged offenders.

Hundreds of stores were looted, buildings were set ablaze and several people died amid the mayhem that broke out Saturday in London and spread over four nights across England.

Victims include three men in Birmingham run down by a car as they defended their neighborhood. Police are questioning three suspects on suspicion of murder.

And detectives opened a murder inquiry after a 68-year-old a man found in a London street after confronting rioters died of his injuries late Thursday. A 22-year-old man was arrested Friday on suspicion of murder.

Police, meanwhile, hit back against claims they were too soft in their initial response to the disorder.

Prime Minister David Cameron said officers had been overwhelmed at first, outmaneuvered by mobile gangs of rioters. He said "far too few police were deployed onto the streets. And the tactics they were using weren't working."

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Cameron told lawmakers there would be no "culture of fear" on Britain's streets, as police raided houses to round up more suspects from four days of rioting and looting in London and other English cities. He said the government was "acting decisively" to restore order after the riots, which shocked the country and the world.

"We will not allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets," Cameron said. "We will not let a violent few beat us."

Lawmakers were summoned back from their summer vacations for an emergency session of Parliament in the riots as government and police worked to regain control, both on the streets and in the court of public opinion. Calm prevailed in London overnight, with a highly visible police presence watching over the capital, but tensions remained high throughout the country.

Cameron promised tough measures to stop further violence and said "nothing should be off the table," including water cannons and plastic bullets.

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As a student at Oxford in the late 1980s, however, Cameron was part of a members' club (the British equivalent of a fraternity), which ritualistically smashed up local restaurants. Unlike the rioters, however, Cameron's club, The Bullingdon, was exclusive and notoriously elite.

"This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and defeated," Cameron said on Tuesday, having returned from his vacation in Italy three days after the riots first ignited in the British capital. He added: "If you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishment" (referring to the fact tha many of those involved are in their early teens).

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It is unclear whether London was quiet because of the massive deployment of police -- British Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday there would be 16,000 on the streets -- or because across the city stores shut early, windows were boarded up, and staff were sent home.

Maybe the rumor that the biggest selling items at hardware stores and online mail-order shops were crow bars and other hand-held heavy metal objects deterred looters. Shopkeepers were clearly preparing to defend their property.

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An eerie calm prevailed in the capital, where hundreds of shops were shuttered or boarded up as a precaution, but unrest spread across England on a fourth night of violence by brazen crowds of young people.

Scenes of ransacked stores, torched cars and blackened buildings have frightened and outraged Britons just a year before their country is to host next summer's Olympic Games, bringing demands for a tougher response from law enforcement. Police across the country have made almost 1,200 arrests since the violence broke out over the weekend.

In London, where armored vehicles and convoys of police vans patrolled the streets, authorities said there were 16,000 officers on duty -- almost triple the number present Monday night.

The show of force seems to have worked. There were no reports of major trouble in London, although there were scores of arrests. Almost 800 people have been arrested in London since trouble began Saturday.

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I took her call as I was walking into the local library to return a book. Inside, the librarians were watching a BBC live feed on their computers of action a mile and a half away. One of the librarians explained he lived over there.

This morning I awoke to learn that half a dozen or more neighborhoods in London -- north to south, east to west -- saw outbreaks of violence, looting and arson. In other cities around the country -- Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and Bristol -- there were also reports of youth confronting police.

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