Brown's furious denunciation of the politically powerful News International papers came a day after questions were raised about how The Sun newspaper obtained confidential information in 2006 that Brown's infant son Fraser had cystic fibrosis.

In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., Brown said he and his wife Sarah were in tears after being informed by Rebekah Brooks, then the editor of The Sun and now the chief executive of News International, that the paper knew about his son's illness.

Brown also accused The Sunday Times of employing criminals to hack into his bank and tax records.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Brown had highlighted what "looks like yet another example of an appalling invasion of privacy and the hacking of personal data," and said he was determined that the current investigations would get to the bottom of it.

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News media including the Independent, Channel 4, the Guardian and the BBC say that Brown's personal details were targeted by people working for titles including the Sun and the Sunday Times. None of the media cited sources, but Brown was set to give a statement later Monday.

The allegations significantly broaden the scandal gripping Murdoch's British empire, which is being threatened by a sprawling police investigation.

The Sunday Times did not immediately return a call seeking comment Monday.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

LONDON (AP) -- British police said Monday they believe someone is trying to sabotage their investigation into Rupert Murdoch's News of The World tabloid by leaking distracting details of the inquiry to the media.

In an unusual statement, Scotland Yard said a story claiming that police tasked with protecting the royal family had sold personal details about the queen and her closest aides was "part of a deliberate campaign to undermine the investigation into the alleged payments by corrupt journalists to corrupt police officers and divert attention from elsewhere."

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Cameron said he aims to form a full coalition government with the third-place Liberal Democrats after his Conservative Party won the most seats but did not get a majority in Britain national election last week.

The 43-year-old leader said it would be "hard and difficult work" to govern as a coalition but added that Britain had serious economic issues to tackle. Cameron visited Buckingham Palace and was asked to form a government by Queen Elizabeth II less than an hour after Brown tendered his resignation to the monarch.

Cameron and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg's pact would be the first coalition government since World War II.

Arriving at London's Downing Street hand in hand with his wife Samantha, Cameron said he believed that Britain's "best days lie ahead."

Hundreds of onlookers, many of them booing, crowded the gates of Downing Street to watch on, as Cameron swept into his new home less than 90 minutes after an emotional Brown had made a farewell address.

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After the recent national election, Labour holds 258 seats, the Tories have 306, and the Lib Dems hold 57 seats. A Tory/LibDem coalition could form a majority government, but Labour and the LibDems would've needed local nationalist and socialist parties to join a coalition.

The Lib Dems may not form a full-blown coalition with the Tories. Another strong possibility is something called "confidence and supply," which forms a minority government that isn't in constant danger of a vote of no confidence dissolving the government.

You can follow BBC news live here.

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Brown's move looks like an attempt to stop the Liberal Democrats from forming a coalition government with the Conservatives, who won the most seats in last Thursday's national elections, but who didn't win enough to form a government. No one's sure how well the Lib Dem/Tory negotiations are going; some Tories say they're going well, but Tory right-winger Iain Duncan-Smith said today that the Tories are uninterested in electoral reform, a Lib Dem priority that would end "first-past-the-post" elections and help third parties pick up more seats in Parliament.

According to the Guardian:

Brown is proposing a "progressive" government, comprising Labour, the Lib Dems, and presumably the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and the Alliance. Electoral reform would be a priority.

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In some ways, yesterday's results were more ordinary than anyone expected from what was a genuinely unusual campaign: the unpopular incumbent Labour Party took a hit, though not as bad as expected. Labour's been cut down to 29 percent of the vote, which won the party 253 seats, so far, out of the 650-member House of Commons. (The counting isn't all the way done yet.)

The once-hated Conservatives (also known as the Tories), after spending 13 years out of power trying to reinvent themselves, managed to retake a narrow plurality. They've won 36 percent of the vote, and 298 seats.

And the Liberal Democrats, long stuck in a distant third place, stayed there. Voter disgust with both major parties failed to materialize into the expected surge for the center-left third party, which got 23 percent of the vote. Breaking all expectations, the Lib Dems actually suffered a net loss of six seats in Parliament (again, according to the count so far), bringing them down to 53 in total.

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This kind of front page politicking isn't uncomon in the British press (or in some American newspapers, like the Manchester (NH) Union-Leader, which has been known to offer front-page editorials on election days). But with today's Obama/David Cameron cover, the pro-Tory paper seems to be trying to replicate one if its most famous (supposed) achievements.

It was back in 1992 when, after 13 years of rule, the Conservatives seemed certain to lose to Neil Kinnock's Labour Party. (Yes, that Neil Kinnock.)

Voter fatigue with the Tories was high, Prime Minister John Major (who had succeeded Margaret Thatcher less than two years earlier) hadn't connected with the public, and polls had shown a steady Labour lead for years. But, after battering Kinnock and Labour for weeks, The Sun came through with this memorable front page on the day of the election:

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After all, what news organization would sit on a tape of a politician offering his explosively candid opinions just because that politician didn't first consider that there might be a microphone around? Actually, as Salon contributor Niall Stanage reminded me yesterday, there's at least one very respectable news organization that would -- and Bill Clinton is probably thankful for it.

Back in November 1991, when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton was at a New Hampshire fundraising event for Dick Swett, who was then the state's lone Democratic congressman. Another candidate, Bob Kerrey, was there too -- and so was C-Span's camera.

As the story was reported (by none other than Chris Matthews, who then wrote for the San Francisco Examiner), the cable network picked up a conversation between Clinton and Kerrey, who were standing offstage together. At one point, Kerrey made a crude lesbian joke involving two women who were seated nearby and Jerry Brown (who was also running for president but who wasn't at the event).

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What’s going on here?

Immigration politics are a little different, country to country, but not that different. Here's how it breaks down in the U.K.: The Conservatives are fairly akin to America's Republican Party, as the least bashful representatives of British nationalism on the scene. Meanwhile, Britain's two left-of-center parties align with the two faces of our Democrats.

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The lady is named Gillian Duffy. She's a lifelong Labour voter. She was apparently heckling Brown as he gave an interview, and Brown's aides suggested that it would be very statesmanly of him to talk to her instead of ignoring her. Her primary complaint: there are too many Eastern Europeans in England!

Brown reasonably pointed out that there are lots of British people in Europe, and Europeans certainly aren't thrilled about that, and then they had a nice little talk and that was the end of it. Until Brown got into his car and a hilarious Armando Iannucci programme broke out.

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Brown made the first major flub of the country's short campaign season Wednesday, caught on an open microphone calling a 65-year-old voter a "bigoted woman" after she pressed him on immigration during a public meeting.

The British leader, said to have a sharp temper, raged at an aide after mixing with voters in northern England -- but failed to notice he was still wearing a TV microphone, or that it was recording.

It's the latest in a long line of missteps by lawmakers whose private remarks have been made accidentally public -- from President Ronald Reagan's 1984 joke declaration of war on Russia to President George W. Bush's overly familiar "Yo, Blair" greeting in 2006 for Brown's predecessor, Tony Blair.

And Brown isn't the first British leader caught off-guard -- in 1993, then-Prime Minister John Major was recorded calling rebellious members of his Cabinet "bastards."

But the political consequences of his blunder could be severe, with Brown already third in opinion polls for Britain's May 6 election and desperate to show his supposedly statesmanlike credentials to dispatch less experienced rivals, Conservative leader David Cameron and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats.

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He didn't sound happy about it.

American intelligence has reportedly known about the facility for some time; the decision to reveal it came because, the New York Times says, "Iran discovered, in recent weeks, that Western intelligence agencies had breached the secrecy surrounding the complex." The country has since officially acknowledged the existence of the plant.

From Obama's statement:

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In fact, it's lately been one of the GOP's favorite touchstones in the healthcare debate. Republicans love to talk about lines for care in the U.K.’s stolid socialized system: Go on the government’s dime for medicine, and you’ll die waiting for that easy surgery!

Seeking to play up this groundbreaking “Be frightened of England” angle, the Republican National Committee ran a web ad warning, "In Great Britain, individuals lose their right to make their own health care choices.” The Club for Growth, a conservative group, has a spot claiming that British bureaucrats pegged the value of six months of life at $22,750. “Under their socialized system, if your treatment costs more, you're out of luck,” the ad's narrator says as the spot cuts back and forth from weeping elderly people to Big Ben and the British flag.

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And terrific theater. Saw a beautiful and moving performance by puppets -- life-size horses in "War Horse" at the National Theatre -- light shells of horses with visible frames and legs of two puppeteers inside, another manipulating the head, and yet the sight of the beasts grazing, nuzzling, shying, rearing up was the most perfect and believable thing I've seen onstage in a long time. And then at the vaudeville-burlesque "La Clique," saw a fine contortionist work his body through the head of a tennis racket and an American comedian drop her drawers, pull a kazoo out of her bosom and stick it up her dress into a very private place and proceed to give us (we thought, we assumed, we dared to hope) a rendition of "America" from her nether regions and, a moment later, put another kazoo in her mouth and play a very accomplished orifice duet, all with the innocence of a 4-H'er doing a performance project at the county fair. Wowza.

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"Just as last year we moved from combat to 'overwatch,' we would expect a further fundamental change of mission in the first months of 2009 as we make the transition to a long-term bilateral partnership with Iraq, similar to the normal relationships which our military forces have with other important countries in the region," Brown said in a statement to the House of Commons, according to the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper.

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Last Tuesday, a former Muslim militant, Shiraz Maher, dropped a bombshell in an interview on the BBC's "Newsnight," saying he had known one of the alleged perpetrators, Dr. Bilal Abdullah, a Sunni Iraqi, when Abdullah was at Cambridge. Dr. Abdullah, he said, "actively cheered the deaths of British and American troops in Iraq." From an elite Sunni medical family, born in the U.K. but raised in Baghdad, Abdullah attended the upscale al-Mansour high school and Baghdad College. Abdullah's family and friends have been targeted by Shiites in the past, according to recent news reports, although Abdullah reportedly had converted to the radical Salafi Jihadi form of Sunnism even before the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. He is alleged to have hated Shiites, whom he considered apostates. He is also said to have come under the influence, while in Iraq, of the Sunni fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaisi, of the Association of Muslim Scholars.

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They've had a lot of practice, of course. Decades of IRA terror inured many to the risk. Over a two-week period in the spring of 1999, three nail bombs, apparently aimed at London's ethnic and gay communities, went off around the city. Then came the July 7, 2005, attacks, followed two weeks later by a second, failed attempt to strike the transport system. These new attacks are different, though, for two reasons. First, this time around Gordon Brown, not Tony Blair, is prime minister. And second, it so far appears that none of the suspects are British-born.

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But the actual transfer of power from one prime minister to the next is a curiously undignified affair. The old premier is often still cramming personal effects into a van at the back of 10 Downing Street while the new one is posing for the cameras at the front. There are no parades or processions, no inaugural balls. The lack of ceremony says a lot about the British attitude toward politics: Government is a mundane, messy business; better just get on with it. And the contrast between Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's entrances into Downing Street says a lot about what to expect from the Brown premiership.

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