Scotland Yard

The head of Scotland Yard resigned amid a phone-hacking scandal that has reached into the highest levels of public life in Britain, a shocking turn of events that came hours after the arrest of one of media baron Rupert Murdoch's most trusted deputies. Paul Stephenson on Sunday night said he was stepping down as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, as Scotland Yard is formally known, because of continued criticism and speculation over links between senior police officials and Murdoch's media empire.

LONDON - Four hackers who pleaded guilty to a series of high-profile cyberattacks on computers in the U.S. and Britain, including those of the CIA and Sony Pictures, were sentenced Thursday to up to 32 months in prison. The four men, all Britons, were members of the hacking group LulzSec, which flaunted its ability to break into the high-security computer networks of such targets as the United States Senate. In 2011, the group claimed responsibility for hacking into the systems of PBS, media baron Rupert Murdoch's News International and the U.S. Air Force, among other targets.

Pseudo Picassos, counterfeit Chagalls and other fakes were on display in London this week, part of an effort by Scotland Yard to warn dealers about forged art that it says fuels crime gangs around the world. While the exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum looked like any other art gallery, the chatter among dealers centered on crime rather than composition, and the program was not open to the public.

LONDON - Security will be tightened for this weekend's London Marathon, which is to go ahead as planned in spite of the Boston bombings, authorities and organizers said Tuesday. Scotland Yard is also gearing up for the challenge of securing the funeral Wednesday of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which will entail the deployment of 4,000 officers. London is well acquainted with terrorism, but Britain's minister for sport, Hugh Robertson, said he was "absolutely confident" Sunday's marathon could take place safely in the British capital, which last year successfully hosted the Summer Olympics.

Two alleged members of the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec, one believed to be a hacker going by the alias of Kayla, have been arrested in England. The two unidentified men, ages 20 and 24, were arrested separately Thursday — one in South Yorkshire county and the other in Wiltshire county — on suspicion of "conspiring to commit offenses under the Computer Misuse Act 1990," according to the Metropolitan Police Service, also known as Scotland Yard. The arrests "are part of an ongoing investigation in collaboration with the FBI, South Yorkshire police and other law enforcement bodies in the UK and overseas, into the activities of the online 'hacktivist' groups Anonymous and LulzSec — in particular in connection with suspected offenses conducted under the cover of the online identity 'Kayla,' " Scotland Yard said in a statement.

Scotland Yard refused to confirm or deny a newspaper report Monday that three officers penetrated the grounds of Buckingham Palace and eluded capture during a test of security for the Royal Family. A London tabloid reported Monday that three officers climbed over a wall at the palace two weeks ago, deliberately set off alarms and then sat in a tree waiting to be caught.

Police have arrested a computer programmer and charged him with collecting information that could be used to plan a terrorist attack, Scotland Yard said Wednesday. Mohammed Abdullah Azam, 32, from Luton, 30 miles northwest of London, was arrested Sunday and has been charged under the anti-terrorism laws, a Scotland Yard official said on condition of anonymity.

Scotland Yard is too busy with down-to-earth crime to investigate the mysterious case of a UFO reported hovering over London, a spokesman said Tuesday. Three policemen, summoned by a teen-age girl who spotted a bizarre object in the sky, reported back to their station house that they too had seen it, a police spokesman said. "What I saw was a flat, gray-green saucer, and as it turned I saw lights," Zena Sfei, 16, an astronomy buff, told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Britain's pert, uniformed meter maids, made famous by a Beatles song about a lovely one called Rita, are being upstaged by the dreaded "Denver Boot." Scotland Yard's zealous--some say overzealous--attack on illegally parked cars has turned London into the world's car-clamping capital and has prompted a storm of protests. The Denver Boot, developed in Colorado in the 1950s, fits over a wheel, immobilizing a car until the driver pays a fee and a crew comes to unlock it. That can take hours.

An uproar over drug testing of professional tennis players competing at Wimbledon continued Wednesday, while the All England Club said the tests were actually being done in London and not on the grounds themselves. Both Scotland Yard and a member of the British Parliament have called for results of the tests to be made public rather than kept confidential, as organizers of the men's tour have announced.

LONDON - Security arrangements are under review and could be tightened for this weekend's London Marathon, which is to go ahead as planned in spite of Monday's bombings in Boston, authorities and organizers said Tuesday. Britain's minister for sport, Hugh Robertson, said he was “absolutely confident” Sunday's event could take place safely in the British capital, which last year successfully hosted the Summer Olympics. The London Marathon is one of the world's most prestigious and popular long-distance running competitions, with a route that goes past or over such landmarks as Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Tower Bridge.

1.Government authorities in Jamaica say they have uncovered a ring involved in trafficking Jamaican children to another Caribbean country. It was unknown how many children were involved. 2.After the meteor explosion last month over Chelyabinsk, Russia, officials hope to develop the area as a tourist attraction. A local travel agency is already booking summer trips for Japanese tourists. 3.The Naked Rambler, a Brit who has twice walked the length of the country while wearing no clothes, was in jail again after he was caught in public in Southampton, England, wearing only boots, socks and a knapsack.

LONDON - A senior police officer was given a 15-month term in prison Friday, the first person sentenced in the wide-ranging phone-hacking inquiry in Britain.   Det. Chief Inspector April Casburn was convicted last month of illegally attempting to sell information to a tabloid journalist in 2010. Judge Adrian Fulford was handed down by who called her actions "a corrupt attempt to make money out of sensitive and potentially very damaging information," according to a BBC report. Scotland Yard, where Casburn had headed the counter-terrorism squad at the time of her offense, issued a statement expressing its “great disappointment” that she “abused her position.” During her trial, Casburn spoke of her unhappiness at work and anger that counter-terrorist officers were diverted to investigate accusations that the now-defunct News of the World tabloid had made extensive use of phone hacking to gain news scoops.

LONDON - A senior Scotland Yard detective was found guilty Thursday of trying to sell confidential information to a tabloid in the first conviction of a police officer in a corruption probe spawned by Britain's phone-hacking scandal. A London jury took just a few hours to find Det. Chief Inspector April Casburn, one of the force's highest-ranking female detectives, guilty of misconduct in public office for leaking details of the phone-hacking investigation and seeking payment for it. The publication to which she made the offer, the News of the World, was the very newspaper under investigation for allegedly tapping into the private voicemails of thousands of people to feed its appetite for scoops.

BEIJING - The Fox Tower in southeastern Beijing, a centuries-old fortress-like building with deep-set red windows and curving eaves, has stood through the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the reign of Mao Tse-tung and the crush of urban development. But for 45-year-old Sinologist Paul French, one historical event stands out above the rest: One morning in 1937, the mutilated corpse of a 19-year-old British woman was found at the base of the tower, her organs removed with surgical precision.

Two white men were given life sentences Wednesday for the racially motivated murder of a black teenager nearly 19 years ago in a case that rocked British society and led to a major shake-up within Scotland Yard. However, the men are expected to serve far less time in prison for the killing of Stephen Lawrence, the 18-year-old who was stabbed to death while waiting for a bus in South London in April 1993. Lawrence was the victim of an unprovoked attack by thugs who shouted racial epithets as they punched and knifed him. A botched police investigation followed, undermined by what an official inquiry said was pervasive racism within the police force.

The year's most compelling political mystery in Kenya--who killed Foreign Minister Robert J. Ouko?--has been supplanted in recent weeks by an even stranger conundrum: Will Scotland Yard's investigation of the homicide ever see the light of day?

There had been unflattering speculation about his manhood, but Prince Charles, a chap once thought to be more at ease conversing with daffodils than women, now stands revealed as the most ardent royal lover since Anne Boleyn caught the eye of Henry VIII. The transcript of a 1989 phone conversation between the prince and Camilla Parker-Bowles has now been published in full by an Australian publication, New Idea.

"Cougar Town" creator Bill Lawrence recently bemoaned in the pages of Entertainment Weekly that his show, now in its third season, had been benched at least until mid-season. Among other things, he blamed the show's unfortunate name and original concept in its struggle to maintain ratings. A similar argument could be made for newcomer "Prime Suspect," which, though not officially canceled, recently was booted from Thursday nights on NBC's midseason schedule. It's being replaced by "The Firm," which is based on the John Grisham novel.

As wildly different as they were in execution, the originals of "Prime Suspect" and "Charlie's Angels" were, thematically, sisters of the same revolution. Although best known for flaunting the beauty of its shapely stars, "Charlie's Angels," which ABC launched in 1976, openly refuted the then-still-popular notion that women were the weaker sex. The faceless Charlie hired women whose police careers had been squelched by stereotypes and created the first all-female detective agency on television.