LONDON - James Murdoch defended his record at the head of his father's scandal-tarred British newspaper unit before a U.K. inquiry Tuesday, saying that subordinates prevented him from making a clean sweep at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid. 

Speaking under oath at Lord Justice Brian Leveson's inquiry into media ethics, Murdoch repeated allegations that the tabloid's then-editor Colin Myler and the company's former in-house lawyer Tom Crone misled him about the scale of illegal behavior at the newspaper. 

Leveson asked Murdoch: "Can you think of a reason why Mr. Myler or Mr. Crone should keep this information from you? Was your relationship with them such that they may think: 'Well we needn't bother him with that' or 'We better keep it from it because he'll ask to cut out the cancer'?" 

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"That must be it," Murdoch said. "I would say: 'Cut out the cancer,' and there was some desire to not do that." 

The 39-year-old Murdoch said that at the time he had no reason to doubt his subordinates when he took over at News International, which published the News of the World, saying he had repeatedly been told that nothing was amiss. 

"I was given assurances by them, which proved to be wrong," he said. 

Revelations that reporters at the News of the World had hacked into the phones of hundreds of high-profile people, including a teenage murder victim, pushed Murdoch's father Rupert to close the 168-year-old newspaper, triggered three U.K. police investigations, led to more than 100 lawsuits, and launched Leveson's inquiry into media practices. 

James Murdoch has found himself sucked into the center of scandal, with critics saying that he should have found out about the wrongdoing once he took over at News International in December 2007. 

The uproar over illegal behavior at the News of the World has already scuttled Murdoch's multi-billion dollar bid for full control of satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC. He resigned from his post as chairman earlier this month "to avoid being a lightning rod," he said. 

Murdoch's relationship with politicians also came under scrutiny. 

The American-born News Corp. executive revealed that he'd told Conservative leader David Cameron that The Sun newspaper would endorse the Tories' election bid at a meeting at the George club in London on Sept. 10, 2009. 

The top-selling paper's endorsement was a blow to Britain's Labour Party — and critics claim that it helped secure Tory approval for the potentially lucrative BSkyB bid after they won the election in 2010. 

Murdoch denied the charge Tuesday. 

"I would never have made that kind of a crass calculation," Murdoch said. "It just wouldn't occur to me." 

Murdoch acknowledged talking to Cameron about it at a Christmas dinner in 2010 — after the Tory leader had been elected prime minister — but said it was "a tiny side conversation ahead of a dinner." 

Judge slams Murdoch's Sky News for illegal email hacking

"It wasn't really a discussion, if you will," Murdoch said. 

Cameron, who won power two years ago, has been forced to play down his contacts with the Murdochs and with Rebecca Brooks, a neighbor and frequent guest at his home in the countryside.

Rupert Murdoch, who is still chairman and chief executive of News International's parent company News Corp., is scheduled to appear before the inquiry on Wednesday. 

U.S.-based News Corp, owner of Fox Television and the Wall Street Journal, was thwarted in its ambition last year to buy the 61 percent of BSkyB, a major British pay-TV provider, that it did not already own. Amid the fire storm of scandal at the News of the World, it withdrew the bid.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

More world news from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Runner who died in London Marathon inspires $500,000 donations
• France's election battle moves from hearts to heads
• UK cops close to arrest over British spy found dead in a bag?
• Judge slams Murdoch's Sky News for illegal email hacking
• Obama unveils sanctions on Syria, Iran for tech assault on activists

Follow us on Twitter: @msnbc_world

LONDON—China’s biggest political scandal in decades has embroiled not just the U.S. but increasingly the U.K.

The series of publicly known events culminating in the removal of rising political star Bo Xilai from power appeared to have been triggered by an attempt by Bo’s former police chief to seek asylum in a U.S. consulate in Chengdu back in February.

However, it looks increasingly like it was the death of a British businessman last year that set off the chain of events.  And while it might not lead to any firings in the U.K. government, it certainly appears to have ruffled feathers in London.

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Murder in Chonqging?
Last November, Neil Heywood — a 41-year old Briton who liked to hint at a life of intrigue (his license plate contained the numbers 007) — was found dead last November in his hotel room in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, which at the time was under Bo’s stewardship.  The cause of death was initially reported as cardiac arrest from overconsumption of alcohol.

Now it looks as though Bo’s ex-crimefighter, Wang Lijun, had evidence suggesting that Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai had engineered Heywood’s death. 

New details on Tuesday about Wang’s frantic 36-hour stay at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in February suggest he tried to give American diplomats information implicating Gu in Heywood’s death and demonstrating that Bo had tried to prevent an investigation into his wife’s role. 

In a startling revelation, also on Tuesday, sources close to the Chinese investigation told Reuters that Heywood had threatened to expose Gu’s plan to move large sums of money overseas after a dispute over his cut from the transaction.   

Chinese officials began stepping up their inquiry into Heywood’s death after Wang was whisked away by Beijing authorities following his visit to the U.S. consulate.

Scandal sends China's netizens into afeeding frenzy

In Britain, opposition members of Parliament (MPs) have raised questions whether the U.K. government had been too cautious or slow to raise concerns in the case because it did not want to jeopardize commercial prospects in China.

During Tuesday’s Parliament session, Foreign Secretary William Hague presented MPs with a detailed timetable of events surrounding Heywood’s death.

“We have demanded an investigation. The Chinese authorities have agreed to conduct an investigation. There’s been a further discussion of that this afternoon,” he told MPs.  “

Hague said Foreign Office officials first heard in mid-January of rumors circulating amongst British expats in China.

But it wasn’t until a month later — a day after Wang’s ill-fated visit to the U.S. consulate — that officials flagged the case with Hague and other ministers back in London.

British government under heat
Hague’s appearance in Parliament coincided with a visit to 10 Downing Street by one of China’s top ministers, Li Changchun.

Li — the propaganda chief and a member of the all-powerful Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee — held a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who raised the matter with him.

In an abrupt departure from the earlier muted approach, Cameron has promised to demand more from the Chinese on Heywood’s death, which has become tabloid fodder over here.  Cameron also read the riot act to his intelligence chiefs.

The Foreign Office has declined to comment further on Li’s meeting or the situation regarding Heywood.

The story, in the meantime, continues to rivet the public in Britain and in China.

“I guess it’s just a good story for normal people,” said an overseas Chinese national now living in London who only wanted to be identified as Lucy.  “Murder, high-powered officials, it’s got all the ingredients.”

By Jason Jouavel, NBC News

LONDON -- A plaque near a bus stop in south London marks where murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence took his last few breaths and serves as a grim reminder of one of Britain's most notorious racist crimes. 

The memorial at the site of Lawrence's killing -- which has been described as the U.K's "Rosa Parks moment" -- has been vandalized several times. That strikes me as a sign that deep hatred still exists.

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• Racist killers sentenced in UK's 'Rosa Parks moment'

I'm a black south Londoner. And almost two decades after the slaying, I still feel very anxious walking through certain streets in Eltham after dark.

Lawrence, 18, was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths in an unprovoked attack as he waited at the bus stop in Eltham in 1993. The investigation was bungled and despite multiple court appearances by suspects over the years no one was convicted until Tuesday.

At least three people involved in Lawrence's slaying remain at large and to this day a notable lack of local people have come forward with information about what happened.

Duwayne Brooks, who was with Lawrence at the time of the attack, told investigators that they had been racially abused before the stabbing. However, police initially treated Brooks like a suspect -- as opposed to a key witness.

The crime also resulted in a 1999 public inquiry that branded London's Metropolitan Police force as "institutionally racist."

 Stephen's parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, have waged a nearly 19-year battle for justice, which finally paid dividends with this week's murder convictions of Gary Dobson and David Norris.

I've seen the slain teenager's courageous mother several times on the streets of south London as she continues her fight to clean-up the police, strengthen laws and support victims of racially motivated crimes. My immediate impulse is always to just salute her.

'Deep darkness'
Although there was celebration in some quarters over the conviction and sentencing of Dobson and Norris, I have to agree with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He summed up this week's events as "little light with deep darkness."

It's important to remember that the people who killed Lawrence have been harbored by their community for years and some are still being protected.

Some progress has undoubtedly been made since Lawrence's slaying.

However, recruitment drives aimed at attracting more black and Asian officers have failed to make the Metropolitan Police representative of London's ethnic diversity.

A disproportionate number of black people are still stopped and searched by the police. It's something I've been through several times. On one occasion, I was driving to work when I was stopped. The police officer said that I looked "suspicious."

Many young black men in London complain about being prejudged and stereotyped. 

I was astonished when a well-educated acquaintance told me she thought that black people should be stopped because they commit most crimes as we casually discussed last summer's London riots. I wonder whether this is also the view of some police officers.

The police must be commended for pursuing Lawrence's killers for close to two decades. But let's not forget that if the investigating officers had been more rigorous when the crime was committed, the Lawrence family may have had justice much sooner.

By Tazeen Ahmad, NBC News correspondent  

NBC News correspondent Tazeen Ahmad is also a reporter for Dispatches, an award-winning investigative news program on Britain’s Channel 4.  She wrote the following piece for msnbc.com after she and a team of journalists spent a year researching and producing “Britain’s Sex Gangs,” a program broadcast in the U.K.  
 
LONDON - Abby sat in the back of the car twisting her fingers nervously. She pushed her bangs out of her eyes but her hands quickly returned to her lap, clasped tightly together. Her chipped pink nail polish served as a reminder that these are the hands of a schoolgirl – a schoolgirl living a nightmare.

For the last two years, Abby had been repeatedly raped by men far older than she is. She was 13 years old the first time it happened.    

“It went on from 7 o'clock, when it started getting dark, to roughly 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning,” she said.

Abby smiled, but the smile never reached her pretty hazel eyes. On this drizzly Friday afternoon, she showed us the places in the northern English city of Leeds her rapists had taken her: fast-food restaurants, hotels, alleyways.

We pulled up outside a children’s playground. Abby was brought here by someone she thought was her friend and then was raped by 20 different men. It was the same park she played in with her sisters. She said being here again made her feel sick.

Abby isn’t alone. The British government estimates that as many as 10,000 children in the U.K. may be victims of sexual exploitation by gangs, and fears the number could be much higher.

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'Gang-grooming'
The crime has been dubbed “on-street grooming” or “gang-grooming” and refers to actions taken by men to befriend young girls, sometimes as young as 11, using a combination of charm, coercion and blackmail to gain their trust and lower their inhibitions before they sexually exploit them. After the target is “groomed,” the girls are passed on to other men to be raped and gang-raped.

Over the past four years, 14 gang-grooming cases have come to court across the country and 46 men have been convicted.

The problem is feared to be so widespread that Sue Berelowitz, Britain’s Deputy Children’s Commissioner, announced the start of a two-year inquiry into the problem in October of this year.

The newly formed Child Sexual Exploitation – Gangs and Groups Inquiry will investigate the scope and scale of the issue so that police and local law enforcement have accurate data – beyond just anecdotal evidence – to help protect future victims.

One aspect of the issue that has gotten a lot of media attention in the U.K. is the race of the victims and perpetrators. There have been high-profile arrests of men of Pakistani descent who abused white girls.

But Berelowitz emphasized that unfortunately this is a widespread problem. "It would also be wrong for anyone to conclude or assert that this is an issue for one particular ethnic community," Berelowitz told the BBC.

Lord Nazir Ahmed, a leading politician of Pakistani descent, and many other members of the British-Pakistani community, have condemned the crimes and emphasized that an entire ethnic group should not be criticized for the actions of a few.  “We have to find a way where we don’t associate the entire [Pakistani] community [with this], we have to put it into context,” Ahmed said.

 

Vicious pattern
On-street grooming follows a pattern. Girls aged between 11 and 14 are most vulnerable and are often targeted by someone close to their own age, sometimes a younger brother or friend of the older men.

The location is usually innocuous – school gates, shopping centers, arcades. It can start with a car pulling up, young guys with charm and good looks engaging a girl in banter. Then cell phone numbers are exchanged and a friendship begins.

The men then work for several months to make the girls believe the friendship is genuine, the relationship meaningful.

“They are investing time and money in girls they target,” said Cat Tatman from Crop, a charity that supports the parents of sexually exploited children.

Once the girls have been won over the exploitation can really begin, she said.

The venues for the next stage vary. Sometimes the girls and their new acquaintances meet in parks and parking lots, often in cheap apartments and hotels – places known in gang circles as “party houses” where the girls are invited to come to “chill."

“It seems like a fun place to go,” Tatman said. “But there is very little of a party going on; often you are the only girl and it’s all men there.”

“Basically, you are the party,” she said.

Chloe, another former victim, met her attackers when she was just 12.  The boys she befriended first were just a couple of years older.

Over several months she was introduced to an ever-growing group of men in northern England, many of them older.  As a young schoolgirl she enjoyed hanging around cool, older guys with cars and fun places to go, and accepted the gifts of alcohol and cigarettes they offered her.

After a year, one of the men turned on her. 

“He got me on the floor and was ripping my clothes off.  There was a man holding my feet, a man holding my arms and trying to put his penis in my mouth,” Chloe said.  “He was on top of me raping me and other men were stood watching and laughing.”

This was the first of many such horrific incidents for Chloe. Over the coming months she was raped and sexually assaulted by groups of men almost daily after school in parks, cars, apartments and public alleyways. When she refused to go and meet them, they threatened to gang-rape her mother. On one occasion when Chloe decided not to comply, she said her attackers raped her anally to teach her a lesson.

Scared silent
I wondered why Chloe and other victims don’t go straight to the police. Tatman from Crop explained that the perpetrators traumatize and terrify their victims and are thus able to manipulate them.

“If you’re a child exploited for two years, you believe they are like gods, you believe that the police can’t stop them, you believe that no one can,” she says.

And where are the victims’ parents in all this? 

Keith and Teresa are a professional working couple. Their daughter was sexually exploited for two years from the age of 12. They seem smart and worldly-wise, concerned and devoted. They tell me these qualities were useless when faced with a powerful and sophisticated grooming process.

“They turned her against us, painting us as horrible people who didn’t understand her, whose life’s mission was to prevent her from having fun,” Teresa said. The men coached their daughter to lie effectively and hide the horror of her secret life for many months.

Even though their daughter escaped and is now recovering, Keith and Teresa are still under terrible strain.

Why do they do it?

In the course of our investigation, we found two young men in the city of Sheffield, in central England, who claimed to know gangs that groomed girls.

The men, in their late teens, sipped soft drinks as they explained in blunt terms what motivated the men they knew. I had narrowed it down to three things – kudos from their peers, easy sex and money.

They responded that money was the key ingredient for the men they knew, as many of the girls were being pimped, or sold, to others in the circle.

“A girl could have sex for 30 pounds ($48),” one told me. “Then there’s another one that could go for 10 pounds ($16).”

Seems like an awfully small sum for such a horrific deed.

The British government’s new study hopes to delve deeper into why these men could commit such depravity and how to prevent it in the future. Their initial findings are expected to be published next summer, with a final report by September 2013. 

 

By Martin Fletcher, NBC News correspondent

BIRMINGHAM, England - In these turbulent days in Britain, the grace of a grieving father shows the country how it can heal.

His friends told me what happened.

Tariq Jahan reacted quickly. Moments after a hit-and-run driver ripped through a crowd of Pakistani Muslims, he knelt over a victim, desperately giving him CPR and save his life. Until he heard these chilling words from a friend: “Tariq, your son is behind you."

He turned and saw. His 21-year-old son Haroon had been hit too, landing on his head after being tossed into the air.

Tariq Jahan held his dying boy in his arms and gave him CPR, in vain.

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Haroon and two friends, brothers, also of Pakistani descent, were among a crowd of residents gathered in the streets to protect their neighborhood from thugs and looters.

One described how cars with black men had driven up and down the road, cursing and taunting the Pakistanis. One car accelerated and ripped into them, hurling the three young men into the air.  The driver raced off.

Everyone I spoke to on that street corner said they knew who did it and why: racial tensions in Birmingham are usually close to boiling point. They blamed blacks.

They also blamed the police.

A hostile crowd gathered around police constable Ahmed, furious. One shouted in his face, waving his fist, “I don’t believe in the police. If you’d done your job last night these three wouldn’t be dead today. You were drinking cups of tea at home.”

Young men swore revenge.

“It’s our turn. Guns tonight,” a young man told me, refusing to give his name. His friend joked, “Let’s go to the gym and work out, get ready.”

Rumors swirled of weapons and violence and revenge.

Then Tariq Jahan spoke, quiet and intense. His wisdom is worth quoting at length. In unimaginable pain, this is what he told his enraged friends, and all of Britain listened:

“Last night we lost three cherished members of our community. They were taken from us in a way that no father, mother, sister or brother should have to endure. Today we stand here to plead with all the youth to remain calm, for our communities to stand united. As we stand here this is not a race issue,” he said.

“The family has received messages of sympathy and support from all parts of the community, all faiths, all colors and backgrounds. Please respect the memory of our sons and the grief of our family and loved ones by staying away from trouble and not going out tonight. Basically, I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, Whites, we all live in the same community. Why do we have to kill one another? What started these riots and what’s escalated? Why are we doing this? I lost my son, step forward if you want to lose your sons, otherwise calm down and go home please.”

Tariq Jahan was heard. Since his son and two friends died, the violence and looting has almost died with them. It’s probably more due to the robust, if somewhat late, police clampdown on city centers than his call for sanity, but Tariq Jahan’s impassioned appeal will echo through the land.

Forget about revenge, he said, and let the law follow its path.

Already police have arrested a man and charged him with the killings. In London alone more than 800 people have been arrested for looting, theft and violence, and security camera pictures of rioters are circulating with appeals for people to identify the perpetrators. The law is taking its course and justice will be done, says Prime Minister David Cameron.

But as a nation licks its wounds and everyone wonders how on earth all this could have happened, a grieving father, an immigrant from Pakistan who made his home in the motherland, will stand as the rallying call for sanity and unity in the United Kingdom.

 By William Kennedy for msnbc.com

LONDON - As riots continued for a fourth day around the U.K., supporters of controversial far-right group English Defence League begged mates to ditch the booze when forming neighborhood watches.

"Leave the beer alone today guys," wrote Paulie Pow on the group’s facebook page.  "The D stands for DEFENCE, not Drinking."

Another commenter, Chris Howard colorfully echoed those sentiments: "NOBODY F***ing GET PISSED! We'll need to be totally sober, that is EXTREMLEY [sic] important for all sorts of reasons including public image."

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He concluded by urging strong action against the rioters: "DESTROY THE BASTRDS [sic]."

The EDL’s stance against what it dubs the "creeping Islamisation" of the United Kingdom has attracted considerable attention, especially after reports that Anders Breivik, who has confessed to killing 76 people in Norway in July, admired and contacted the group.

The EDL officially condemns violence, but has routinely clashed with police and anti-fascist groups during more than two dozen marches and protests around England, from Birmingham to Manchester in the north (both sites of current rioting) to Portsmouth in the south.

The arrest of EDL founder, Stephen Lennon, 28, for instigating a soccer-related brawl earlier this year spurred ongoing claims that a hooliganism culture defines the group.

On Tuesday league members patrolling the streets complained officers were diverted to monitor them, while rioters remained unchecked.

Whether sober or not, vigilantism appears likely to increase around England; Reuters reported that sales of batons and baseball bats grown by more than 5,000 percent on Amazon’s UK site between Monday and Tuesday. As of Wednesday afternoon sales of a German-brand telescopic baton had jumped nearly 36,000 percent.

 

By Martin Fletcher, NBC News correspondent

LONDON -- As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here's a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

The TV reporter from Britain's ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. "Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard,  more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

The truth is that discontent has been simmering among Britain's urban poor for years, and few have paid attention. Social activists say one out of two children in Tottenham live in poverty. It's one of the poorest areas of Britain. Britain's worst riots in decades took place here in 1985. A policeman was hacked to death. After these riots, the same young man pointed out, "They built us a swimming pool."

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Poverty, joblessness cycle
Police and local leaders in Tottenham made real progress in improving community relations in the intervening years and that's true about all of Britain. The best way to prevent crime, the theory goes, is to improve the lot of the people, then they won't need to commit crimes. But caught in a poverty and joblessness cycle, young people in many British urban areas have little hope of a better life.

So when a local 29-year-old father, described by police as a gangster, was shot dead by an officer, the response came quickly.
 
Mark Duggan was killed Thursday. On Saturday night about 50 relatives and friends protested outside the Tottenham police station.

Local young men, almost all with their heads covered by hoods -- known here as "hoodies" -- took advantage to indulge themselves in a favorite sport: cursing the police. This quickly escalated into a night of hurling rocks, bottles (Jack Daniels, one young man told me -- "we broke into the liquor store, drank the Jack Daniels and threw the bottles at the cops"), burning two patrol cars, torching buildings, smashing shop windows and carting off hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of phones, cameras and clothes.
 
The looting and rioting had nothing at all to do with the killing of Mark Duggan. That was the spark. The bonfire had been prepared by years of neglect, fueled by the anger of young men with no stake in the system, angry at everybody and quick to exploit fury at the killing of a local man, even if he did allegedly fire at the police officer first.

So now the question people in Tottenham are asking is: Will the government pay attention to the social issues underlying the anger?

And a wider question is: Would anyone care at all if there had not been violence?