Murdoch empire to be sued in US

by-ALAN COWELL
A high-profile British lawyer who has been closely involved in pursuing the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids was quoted on Thursday as saying that he planned for the first time to sue on behalf of alleged victims in the United States, the centre of Murdoch’s global media empire. The lawyer, Mark Lewis, said he would take legal action on behalf of three people — a “well-known sports person,” a sports person not in the public eye and an American citizen — the BBC reported.“The News of the World had thousands of people they hacked,” he said, referring to the Sunday tabloid that Murdoch closed down last year as the hacking scandal engulfed it. “Some of them were in America at the time, either traveling or resident there.”
It was not immediately clear how or whether the action would affect News Corporation, the parent company of News International, the Murdoch family’s British newspaper subsidiary. News International declined immediate comment on the cases. In September, Lewis said that he had held discussions with American lawyers about the steps necessary to open proceedings against News Corporation in New York, and that he expected the process to begin soon. In an interview at the time, Lewis said that the legal action in the United States would focus on the “News Corporation’s liability for actions by its foreign subsidiaries,” including The News of the World. Lewis’s clients in the hacking scandal include the family of Milly Dowler, an abducted teenager who was found murdered in an outer London suburb in 2002, and whose voice mail was said to have been hacked after she disappeared. (New York Times )