Danny Puff

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) - The FBI believes it has identified the thieves who stole 13 artworks from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 in the costliest art theft in U.S. history and asked for anyone who had seen the paintings to contact the bureau.

On the 23rd anniversary of the theft, which stands as one of the most prominent unsolved crimes in modern Boston, officials said that their top priority was recovering the $500 million in missing art, which includes Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee" and Edouard Manet's "Chez Tortoni."

The holes in the Gardner museum's collection are prominent, in part because the empty frames that once held the paintings remain, empty, on the gallery walls due to a quirk in the will of the museum's founder.

FBI officials said they believed the artworks were offered for sale in Connecticut and Philadelphia in the years after the heist and said they suspect much of the art could still be in the northeastern United States.

"It's likely that over the years, someone - a friend, a neighbor or relative - has seen the art hanging on a wall, placed above a mantle or stored in an attic," Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office, told a Monday press conference.

"We want that person to call us."

The museum reiterated its offer of a $5 million reward for information that leads directly to the return of all the art.

Law enforcement officials said they could offer immunity from prosecution to anyone who comes forward to surrender the paintings. Any prosecution would focus on charges of possession or trafficking in stolen property, since the statute of limitations on prosecuting the original theft has expired.

"Immunity is available, it's a very strong possibility," said U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, noting that the artwork could be in the possession of people who were unaware it had been stolen.

THIEVES IDENTIFIED, FBI SAYS

DesLauriers said the bureau had identified the suspected thieves, who he described as members of a criminal organization with a presence in the mid-Atlantic states and New England. He said the FBI did not want to release the identities of its suspects because that could compromise its investigation.

The FBI called on anyone who had seen any of the missing art - which also includes works by Vermeer and Degas - to report it. (https://tips.fbi.gov)

On the night of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers arrived at the private museum's front door, and a security guard let them in. The thieves allegedly overpowered both guards, who were found duct-taped to chairs in the museum's basement the next morning.

The 13 stolen artworks included paintings, drawings, sculpture and a beaker. The FBI posted a Web site on Monday with photos and descriptions of the stolen works. (http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2013/march/reward-offered-for-return-of-stolen-gardner-museum-artwork)

Thieves rarely succeed in selling well-known stolen art for anything near its worth, said Robert Wittman, a former FBI agency who today works as a private art security and recover expert.

That is because artwork is easily identified as stolen and serious collectors and dealers look into a work's origin before buying it.

"People who steal these types of paintings, they never monetize them," Wittman said. Usually they are common criminals, they are involved in many areas of criminal activity - car theft, gun-running, and they don't realize that the painting world is a whole different situation."

Because of the difficulty of selling stolen art, there is a risk that the paintings taken from the Gardner museum have been destroyed or damaged, Wittman said.

"Once you cut it out of the frame and things get rolled up ... things deteriorate pretty quickly," Wittman said.

The Gardner Museum was founded by Isabella Stewart Gardner, an art collector who died in 1924. Her will contained very specific conditions on the running of the museum, including the arrangement of her collection and free admission to anyone named Isabella, a practice that continues today.

The FBI solved Boston's other long-running crime mystery in June 2011 when it found accused mobster James "Whitey" Bulger hiding in a seaside California community. Bulger, who is accused of committing or ordering 19 murders, was arrested on a tip that came in after the FBI launched a publicity campaign aimed at tracking him down. He had been on the run since 1994.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Leslie Adler, Gary Hill and Andrew Hay)

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NEW YORK (AP) Rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars wanted the announcement for their latest studio album to be out of this world. And that's where the album's first single debuted.

"Up in the Air" was sent to the International Space Station for an exclusive listening Monday. It will be released Tuesday on Earth.

The new album, "Love Lust Faith + Dreams," will be available May 21.

A compact disc containing the song was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 1. The band got to watch the rocket blast into space.

"It was amazing to feel it take off," frontman Jared Leto said in a recent interview. "The noise and the brightness was overwhelming, and you're still a mile away."

Leto said the challenge of sending a song into space paled in comparison to being sued for $30 million by EMI when the band was working on "This Is War," released in 2009, which sold over 500,000 copies. The band also launched an aggressive world tour to promote the CD.

"The last album was about closure. There was a battle and a war that we fought. This one is a new beginning," the 41-year-old singer-actor said.

The new single "has to do with getting to a point in your life where you're ready to let go of the past, embrace change and become more of who you really are," Leto said.

The lawsuit was eventually resolved, and the band has continued working with EMI. Leto said the out-of-this-world debut for the new album was fitting after the enormous weight of the lawsuit was lifted, although sending a CD into space was no easy task.

"Most worthy things are not easy to get done. I think a lot of great things have a tremendous amount of challenge, a tremendous amount of difficulty, and I think this was one of those things," he said.

Leto said he wrote and recorded more than 70 songs before determining the final 12 for the new album.

"My songs must feel like discarded lovers because I'm continuously abandoning time," he said. "But that feels better than being sued."

EMI sued the band in 2008 for breach of contract.

"That $30 million lawsuit in that battle was very real. It wasn't a headline. It was something we thought about every single moment of the day that was there, weighing on us. And not just the fact that we would lose and owe a corporation $30 million, but we would have our creative lives stamped out," Leto said.

Their documentary, "Artifact," chronicles the production of the band's third album.

"The film is highly critical of the record business, but I'm not anti-record label, at all. I'm anti-greed. I'm anti-corruption," Leto said. "I'm pro-artist. I believe that everybody can win. You don't have to steal from one another to do it, or to treat one another unfairly."

"Artifact" won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and was recently shown at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

While things are back to normal, Leto feels the "cuts are still fresh."

"I think they're healing. But they're definitely not healed yet. It takes some time. The good news is that there's an entirely new group that's running things. It's essentially a new record company," Leto said.

The band, which also includes Shannon Leto and Tomo Milicivic, will begin a world tour in June to support the new album.

Meanwhile, Leto will return to the big screen this year, starring opposite Matthew McConaughey in the AIDS drama, "Dallas Buyers Club."

"I hadn't made a film for five years, and this role came along to play a transsexual in a film about the birth of this horrible plague. I wasn't looking to make a film, or to take five years off, either," Leto said.

A conversation between astronaut Tom Marshburn from the International Space Station and Leto will be available on both the band's and NASA's websites.

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Online:

http://www.thirtysecondstomars.com

http://www.nasa.gov/

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John Carucci covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/jacarucci

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LONDON (AP) British investigators have found hundreds more potential phone-hacking victims of Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid, a victim's lawyer said Monday.

Lawyer Hugh Tomlinson made the announcement at Britain's High Court during legal arguments related to the lawsuits against News of the World publisher News International. Tomlinson did not go into much detail, but hundreds of extra victims could translate into millions of extra damages for the UK newspaper company.

The phone hacking scandal has greatly damaged the reputation of the British tabloid press, which has been found to have hacked into the voicemails of celebrities, politicians, crime victims and others. Murdoch's company has already paid millions of pounds in settlements, and a national outcry forced British politicians to promise action to make the medial more responsible.

At a court hearing Monday, a lawyer said journalists at The Sun newspaper another Murdoch title harvested data from a lawmaker's stolen phone.

Lawyer David Sherborne said parliamentarian Siobhain McDonagh has accepted substantial but undisclosed damages from the newspaper after her cellphone was stolen from a parked car in 2010. Her text messages had later been accessed by The Sun, Sherborne said.

News International lawyer Dinah Rose acknowledged that The Sun was guilty of "serious misuse of her private information."

The revelations of new victims came only hours after British politicians announced they struck a last-minute deal over press regulation, unveiling a new code meant to curb the worst abuses of the country's scandal-tarred media.

The code follows days of heated debate over how to implement the recommendations of Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who held an inquiry that aimed to clean up a newspaper industry plunged into crisis by revelations of widespread phone hacking.

Victims' groups have lobbied for an independent watchdog whose powers are enshrined in law but media groups have said that threatens press freedom.

The deal struck early Monday appears to be a complicated compromise.

"I think we have got an agreement which protects the freedom of the press, that is incredibly important in a democracy, but also protects the rights of people not to have their lives turned upside down," senior opposition leader Harriet Harman told broadcaster ITV.

Unlike the U.K.'s widely discredited Press Complaints Commission, which barely bothered to investigate allegations of phone hacking before the scandal broke, the new regulator being proposed by politicians would be independent of the media and would have the power to force newspapers to print prominent apologies.

Submitting to the regulatory regime would be optional, but media groups staying outside the system could risk substantial fines if they get stories wrong.

And rather than being established through a new press law, which advocates of Britain's media have described as unacceptable, the regulatory body would be created through a Royal Charter, a kind of executive order whose history stretches back to medieval times. Adding to the complexity, a law would be passed to prevent ministers from tweaking the system after the fact.

Harman acknowledged that the charter was "quite a sort of complex and old-fashioned thing" but said it "kind of more or less ... has got legal basis."

Victims' group Hacked Off said Monday it believes the deal will go a long way toward preserving press freedom and protecting the public from fresh abuses. The groups said it remained concerned about how newspaper groups would be cajoled into joining.

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MADRID (Reuters) - Alfredo Di Stefano may have kicked a ball about with Argentine compatriot Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was elected Pope Francis I last week, when they were growing up around the same time in Buenos Aires, the Real Madrid great has said.

Di Stefano, who is just over 10 years older than the 76-year-old Bergoglio, wrote in his regular column in sports daily Marca on Monday that the pair had gone to the same school and lived close to each other in the Argentine capital.

"As you can imagine his election filled me with enormous joy," Di Stefano wrote.

"The Pope was probably one of those kids with whom I played football in the street," he added.

"In the neighborhood we put together proper matches with everyone against everyone until it got dark.

"You'll have to ask him because at that time I was the famous one, from when I was very small, as I belonged to the River Plate youth academy, everyone knew me."

Di Stefano is widely considered one of the greatest players of all time and helped to turn Real Madrid, the La Liga club he joined in 1953, into one of the world's leading sides.

One of Pope Francis's predecessors, John Paul II, who died in 2005, was a goalkeeper in his youth.

(Reporting by Iain Rogers, editing by Clare Fallon)

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HONG KONG (AP) Michelle Yeoh is happy to be honored with the "Excellence in Asian Cinema Award" but says she hopes there's no hidden message.

She asked, "I hope it's not their way of telling me that I need to retire?"

The star of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and last year's Aung San Suu Kyi biopic "The Lady" is being honored at the Asian Film Awards on Monday night.

Speaking to reporters a day earlier, Yeoh said she's happy to receive the award where her career started, in Hong Kong.

And while she acknowledged she's long heard rumors of a "Crouching Tiger" sequel, she says she's yet to see a script or other plans on the project. The 2000 original was directed by Ang Lee and won four Academy Awards.

The recent reports have attached kung fu star Donnie Yen to the unconfirmed sequel, and Yeoh said she's a fan and would welcome the opportunity to work with him if a project is developed.

The Hong Kong film festival's opener Sunday was "Ip Man: the Final Fight," the latest film about martial arts master Ip Man. Lead actor Anthony Wong and actress Zhou Chou Chou were among stars walking the red carpet.

Veteran Hong Kong directors Johnnie To and Ronny Yu are also premiering works at the festival, which features "Infernal Affairs" director Andrew Lau.

The festival closes in April with the Iranian film "Closed Curtain," which is fresh off a win for best script at the Berlin Film Festival.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) Japanese architect Toyo Ito, whose buildings have been praised for their fluid beauty and balance between the physical and virtual world, has won the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the prize's jury announced Sunday.

The 71-year-old architect joins such masters as Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano and Wang Su in receiving the honor that's been called architecture's Nobel Prize. Ito, the sixth Japanese architect to receive the prize, was recognized for the libraries, houses, theaters, offices and other buildings he has designed in Japan and beyond.

He accepted the honor by saying that whenever he's done designing a building, he becomes "painfully aware of my own inadequacy, and it turns into energy to challenge the next project."

"Therefore, I will never fix my architectural style and never be satisfied with my works," he said in a statement.

"Toyo Ito's architecture has improved the quality of both public and private spaces," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who served on the Pritzker Prize jury.

"It has inspired many architects, critics and members of the general public alike. Along with all others involved with the Pritzker Prize, I am very pleased that he has received the award," Breyer said in a statement.

Some of Ito's notable creations include the curvaceous Municipal Funeral Hall in Gifu, Japan; the transparent Sendai Mediatheque library in Miyagi, Japan; the arch-filled Tama Art University Library in suburban Tokyo; the spiral White O residence in Marbella, Chile; and the angular 2002 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London.

"His buildings are complex, yet his high degree of synthesis means that his works attain a level of calmness, which ultimately allows the inhabitants to freely develop their life and activities in them," said Chilean architect and Pritzker Prize jury member Alejandro Aravena.

Ito began his career at Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates after he graduated from Tokyo University in 1965. He founded his own architecture firm in 1971. His works have been exhibited in museums in the United States, England, Denmark, Italy, Chile and numerous cities in Japan.

Ito will receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion at the formal Pritzker ceremony May 29 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

Sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation, the Pritzker Prize was established in 1979 by the late entrepreneur Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, to honor "a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture."

The Pritzker family founded the prize because of its involvement with developing Hyatt Hotel properties around the world and because architecture was not included in the Nobel Prizes. The Pritzker selection process is modeled after the Nobels.

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang/.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) Natalie Maines is starting out nervous on stage, almost 10 years to the day that the Dixie Chicks spitfire slammed then-President George W. Bush and forever changed the fate and fortunes of the country superstars.

On this night she barely speaks between songs.

Her hair slicks up in a punkish pompadour. She looks slimmer than when the Dixie Chicks began a hiatus in 2007 that may never end. The crowd at the South by Southwest music festival to hear Maines perform her solo debut "Mother" for only the second time is a healthy size, but it is also far from a packed house.

"We missed you, Natalie!" one fan hollers.

Maines smiles but doesn't banter back.

"I ask myself, 'Why is that? What are you doing, girl?'" Maines told The Associated Press the next morning at a downtown Austin hotel. "I think right now I have so much to remember. This is the most guitar I've ever had to play."

Now 38 and a solo artist for the first time in her career, Maines is candid about the past and guarded about the future. Ask whether the Dixie Chicks will ever record new music again, she curls in her chair with tense energy and declines to predict.

"I think I thought time would heal and that I would come around. But just like the song says, I'm still waiting," said Maines, pulling a lyric from the band's defiant 2006 smash single "Not Ready to Make Nice."

Fellow Chicks Emily Erwin and Martie Maguire don't needle her to reunite in the studio, Maines said, but she acknowledges that choosing the solo project "Mother" as her first album since 2006 may not have been their first choice. "I'm pretty sure they would rather I be making a Dixie Chicks record, but they would never say that, thank God," Maines said.

Now rehash her takedown of then-President Bush in 2003 and well, on second thought, don't bother.

Maines does that herself.

"Good thing I'm not a told ya so kind of person or I might point out that 10 years ago today I said GWB was full of bull and I was right," she tweeted on March 10, three days before her first South by Southwest performance.

When the Texas-born Maines told a London crowd at the start of the Iraq invasion she was ashamed to be from the same state as Bush, the Dixie Chicks became pariahs of the country music industry that vaulted them to stardom. Radio stations blackballed the Dixie Chicks from playlists and legions of fans turned their backs.

The Dixie Chicks stayed firm during the backlash, and released "Taking the Long Way" in 2006 that won five Grammys and was a best-seller despite being largely ignored by country radio. Maines now refers to the group as "tainted" but is still open to performing live with the Dixie Chicks, and two shows are scheduled in Canada this summer.

Those concerts will be a different sound than "Mother." The album is Maines putting her take on covers that span from Pink Floyd (the album title borrows from "The Wall"), Eddie Vedder's "Without You" and Jeff Buckley's "Lover, You Should've Come Over."

Guitar virtuoso Ben Harper produced the album and performed with Maines at SXSW for a lively show that skewed far more on the side of rock and Americana than the bluegrass and country combination of the Dixie Chicks. Maines first played at the 2,700-seat Moody Theater that is the home studio for Austin City Limits a big and tough venue to fill at SXSW, given the 2,200 other artists all vying for attention.

Maines doesn't expect to win back fans that Dixie Chicks lost, and isn't sure who will embrace her different sound now.

"I like what the three of us had together," Maines said of the Dixie Chicks. "I did what was required. It felt like my job. I felt like a businesswoman in the industry I was in. I feel like I accepted that and waved that country flag but always felt like I was holding on to who I was, and we were still considered rebellious in the Top 40 country market. But it was news to me that people thought I was something I wasn't.

"The cat just feels out of the bag now," Maines said. "I'm not sure I can go back to that."

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Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) How did Prince close out South by Southwest Music Festival's weeklong showcase of rock n' roll?

By naturally throwing a totally different kind of party: a grooving, brass band-backed funk fest that stretched to 3 a.m. and outlasted many fans lucky enough to get inside the exclusive show that also featured A Tribe Called Quest.

As Justin Timberlake and the Smashing Pumpkins headlined other SXSW wrap-ups nearby, Prince prevailed as the toughest ticket Saturday night by performing for only 300 people in his first appearance at the annual music festival that drew 2,200 bands and artists this year.

Prince towered over them all but his concert at the tiny La Zona Rosa club that sits on the fringe of the SXSW mayhem was no grandiose spectacle. He performed for 2 hours on a spartan stage behind a giant video board. He contentedly played bandleader instead of superstar, often disappearing backstage for stretches as the band jammed.

"They called our people and said they wanted some funk in Austin," said Prince, before belting out the last bars of a gentle rendition of "Purple Rain."

A 12-piece brass band joined the latest incarnation of Prince's New Power Generation for a run of hits like "1999" and "Cool" that jammed with a soulful backbone. The show began with the band making a Mardi Gras-style march onto the stage, only to have their horn blasts drowned out by shrieks upon fans sighting Prince in a magenta, high-collared shirt and snug black blazer.

Organizers warned the crowd three times before the show that taking pictures was forbidden. Fans who flaunted the rule were scolded by security or told to scram. Even simply using a cellphone was banned at the concert thrown by phone-maker Samsung, though promoters worked the crowd beforehand, offering customers fresh phone batteries or device test-drives.

Prince never played guitar during the set. Nor did he perform his new single "Screwdriver" that debuted earlier this year, opting instead for funk covers: Curtis Mayfield's "We're a Winner" and Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop Until You Get Enough" among them as the night dragged on and weary fans made their way to the exits early.

"Don't make me hurt you. You know how many hits I got?" Prince said during the first of several pseudo-set closers, before launching into another encore.

Green Day, Dave Grohl, Vampire Weekend, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks also starred at SXSW this week.

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Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber.

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CHICAGO (AP) She inspired a novel and a movie starring Robert Redford when in 1949 she lured a major league ballplayer she'd never met into a hotel room with a cryptic note and shot him, nearly killing him.

After the headlines faded, Ruth Ann Steinhagen did something else just as surprising: She disappeared into obscurity, living a quiet life unnoticed in Chicago until now, more than a half century later, when news broke that she had died three months earlier.

The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed Friday that Steinhagen passed away of natural causes on Dec. 29, at the age of 83. First reported by the Chicago Tribune last week, her identity was a surprise even to the morgue employees who knew about the 1984 movie "The Natural," in which she was portrayed by actress Barbara Hershey.

"She chose to live in the shadows and she did a good job of it," John Theodore, an author who wrote a 2002 nonfiction book about the crime, wrote in an email Sunday.

The story, with its elements of obsession, mystery, insanity and a baseball star, made it part of both Chicago's colorful crime history and rich baseball lore.

The story began with what appeared to be just another young woman's crush on Eddie Waitkus, the Chicago Cubs' handsome first baseman. So complete was this crush that the teenager set a place for Waitkus, whom she'd never met, at the family dinner table. She turned her bedroom into a shrine to him, and put his photo under her pillow.

After the 1948 season, Waitkus was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies a fateful turn. "When he went to the Phillies, that's when she decided to kill him," Theodore said in an interview.

Steinhagen had her chance the next season, when the Phillies came to Chicago to play the Cubs at Wrigley Field. She checked into a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel where he was staying and invited him to her room.

"We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about," she wrote in a note to him after a game at Wrigley on June 14, 1949.

It worked. Waitkus arrived at her room. After he sat down, Steinhagen walked to a closet, said, "I have a surprise for you," then turned with the rifle she had hidden there and shot him in the chest. Theodore wrote that she then knelt by his side and held his hand on her lap. She told a psychiatrist afterward about how she had dreamed of killing him and found it strange that she was now "holding him in my arms."

Newspapers devoured and trumpeted the lurid story of a 19-year-old baseball groupie, known in the parlance of the day as a "Baseball Annie." Among the sensational and probably staged photos was one showing Steinhagen writing in her journal at a table in her jail cell with a framed photograph of Waitkus propped nearby.

A judge determined she was insane and committed her to a mental hospital. She was released three years later, after doctors determined she had regained her sanity.

Details about the rest of her life are sketchy. She lived with her sister in a house just a few miles from the hotel where she shot Waitkus. A neighbor told Theodore that Steinhagen said she worked in an office for 35 years but never revealed her employer. And she made an effort to conceal her privacy, often refusing to answer the phone or come to the door when Theodore knocked.

Chris Gentner, a neighbor who used to help the Steinhagen sisters with chores, said he only found out who she was 15 years after they began living nearby.

"I found out through my ex-wife I'm not sure how she found out and I looked (Steinhagen) up online. And as soon as I saw (her photograph) online I said, 'That's her,'" Gentner said.

The 1984 movie was based on a novel by Bernard Malamud that was inspired by the story. Theodore's 2002 book was entitled "Baseball's Natural: The story of Eddie Waitkus."

Waitkus, who played the season after he was shot, helping the Phillies win the National League pennant, decided not to press charges in 1952 when Steinhagen was deemed sane. The trial would have likely made banner headlines particularly since Malamud's novel was released in 1952 so Watikus' decision almost certainly assisted Steinhagen's disappearance into obscurity.

He died in 1972, 12 years before Redford portrayed Roy Hobbs, the character inspired by Waitkus.

"He hardly ever talked to his family about Ruth," Theodore said.

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LONDON (AP) Celebrities like J.K. Rowling and Hugh Grant accused the British government on Sunday of letting down the victims of media intrusion and urged tough new measures to rein in Britain's unruly press.

Lawmakers are to vote Monday on rival plans for tougher controls in the wake of the country's phone-hacking scandal.

The Conservative-led government says it will propose a new press watchdog with the power to levy fines of up to 1 million pounds ($1.5 million). But hacking victims say the regulator must be backed by a new law to give it real teeth something Prime Minister David Cameron opposes.

"Harry Potter" author Rowling who testified previously to a media ethics inquiry about the impact of intrusive media upon her family said she and other victims felt they "have been hung out to dry" by the government.

Grant, who won damages for phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid, said hacking victims supported a rival plan by the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party for stronger media measures. The actor said lawmakers "promised victims to do right by them, and they have that chance on Monday."

Debate about how to control the press has raged in Britain since revelations in 2011 that tabloid journalists had eavesdropped on voicemails, bribed officials for information and hacked into computers in a relentless quest for scoops.

The scandal has brought the demise of one newspaper Murdoch's News of the World along with dozens of arrests and resignations, scores of lawsuits against Murdoch's media empire and a public inquiry into media ethics.

That inquiry, led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson, last year recommended the creation of a strong press watchdog body dominated by non-journalists and backed by government regulation.

But negotiations between Cameron's Conservatives and others over how to implement those recommendations have stalled amid an increasingly acrimonious debate. Politicians are divided about whether a new press watchdog should be set up through legislation as recommended by Leveson or through a Royal Charter, an executive act that does not require a vote in Parliament.

Proponents say passing a law will put the watchdog on a firmer footing and give it more power to discipline rogue newspapers. Opponents believe that passing a media law would endanger the country's free press.

In fact, the proposals aren't all that different. A new law would set up an independent press watchdog, not control the media directly. And the regulator would only have the power to impose fines or demand published apologies from newspapers not to stop articles being published.

But the language of the debate has been fierce, with opponents fearing the demise of Britain's free press and advocates seeing a bullying media riding roughshod over people's rights.

"The idea of a law a great, big, all-singing, all-dancing media law ... would have been bad for press freedom, bad for individual freedom," Cameron said.

Rowling accused the prime minister of letting down hacking victims by ignoring Leveson's proposals.

"I believed David Cameron when he said that he would implement Leveson's recommendations 'unless they were bonkers,'" she said. "I did not see how he could back away, with honor, from words so bold and unequivocal.

"Well, he has backed away, and I am one among many who feel they have been hung out to dry."

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