UK press awaits findings of Leveson report The UK's self-regulated press waited on Thursday to discover what threats of further restrictions might be placed upon it following the behaviour of some news organisations. The 2,000-page report of a year-long judge-led inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press was due to be published at 1330 GMT, crystallising 16 months of evidence-gathering from more than 400 witnesses and sparked by phone hacking, the biggest scandal to hit the media since the second world war. Lord Justice Leveson is expected to deal not only with recommendations for future regulation of the press, but also to opine on how the earlier behaviour of powerful titles, and their editors and proprietors, affected the conduct of politicians and the UK's major police forces. The report is likely to focus attention again on the illegal methods used by some newspapers in the decade leading up to the phone hacking scandal. Lord Justice Leveson has a wealth of evidence at his disposal, not least thousands of instances of unjustified and usually illegal privacy invasions from the files of the private detective Steve Whittamore, who was convicted of data offences in 2005. His report will have a broad sweep, taking in the relationship between Prime Minister David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of The Sun and News of the World who resigned as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers over the phone-hacking scandal. The judge will also give his verdict on Jeremy Hunt, the former culture secretary, and his behaviour at the time that Mr Murdoch was trying to buy the 60.9 per cent of British Sky Broadcasting his News Corp group did not already own. Details of Mr Hunt's support for the bid before he became legally responsible for overseeing its progress almost cost him his job earlier this year. The report will make uncomfortable reading for Scotland Yard, too, as Lord Justice Leveson will lay out the way in which its relationship with newspapers affected the original investigation into phone hacking in 2006 that led to the conviction of one News of the World reporter and a private detective contracted to the News International title. After the Guardian reported that the practice was far more widespread, a renewed police inquiry, branching into allegations of corruption, has led to the arrest of more than 70 people, mostly News International journalists, and charges against more than a dozen. The inquiry was ordered in July 2011 when revelations in the Guardian that the News of the World had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler while the Surrey schoolgirl was missing in 2002 led to Mr Murdoch closing the newspaper. Milly was later found murdered and her parents have become symbols of the way in which some newspapers defied their own codes of conduct to intrude into the lives of both celebrities and members of the public.