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The Menendez brothers’ disastrous first trial turned the justice department of LA County into a laughing stock. Over the course of the decade, the Da’s office had had a number of humiliating high-profile defeats one after another, the most embarrassing one being the O.J. Simpson case. That was one of the reasons why Gil Garcetti, the former Da of LA county, refused to accept the brothers’ plea bargain. On live television, Garcetti told the media and the public that the boys were accused of first-degree murder, and he would make sure that they served the sentence they deserved. A year later, in 1995, a retrial was arranged with Judge Stanley Weisberg presiding over the case. Ironically, he was the same judge who’d presided over the previous trial, which only makes you wonder if the judge was even impartial or was carrying out an image-cleansing agenda.

In order to avoid...

The ten-episode series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (read our review Here) was such a huge success for the Netflix streaming service back in 2022 that Netflix ordered two more seasons of the show from its creators, Ian Brennan and American Horror Story co-creator Ryan Murphy. Last year, it was announced that the second season would be titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, and we’re now just a couple of days away from the premiere date! Monsters is set to start streaming on September 19th… and in the build-up to the season’s premiere, Murphy has gone ahead and revealed that season 3 is going to star Sons of Anarchy‘s Charlie Hunnam as murderer and graverobber Ed Gein.

Variety reports that Murphy made this announcement onstage during a Monsters promotional event in Los Angeles.

Variety also reminds us that Ed Gein, who also hailed from Wisconsin like Dahmer,...

Full text of the Guardian editor's Orwell lecture on journalism and the phone-hacking scandal, given at University College, London

Thank you for asking me to give this lecture.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have become a journalist were it not for George Orwell. His collected Essays, Journalism and Letters appeared in a four volume Penguin edition in 1968, when I was about 15. I bought them one at a time with my saved pocket money … and read every word. And, with each essay and article, I learned more about politics; about observation; and about how to write. I doubt that I have ever managed to match his clarity of thought and prose – but he was certainly a model of both, and so it's a great honour to be here speaking in his name.

The invitation to speak tonight came just after the extraordinary events of the summer. I know you wanted the...