Samsung has announced the SL502 (PL55 in Europe) digital compact camera. It has a 5x zoom but starting at 35mm equivalent, so no wide-angle capability. With a 12.2MP sensor and 2.7 inch LCD, it includes features such as Smart Auto mode, Smart Album, Face, Smile and Blink detection. Priced at £149, it will start shipping in August 2009. 
Samsung has released the SL720 (PL70 in Europe) digital compact camera with 720p HD video recording. Sporting an 12.2MP sensor, 3 inch LCD and a 5x image stabilized zoom lens starting at 28mm. It includes the ability to pause and re-record HD movie clips and has an HDMI connector. Priced at £199 it will become available in August 2009. 
Cosina has today announced Voigtländer-branded adapters to connect F and K mount lenses with Micro Four Thirds camera bodies. The adapters are designed for Voigtländer and Carl Zeiss lenses with Nikon F or Pentax K mounts. They provide only a mechanical connection between the lens and body so only lenses with a manual aperture ring will be compatible. A town in Florida's western panhandle is coming to terms with a murder in which a team of up to eight men broke into the home of a couple known locally for caring for disabled children and shot them in front of their family.
Police investigating the double murder in Pensacola, near the border with Alabama, said the break-in and killing was organised with military precision. Melanie and Byrd Billings were shot a number of times last Thursday, when nine of their children were in the house.
The Billings were well-known locally because in addition to four biological children they had adopted 12 children with conditions ranging from autism to Down's syndrome. Some in the town referred to the parents as "angels".
Three men were in custody last night over the murders: Wayne Coldiron, a labourer, 41; Leonard Gonzalez Jr, 35, who was arrested in Florida, and his father, 56, also called Leonard.
Two other men were being questioned yesterday, and police said they were searching for a further three.
Coldiron and the younger Gonzalez have been charged with murder.
The investigation has been aided by the fact that the couple had installed CCTV cameras in every room and around the house as a security measure for their children.
Footage recorded by one outside camera showed a large red van pulling up to the front door of the house. The van deposited three men dressed in black clothes and masks who entered the house, while two others, also dressed in black, came out of hiding in nearby woods and entered via an unlocked door at the back.
Sheriff David Morgan, leading the investigation, told reporters the break-in and shootings took barely 10 minutes. "I think you'll find this particularly chilling, and here's why: we have a team that enters at the rear of the home and another that enters at the front of the home," he said.
Three of the nine children at home at the time witnessed the intruders and one ran out of the house and alerted a neighbour who called the police. None of the children, all aged between eight and 14, were hurt.
Morgan said the mastermind of the killings was among the three men in custody, though he would not identify him. He added there were many possible motives for the attack, one of which was robbery.
A clue to the possible motive was found by the local paper, the Pensacola News Journal, on the MySpace page of Leonard Gonzalez Jr. It was last updated on Wednesday, a day before the murders.
His last profile status reads: "Making a move for humanity." On his page he wrote about his eight-year-old daughter Mary Gonzalez whom he refers to as Bella. "She was taken from me, against my will, several years ago and I miss her very much."
In a post on 6 July titled "We are getting closer" he tells his daughter she will be returned soon to her "true loving family".
He went on: "Not only are you descended from aristocracy … you have the DNA and family lineage to back up whatever dreams you may have."
According to police, the elder Gonzalez has admitted acting as the getaway driver, remaining in the van while others entered the house. Warrants suggest that he has also alerted police to the involvement of several other men.
Gonzalez Sr has been charged with tampering with evidence after he allegedly tried to paint over the van to disguise it. His bail has been set at $500,000 (£300,000).
An adult daughter of the Billingses, Ashley Markham, said the younger children were now being cared for together with family and friends at an undisclosed location.
Her life used to consist of endless rounds of medicines, long stays in hospital and uncertainty about how much longer she would live for. Now 16-year-old Hannah Clark â€" the first person in Britain to receive someone else's heart but later have it removed, only for her own to unexpectedly recover â€" relishes typical teenage pursuits such as running, shopping and walking her dog.
Born with a rare heart condition that could easily have killed her, Hannah, from Mountain Ash near Cardiff, was two when she joined an exclusive club by having a five-month-old girl's heart grafted on to her own.
For 10 and a half years she had two hearts â€" "piggybacking", doctors call it â€" although it was the donated heart that kept Hannah alive while her original organ took a long rest.
Complications meant the second heart had to be taken out when she was 12, and doctors were unsure what would happen. No one had survived such a procedure.
Now, three and a half years later, one of the most dramatic success stories in recent medical history has just done her GCSEs, started her first part-time job at a kennels and is preparing for a family holiday by the seaside â€" all powered by a heart which, for her first 12 years, doctors thought could not keep her alive.
Confirmation of Hannah's highly unusual success in recovering from cardiomyopathy, which affects the heart's muscle, comes today in the form of a long article in the Lancet medical journal.
In complicated medicalese, it tells an amazing story of survival. The authors, who include renowned heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, testify to the teenager's feat.
Yesterday the girl who used to have two hearts negotiated another obstacle: a press conference to tell her story.
At times the constant whirring of cameras, barrage of questions and sheer number of people left her lost for words, or in tears.
How specially does she treasure life now, someone asked? "I can't say," replied Hannah. It took her mother, Liz, to answer: "She just loves life. She doesn't think about tomorrow; she thinks about today, and lives life to the full. She gets up every morning smiling, and it's very, very rare to see Hannah upset.
"She doesn't go to bed until three o'clock in the morning sometimes … that's how much energy she's got. She couldn't have done that before."
Yacoub, of the Harefield hospital in west London, said her recovery had given the many doctors involved in her care insights into many things, such as transplant surgery and the use of immunosuppressant drugs, which must be taken to minimise the chances of a patient's body rejecting a new organ.
Before Hannah, no one's own heart had ever recovered enough to keep them alive, although doctors did think it was a theoretical possibility that a weak heart could somehow become strong.
Among the lessons learned from Hannah, Yacoub said, was that "the possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic. A heart that was not contracting at all, after a time we put the new heart to pump next to it, and do its work. Now it is functioning normally. That is going to be very fundamental in helping people in the future."
Born in 1993, Hannah underwent what surgeons call heterotopic cardiac transplantation, or "piggybacking", two years later. However, the immunosuppressant drugs led to her developing an incurable, rare cancer that kept returning despite repeated bouts of chemotherapy.
But the doctors' strategy, to reduce the doses of immunosuppressants, led to Hannah's second heart failing. In February 2006, they decided they had no choice but to take it out, or risk Hannah's death. Three and a half years of constant improvement, and Hannah's gloriously normal life, have proved enough for them to pronounce the reversal of her transplant an unqualified, if unexpected, success.
Her father, Paul, recalled how when she was being treated at London's Great Ormond Street hospital the family was told that Hannah was about to die.
"They called us in and said that a tumour had affected her spinal cord and was putting pressure on her brain, and was going to kill her. A nurse told us that she only had 12 hours to live. I said, 'Well, you believe what you believe and I'll believe what I believe'. For some reason, the next day she was OK."
Their experience has made the Clark family advocates of presumed consent, a policy â€" supported by Gordon Brown and chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson â€" that would see everyone in the UK presumed to be in favour of donating their organs after death. Supporters believe that, with 1,000 people dying every year due to shortages, the move would greatly increase the supply of organs. Yacoub said that, having previously been opposed to presumed consent, he now backed it.
July 1995 Aged two, Hannah undergoes "piggybacking", in which a donor heart is joined with her own. She improves for four and a half years.
August 2001 Hannah is found to have a rare form of cancer caused by immunosuppressant drugs that stop her body rejecting the new organ.
2001-2006 Her cancer keeps recurring. Doctors deem it incurable.
February 2006 Doctors decide to remove the donor heart.
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It's not easy to interview someone who you've last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can't help recalling a scene I've just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang "merchant banker" been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as "dangerous" after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
"Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting," he says as we settle down in the bar. "It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place." But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? "I don't know. I don't want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There's pleasure in his life but there's nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene."
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: "I'm a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I'm Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert." (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. "She said: 'How are they actually doing that?' And my brother-in-law said: 'It's trick photography.'") His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird's Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? "They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren't recognised, so that's how us lot [he means the British and the Irish â€" Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I'd just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don't really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors â€" and Irish ones too if I'm anything to go by â€" are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They're often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death."
Gillen's resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. "There's a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire," he says. "I have been in control of what I've been doing, of the career I've put together." I'm not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let's not spoil the story.
"I've made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that's a good career strategy. Or at least, it's my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else."
Freefall marks Gillen's return to British TV drama after too long away. "When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I'd done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock'n'roll band now."
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4's Today programme recently: "If you turn on American TV, there's a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that's the case here now as well . . . we don't seem to be able to do contemporary stuff." Does Gillan agree?
"So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale's work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead."
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. "I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling â€" New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home." He lives with his wife Olivia O'Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. "They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent â€" then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist."
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn't sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. "No, it's nothing like that. It's an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It's the kind of horror film that I like â€" The Exorcist and The Wicker Man."
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it's time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won't divulge.
Why did he take the role? "I like to mix it up and do something completely different." It was, he says, "literally the smell of the paint" that made him become an actor in the first place: "I was building and painting the sets. I didn't want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school." He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he "definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life â€" I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There's nothing more to life" •
Night watch on endangered species in Australia after nine birds mauled to death
Fox attacks on endangered penguins have led Australia's wildlife authorities to post snipers at night to protect the birds.
A colony of about 120 little penguins (Eudyptula minor), also known as fairy penguins, at Quarantine beach in Sydney has recently lost about nine of its number to attacks. On Sunday night, the two snipers took their first watch but were unable to shoot the animals responsible.
"We've got infrared cameras as well to detect fox movements along with fox baiting … This is really a microcosm of the devastation foxes can wreak in some areas," the National Parks and Wildlife Service told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Autopsies on the dead penguins showed foxes or dogs were probably responsible because of the nature of the bite marks. DNA swabs were being analysed.
Angelika Treichler from local group Manly Environment Centre told the Herald the attacks were happening at dusk when the nocturnal penguins come ashore. She urged dog owners to keep their animals on leads.
The BBC's output treats the findings of thousands of scientists on climate change as no more than 'views' or 'opinion'
Years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I worked for the BBC's natural history unit as a radio producer. It was a great job, and my colleagues were stimulating and fun. I was allowed to make investigative environmental programmes, and we exposed some shocking scandals. We recorded the head of customs in Abidjan offering to sell us smuggled chimpanzees, for example, and we found that a bulk carrier which crashed off the coast of Cork, polluting rare habitats, appeared to have been deliberately scuppered.
After Mrs Thatcher launched her coup against the BBC, its executives quickly lost their appetite for investigative programmes, and my boss explained that we no longer had the support we needed to continue. Since then the natural history unit has continued to broadcast beautiful, thrilling programmes about the world's wildlife. Occasionally it makes an environmental programme. But by and large it presents the biosphere as if it inhabits a planet yet to be discovered by human beings (except of course the cameramen you see struggling with the elements in the "how we made it" segments).
The most extreme example was the three-part series on the Congo made for the BBC by Scorer Associates. At the height of a devastating civil war which had caused the deaths of some 4 million people, the series reported that "the Congo may once have been known as the 'heart of darkness' - today it seems more like a bright, beautiful wilderness." In two and a half hours of programmes the killings were not mentioned.
Lovely as the unit's output remains, I believe that it creates a misleading impression of the world, which can have grave political consequences. It encourages people to believe that all is well with the world's ecosystems; often it produces the only footage viewers see from far-flung parts of the world. I am not arguing that the political or environmental context should dominate the unit's output, only that it should be acknowledged and explained, however briefly. Is this too much to ask?
Yes, apparently. For the past few years an environmental campaigner called Peter Hack has been writing to the BBC asking about one of these gaps. As far as he can discover, over the past 17 years (since the 1992 Rio earth summit in other words) of BBC films about the ecosystems of east Africa, there has not been a single mention of climate change. Yet these places have been hit harder than almost anywhere else by changes in weather patterns. Kenya, for example, has suffered a series of extreme droughts, whose frequency appears to be unprecedented. These have direct and immediate impacts on the region's wildlife. But watching Big Cat Diary or any of the other films the unit has made in the Serengeti, Maasai Mara and other great parks and reserves, you wouldn't have the faintest idea that anything had changed.
Peter Hack has just shown me the latest letter he's received from Gerald McCusker at BBC Information. McCusker explains the gap thus:
"It's not always possible or practical to reflect all the different opinions on a subject within individual programmes and we feel that over a reasonable period our coverage will reflect a diverse range of views and opinions with regard to this issue."
So it turns out that the entire science of climate change, the work of thousands of researchers, the tens of thousands of papers published in scientific journals, the indisputable facts about changes in temperature, precipitation and wildlife populations in east Africa is no more than a "view" or "opinion". Nice to know where you stand, isn't it?
A 14-year-old boy from the Isle of Man has died at a water park in Thailand after he became trapped in a pumping system while looking for his lost goggles.
Nathan Clark, from Douglas, went to search for his goggles after they dropped through a grill at the bottom of one of the pools at the Pattaya water park, 85 miles east of Bangkok.
Members of his family told of their horror as staff at the tourist attraction refused to listen to their pleas for help for because they did not believe the accident could have happened.
Nathan's father, Jim Clark, a tunnel engineer, had dived in to try and save him after Nathan's elder brother Rhys, 15, raised the alarm, but he could find no trace of his son. Nathan's body was finally found after engineers opened a water gate in the pump room.
Jim Clark hit out at a Thai cameraman after they tried to film his son's body on the floor of the pump room, lashing at one with a spanner. Thai police have subsequently ordered him to pay 12,000 baht (about £240) compensation.
Jim Clark, who works for the international tunnel construction company Robbins in New Delhi, said: " The guards did nothing for 30 minutes. They would not believe what had happened. When I finally forced them to do something they went to the pump room, opened a hatch, and my son's body came out.
Sony has announced a 32GB variant of its Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX memory card. With the largest storage capacity in its line and fast recording speeds, it can record up to 225 minutes of HD videos, and is ideal for use in digital cameras with high speed burst modes. It also offers fast PC transfer speeds of 20MB/s using the included USB adapter. The Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX is also available in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB capacities. A 14-year-old boy from the Isle of Man has died at a water park in Thailand after he became trapped in a pumping system while looking for his lost goggles.
Nathan Clark, from Douglas, went to search for his goggles after they dropped through a grill at the bottom of one of the pools at the Pattaya water park, 85 miles east of Bangkok.
Members of his family told of their horror as staff at the tourist attraction refused to listen to their pleas for help for because they did not believe the accident could have happened.
Nathan's father, Jim Clark, a tunnel engineer, had dived in to try and save him after Nathan's elder brother Rhys, 15, raised the alarm, but he could find no trace of his son. Nathan's body was finally found after engineers opened a water gate in the pump room.
Jim Clark hit out at a Thai cameraman after they tried to film his son's body on the floor of the pump room, lashing at one with a spanner. Thai police have subsequently ordered him to pay 12,000 baht (about £240) compensation.
Jim Clark, who works for the international tunnel construction company Robbins in New Delhi, said: " The guards did nothing for 30 minutes. They would not believe what had happened. When I finally forced them to do something they went to the pump room, opened a hatch, and my son's body came out.
Guardian 'crowd-sourcing' experiment also reveals Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans claimed for four digital cameras in space of 18 months
A Tory MP charged the taxpayer £375 a month for four years for his mobile phone bills and claimed for four digital cameras in just 18 months, it has been revealed.
The expenses claims by Nigel Evans, the MP for Ribble Valley, in Lancashire, came to light as a result of the Guardian's unique "crowd-sourcing" experiment, which asked readers to help journalists trawl through the hundreds of thousands of pages of censored documents released by the Commons last month.
The cameras bought by Evans between May 2006 and November 2007 cost between £199 and £387, with the prices sometimes including memory cards and, in one instance, a camera case.
His mobile phone bills, with Vodafone and O2, came to an average of £404 a month in 2004-05, £389 in 2005-06, £418 in 2006-07 and £289 in 2007-08.
The average figure over four years was £375. Evans's highest monthly bill, for £686.34, was from Vodafone in June 2006.
Telephone costs are allowed under the rules set out in the Green Book, which governs MPs' expenses, while cameras could conceivably come under "purchase of hardware and software".
But claims are only allowed for "expenditure that it was necessary for a member to incur to ensure that he or she could properly perform his or her parliamentary duties".
Asked why his mobile bills were so high, Evans said it was "due to the fact of roaming [costs] when abroad".
"I still keep in touch with constituents and journalists, so when they phone me I still pick up a hefty chunk of the charges," he explained.
He pointed out that roaming charges were "coming down or being shelved" by many telephone companies, and added: "I will be turning my phone off when abroad and getting my staff to text me any calls I must make.
"I will prioritise them more effectively, hence lower charges."
Of the four cameras, the Conservative MP said: "We are currently using two in the office here ... and one broke, and one was stolen at some stage ... so we are currently operating the two.
"I have bought a video camera at my own expense at the tail end of last year [and] I will use it as a digital camera if necessary."
Guardian reader Tony Hacking brought Evans's expenses to the paper's attention. Evans is his MP.
He said he had compared his accounts with those of Jack Straw, a neighbouring MP, and found that while Straw's appeared to be "straightforward and businesslike", Evans's "seemed more like indulging an interest in electronic gadgets".
Hacking said: "I have worked in business where expenses were fairly but scrupulously expected to be fully explained.
"I have also worked at a senior level in a high school where auditors expected and checked to ensure that I could account for every laptop, mouse and keyboard.
"The governors of the school knew how I was spending every pound of the £2.5m budget."
He said he did not believe Evans's expenses were in the same league as those of some MPs, "but they do look offhand and casual in a way that, if I had the same approach, there would have been serious questions raised about my positions in business and education".
He added: "I have certainly known of headteachers who have been dismissed for 'financial irregularities' of the kind which some MPs have dismissed as 'within the rules'."
Hacking said he was angry that MPs had "muddied the water" since the Telegraph first obtained an unedited disk of expenses details and began publishing revelations in May.
Parliamentarians, he said, had "prevaricated so that the issue is still unresolved and things will drift back to the usual".
"Perhaps MPs should show the same professionalism as teachers and work throughout the recess to develop a framework of professional standards for politicians," he added.
The Guardian's exercise has yielded hundreds of pieces of information from readers, which reporters will continue to examine.
Reader Ian Fairbarn pointed out that Oliver Heald, the Conservative MP for Hertfordshire North East, had on two occasions double claimed for the same month's £250 worth of petty cash.
In both September and October 2007, Heald claimed for September's £250, while in both November and December 2006 he claimed for November's £250.
The MP said the double claims were due to "administrative errors where months were inadvertently mismarked", adding: "I did not claim for other months in each year, so the annual totals did not exceed the maximum."
Without commenting on the individual case, a spokesman for the Commons Department of Resources said this behaviour would probably fall within the rules.
Another reader, Mike Ion, discovered that Mark Pritchard, the Tory MP for the Wrekin, had claimed £131.60 for placing a Conservative advert in the Telford Journal.
The Department of Resources spokesman said MPs were not allowed to claim for the costs of any party political campaigning.
Pritchard said: "From my recollection, this advert was for a surgery." This would not be party political.
