Ministers were today urged to investigate the slaying of mental health charity worker Ashleigh Ewing.

As devoted foster parents, Vincent and Pauline Matherick have provided a stable family home for almost 30 vulnerable children.

Children as young as eight are to be protected from online sexual abuse in a new initiative by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).

A young mental health worker was stabbed to death with four knives by a patient who had been freed from a psychiatric hospital after threatening to murder the Queen.

{mosimage}Ashleigh Ewing, 22, was on a routine visit to the home of Ronald Dixon, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, when he launched an attack that left her with 39 stab wounds.

Dixon, 35, thought that he was the son of Henry VIII and had been arrested at Buckingham Palace four months earlier, when he told police that he wanted to see his mother – the Queen – and planned to kill her.

He was treated at a psychiatric hospital in January last year, but by May he had been allowed to return to his home in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Metropolitan Police had taken his threats on the Queen’s life seriously enough to order checks on his whereabouts before she visited the North East in April.

Ms Ewing, who was sent to Dixon’s flat to deliver a letter, was six months into her first full-time job after graduating from Northumbria University.

She was employed as a support worker by Mental Health Matters, a charity that provides community services to clients with psychiatric problems and that managed the property where Dixon was living.

Newcastle Crown Court was told that Dixon, who called himself King Ron, had been refusing to take antipsychotic drugs, was drinking alcohol and had become distressed by mounting debts. He was showing signs of a relapse into a psychotic state.

An American based company has had its plans for an 80 bedroom assisted living’ care home in Hale approved by Trafford’s planning committee.

New procedures have been launched making it easier to detect suspected abuse of vulnerable adults in South Yorkshire.

A dramatic increase in mental illness cases among cannabis users has intensified pressure on Labour to end its “soft” drugs policy.

Drug treatment in Swindon is undergoing an overhaul after the service failed national standards. Swindon Council has sacked former drug service suppliers while two new contractors have been brought in.

A Forest of Dean social worker who molested a teenage girl has been spared a prison sentence so he can care for his bedridden young wife.

Planning consent for a new care home to be built in Middlesbrough has been granted.