People with learning difficulties such as Down’s syndrome are to be tagged and monitored by satellite technology in a controversial pilot project.

A hospital worker with a grudge against the NHS may be trying to kill patients by sabotaging crucial equipment, police fear.

Urgent action is needed to prevent a “cancer time bomb” exploding as a result of soaring obesity rates, a leading specialist warns today.

Downing Street today sought to play down the row over a call by industry minister Margaret Hodge to give established British families priority social housing over immigrants.

A controversial Unicef report placing the UK bottom of the league for child well-being is really talking about England, a statistician has said. The report, which was criticised by the government, placed the UK at the bottom of 21 industrialised nations. But a further study of the report’s data reveals Scots and Welsh children are much happier than in England.

{mosimage}Dr Kevin McConway told Radio 4’s More Or Less that some of the Unicef conclusions were based on England. Dr McConway, of the Open University, studied the original survey data Unicef used to compile its report. Unicef, the United Nations childrens’ agency, based its report on 40 indicators including poverty, family, relationships and health. “Britain came off pretty badly with most of the dimensions looked at,” he said. “Some of the data was based on a World Health Organisation which was done separately in England, Scotland and Wales and it wasn’t done at all in Northern Ireland.

“In the Unicef report – which placed the UK at the bottom – in terms of the data they got from the WHO they only used the English data. For example they asked 11, 13 and 15 -year-olds if they found other classmates kind and helpful – England did very badly on that with only 40% but in Scotland and Wales it was much higher – it was two thirds in both of those areas. This would have put Scotland and Wales in the middle of the pack of other countries covered in the Unicef survey, whereas England is doing pretty badly.”

Almost one million children are trapped in overcrowded living conditions in England, a housing charity warned. Shelter said Government figures showed 955,000 youngsters are living in “cramped, squalid” housing, a rise of 50,000 on three years ago.

{mosimage}The charity is calling on the Government to update current legislation on overcrowding, which does not take into account infants under one year old and in which living rooms and even kitchens can count as bedrooms. Changing the legal definition of overcrowding dating back to 1935, which also counts children between one and 10 as “half a person”, would begin to tackle the crisis, Shelter said. Overcrowding can cause depression, ill-health, lack of sleep and social isolation, while the lack of space makes it difficult for children to study, play and develop normally, the charity said. The Housing Act 2004 set out powers to update the statutory definition of overcrowding, but it has still not been changed.

Shelter has launched a viral advertising campaign online to highlight the issue and urge the Government to take action. It features a mock news broadcast of a politician on the campaign trail posing with a baby and then throwing it into the crowd. It is voiced by Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow and directed by The Thick of It writer and director Armando Iannucci.

A U-turn has cleared the way for scientists to create hybrid animal-human embryos for stem cell research. The government move followed a White Paper proposal banning the hybrids that attracted criticism from scientists, charities, patient groups and MPs.

The NHS in England could save more than £300m a year by being more efficient when prescribing drugs, the government spending watchdog says. GPs could make more use of cheaper, non-brand versions of the most common prescription drugs, without harming care, the National Audit Office said.

A growing gap between the earnings of Britain’s richest and poorest has been seized on by critics of Prime Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown as proof Labour has failed to make the country “fairer”.

More young women who are diagnosed with breast cancer could be spared painful doses of chemotherapy after scientists proved that a readily available drug offers an equally effective treatment.