Gordon Brown will announce today that the government is to spend an extra £1bn to lift 200,000 children out of poverty as he uses his final budget to help put Labour back on track to meet its target for alleviating deprivation among the young.

First-time passport applicants aged over 16 will face a list of up to 200 personal questions when compulsory interviews are introduced later this spring. Hundreds of thousands of people, mainly teenagers, will be grilled about their lives by a Government official in a dry run for the introduction of ID cards.

A “sadistic” foster mother was found guilty yesterday of subjecting three children in her care to a horrifying catalogue of physical and mental abuse over 20 years.

{mosimage}Eunice Spry, 62, beat the children with sticks and metal bars, scrubbed their skin with sandpaper and forced them to eat lard, bleach, vomit and even their own faeces.

She treated the children, two girls and a boy, as if they were her slaves, ordering one of them to stay in a wheelchair for four years even though she could walk so Spry could claim benefits for her.

Spry, a Jehovah’s Witness and a pillar of her local community, would punish the children because she thought they were possessed by the devil.

Once she kept two of them imprisoned, naked and starving, in a room for a month.

She forced them to run up and down the stairs and “tortured” them by making them take part in the “invisible chair” game, squatting for hours on end until they collapsed – then they were beaten.

Men are being scared away from joining the teaching profession by a wave of “paedophile hysteria”, a leading Tory has warned. Boris Johnson said school staffrooms are increasingly dominated by female teachers because men are afraid of attracting false child abuse allegations.

New rules requiring religious adoption agencies to accept gay couples as adoptive parents are due to be debated in the House of Lords. Church leaders say Parliament has not had enough time to debate the changes, part of the new Equality Act.

A major study appears to provide hard evidence that eating a high-fat diet increases a postmenopausal woman’s risk of breast cancer. Animal research has found a high fat intake boosts cancer risk, but other studies in humans were inconclusive.

When it comes to prejudice against people with a disability, it is just as likely to come from a disabled as a non-disabled person, according to a new study. And not only are disabled people as likely to be prejudiced, there is also a tendency to rank impairments in terms of how undesirable they are.

What similarities does South Africa have with England in terms of workforce development in social care? Surprisingly, says Vuyani Nkalitshana of Johannesburg,  “quite a lot.”

Directors of Children’s Services in England have welcomed all those aspects of today’s Budget Statement from the Chancellor which will help local authorities sustain their efforts to reduce and end child poverty.

Providing care for the rising number of elderly residents is a problem that needs urgent attention, the director of Hertfordshire’s adult care services has warned. Responding to the Local Government Association’s (LGA) survey on cost shunting from the NHS to local authorities, Sarah Pickup says adult social care funding needed to be addressed immediately.