Immigrants should carry out community work before being granted UK citizenship, Gordon Brown will say. The chancellor is expected to tell a seminar on Britishness that the move would help new arrivals settle.

A young woman manager who was sacked because her plan to adopt a child would make her “no bloody use” to her employers won a landmark employment tribunal case yesterday.

A boy of eight who weighs 14 stone could be taken into care in a landmark step in the fight against childhood obesity. Connor McCreaddie, who is more than three times the average weight for a child his age, has broken four beds and five bicycles because he is so heavy.

{mosimage}At one stage he weighed 15 and a half stone. He wears adult clothes because no school uniforms can be found to fit him and has missed weeks of classes because he cannot manage the short walk to school without getting breathless.

Tomorrow a child protection conference will take place, which could lead to moves to take Connor into care unless his diet is improved. It is feared that his weight could cause long-term health problems such as diabetes or heart disease.

Two specialist obesity nurses, a consultant paediatrician, the deputy headmaster of his school, a police officer and two social workers will sit on the panel which will decide his future.

He could be put on the child protection register, along with victims of physical or sexual abuse, or on the less serious children in need register.

Connor’s mother, 35-year-old Nicola McKeown, said: “If Connor gets taken into care that is the worst scenario there could be.

The number of people suffering from dementia will increase by 154% in the next 45 years, according to a report by some of the top researchers of the illness in Britain, with the number affected rising from 700,000 today to 1.735m in 2051.

Families who harbour young men with guns face eviction from their homes and being moved out of their communities under a pioneering police crackdown.

The security services are conducting background checks on imams who provide religious and pastoral care in jails. The vetting, part of the effort to prevent inmates from being radicalised, is in addition to the routine counter-terrorism checks conducted by the Prison Service and a further check by the Criminal Records Bureau.

Women with diabetes are not receiving enough support from the NHS before pregnancy, as services are “poor and uncoordinated”, a report says.

One in six calls to a 24-hour helpline last year concerning mental health came from girls contemplating suicide. Some rang ChildLine while attempting to kill themselves, while others had tried to take their own life, and were thinking of doing so again.

Almost one in ten people suspect that a child is being sexually abused, a survey has shown. The YouGov poll of more than 2,600 adults showed 7% had such concerns but nearly one in four (23%) of them failed to report their suspicions due to a “lack of evidence”.

Violent and abusive patients are costing the NHS more than £100m a year, according to a Panorama investigation. An estimated 75,000 staff were attacked last year, costing the NHS in extra security, absenteeism, training of staff and legal bills, it reports.