HEARTS FC have teamed up with a council’s youth justice team to tackle young offending in the region.

Aberdeen City Council’s decision to make £27m of cuts as well as a council tax freeze has led to angry reaction.

Funding is being withdrawn from several care organisations, and social work services, sports centres and libraries will also be affected. The art deco Bon Accord Baths – the city’s oldest pool – is to close down, as is the children’s farm at Doonies.

Kate Dean, leader of the Lib Dem and SNP administration, admitted they had been faced with difficult choices.

She told BBC Scotland: “This is not what any of us came in to local government to do. “Some hard decisions have had to be made. We have tried to provide as much as we can.”

The level of council tax was frozen, as it was in Aberdeenshire, Moray, Orkney and Shetland. However, Aberdeen’s opposition Labour leader Len Ironside did not accept the administration’s arithmetic.

HUNDREDS of jobs will be lost to ensure the SNP election commitment to freeze council tax is met, it emerged yesterday, as more than half of Scotland’s local authorities announced their budgets.

LAST year, more than 3000 calls were made to the Fife Domestic and Sexual Abuse Partnership, most of which involved children in some way.

Scotland’s prison population has reached an all-time high, according to the latest figures. A total of 7609 prisoners were in custody last Friday, around 1000 above capacity and nearly 20% more than 10 years ago.

A service that aims to tackle ill-health in Scotland’s workplaces was launched in Dundee yesterday.

An Aberdeen charity for the homeless fears it will have to close four of its centres if it loses council funding.

FOUR Chinese women trafficked into Scotland by gangs to work in the sex industry have been found during a series of raids by police.

A major charity for carers and users of community care services in the Highlands has warned that it will close if local authority funding is withdrawn.

The survivors of childhood abuse in care were yesterday promised “truth and reconciliation”. Most welcomed the truth. Some rejected the reconciliation.

The Scottish Government announced a special forum where victims can tell their stories and, perhaps, come to terms with their experiences.

As first revealed by The Herald last year, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be set up, a body that will expose abuse but not punish abusers.

It was unveiled in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, by children’s minister Adam Ingram.

“We are considering good practice examples for taking forward a forum to give survivors the chance to speak about their experiences to help come to terms with the past,” Mr Ingram told MSPs. “This will provide an invaluable opportunity to establish the facts, learn from the suffering and use the experience to help us protect and provide for children in the future.”

Support groups have long campaigned for a place where their stories can be told. But they remained split on Mr Ingram’s proposal.