A Scot at the centre of a £35m illicit drugs-smuggling operation will be sentenced in the United States this week.

Alex Salmond and the Scottish Executive were last night accused of “getting ahead of themselves” after suggesting Whitehall was sympathetic to Holyrood making new laws on gun crime in Scotland.

A Scottish man who has spent more than 20 years on death row in the US is to face a retrial after his conviction was overturned for a second time.

Reality TV at its most grotesque, or a bold solution to the problem of protecting the growing number of children at risk of abuse or neglect from living with drug- or drink-addicted parents?

The news released last week by the Scottish Executive that nearly 160,000 children in Scotland may be living with an alcoholic or drug-addicted parent is one of those shattering statistics that are almost impossible to take in.

Help the Aged and Age Concern, the UK’s two biggest old-people’s charities, are discussing a merger. This is the third time in 10 years that the two organisations have attempted to join together and they are expected to make an announcement on a their move to create a single charity in November.

It was intended to confront some of Scotland’s wildest young men and give them the opportunity to turn their lives around. Dubbed the “last-chance saloon”, the Airborne initiative – a nine-week “boot camp” at Braidwood House in Lanarkshire – tackled the most persistent offending behaviour and attempted to steer youths on to the right path.

A £100 million Scottish Executive crackdown on youth crime has had no measurable effect on offending, according to a damning report published today.

The other day I showed my children a picture of a woman aged 100 waterskiing. As a 56-year-old, beginning the countdown to my free bus pass, I found this image of superannuated athleticism positively inspirational. They found it rather repulsive.

More than 120 schools and services are to be hit as thousands of council workers stage a one-day strike over swingeing cuts and possible redundancies.