Major health problems including binge drinking and bad eating habits are more common in the west of Scotland – even among the middle classes.

The Big Lottery Fund has announced  an award of £16 million from its well-being programme, matched by a further £2 million from Comic Relief to support ‘Moving People’, a mental health charity partnership led by Mental Health Media, Mind, Rethink and Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.

Someone has a heart attack in Scotland every 15 minutes according to new figures. The British Heart Foundation (BHF) said around one in 10 Scots also live with heart and circulatory disease.

More and more women are being sent to Cornton Vale Prison and more of them display bad health, addiction and history of abuse, according to a new report.

Conditions at Scotland’s only female prison, Cornton Vale, have been heavily criticised in a new HMI report. Despite listing six recommendations to improve the prison in 2006, inspectors found five had not been implemented.

Judges refer to it as the “bog standard murder”. One drunken young man argues with another after a night of binge drinking. In anger he reaches for the sharpest thing to hand, a broken bottle or a knife, and lashes out.

Almost half of all murders in Scotland are committed by offenders already on bail, an international conference on violence reduction was told yesterday.

Council bosses traded sexual favours for courses and promotion, a tribunal heard yesterday. Tom McNeil, 52, claims that he was forced to quit his senior post with Aberdeen City Council after he saw two managers having sex in the office.

The number of cases of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) has risen steeply in Scotland. Chlamydia cases are four-times that of 1996, and cases of infectious syphilis increased more than 10-fold.

Regulators are set to rule on whether a fee-paying school should continue to enjoy charitable status. The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulators (OSCR) will decide if the High School of Dundee meets a new “public benefit” assessment.