The Church of Scotland Guild is probably the most radical part of the Kirk. No, don’t laugh. Despite the caricatures of harmless old ladies knitting and gossiping, records show the Guild has boycotted food from the old apartheid-ridden South Africa, supported people afflicted by Aids, paid for a worker with prostitutes in Edinburgh, helped with a refugee centre in Cairo and attacked the sex industry booths at the last football World Cup.

Jim Murphy, Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, was at the SECC in Glasgow yesterday to hear the views of voluntary organisations on the future of welfare reform.

Patients of a leading haemophilia consultant were used for early research into HIV and AIDS without being told they had the condition, it was claimed yesterday.

Jess Barrow, who helped produce Scotland’s vision for the country’s ageing population, has died. She was 43.

{mosimage}Ms Barrow was a leading figure with Age Concern Scotland for 10 years and was seconded to the Scottish Executive in 2005 to develop its strategy to prepare for the changing demographics of the country.

Yesterday, tributes were paid to Ms Barrow and the role she played in improving the lives of older people.

Malcolm Chisholm, who worked with Ms Barrow most recently as Communities Minister, said: “She was particularly committed to promoting the cause of older people in the broadest sense and she had quite a lot of success in doing so.

“She was absolutely central to the development of the Strategy for Scotland with an Ageing Population and she had such a positive view of older people.

“Although she had been a great campaigner for services, she always emphasised the enormous contribution older people could make to society. I valued her very highly in her role. She was a wonderful person who we will all miss.”

An out-of-hours health service that saw a GP prescribe painkillers to a patient who died in agony a few hours later has been criticised.

A disabled woman was yesterday celebrating a £2500 compensation payout after a tattoo parlour refused her entry, saying it did not “do people like that”.

Scotland’s £3.2bn voluntary sector is “on the wire” following a shortfall in funding from local authorities and a decrease in public donations.

The number of background reports sought for young offenders in Scotland’s biggest city has doubled in just two years. The rising workload in Glasgow comes as one of the clearest signs yet of just how many children are causing serious concern to authorities.

Civic leaders in Glasgow were last night accused of running out of ideas by a report they helped to fund. Demos, a London-based think-tank, said the city’s council and other authorities had left whole communities and neighbourhoods behind as they chased a “formulaic” vision of regeneration.

One-in-four Scots children is living in poverty, according to a new report released today by a leading children’s charity. Barnardo’s Scotland said about 250,000 youngsters are currently living below the breadline.