Housing must be placed at Scotland’s political and financial heart over the coming four years and beyond if we are to ensure everyone has a home. That will be the message – at a major housing conference – from housing and homelessness charity, Shelter Scotland.

A move to privatise residential care homes for the elderly in the Highlands may be reviewed. The SNP group on Highland Council have asked officials to revisit the decision to transfer them to the private sector.

Wearing only a flower-patterned bikini and flip flops, the young Thai woman politely explained the charge would be £60 for a half-hour massage. The exchange might be typical of ones which take place every night and day in the city’s saunas. But this was happening in a smart tenement flat on Leith Walk.

A senior nurse who was caught watching porn in the residents’ lounge of a Scottish care home was yesterday struck off. The Nursing and Midwifery Council found Jessie MacPhee, 42, guilty of sleeping on the job as well as five counts of abusing colleagues and one of improperly storing medicine.

A move to privatise residential care homes for the elderly in the Highlands may be reviewed. The SNP group on Highland Council have asked officials to revisit the decision to transfer them to the private sector.

Aberdeen city council is defending plans to reorganise social work provision at the north-east’s biggest hospital. It has been suggested the permanent on-site team at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary could be

More children are being locked up in Scotland’s only asylum detention centre. Inspectors found 122 youngsters had been held at the Dungavel House unit in Lanarkshire in the first 11 months of last year, up from 94 in the whole of 2005.

The new administration in East Lothian has ordered an inquiry into the controversial £130,000 redundancy payment promised to the authority’s outgoing chief executive. The SNP and Liberal Democrat coalition has demanded that lawyers investigate the details of the payment to John Lindsay which was agreed by the council’s previous Labour administration.

The number of inmates freed early from Scottish prisons who have been sent back to jail for breaching their electronic tagging orders has nearly tripled in the past five months.

For Anne MacDonald becoming a foster parent was the fulfilment of an ambition she had harboured since childhood. Mrs MacDonald is one of more than 2000 foster carers throughout Scotland who have opened up their homes and hearts to some of society’s most vulnerable and needy youngsters.