Social care charity Quarriers is to call on the next Scottish Executive to do more to back community-based work with children and to encourage integrated working.

A ban on the sale of 10-pack cigarettes is among a range of tough measures recommended in a report to protect children from the “tobacco trap”. The British Medical Association report also called for a rise in the cigarette purchase age to 18 from 16.

Engineers were fighting to stem the flow of millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh last night as a health alert was issued for ten miles of coastline.

A new computerised cancer screening system planned for Scotland is unreliable and “dangerous to patient care”, according to GPs. Doctors are calling for the cervical cancer screening system, which is due to be launched in Scotland on May 28, to be delayed so technical issues can be ironed out.

Scotland’s justice system is failing to protect the growing number of women who are victims of stalking, an investigation by The Scotsman can reveal. Ten years after a specific law on stalking was introduced south of the Border, Scotland still has not introduced an equivalent piece of legislation.

Doctors are demanding a halt to a new computerised cancer screening system amid fears it undermines patient care. A national, paperless programme for cervical cancer tests is due to be launched in Scotland in five weeks.

As the spring sunshine arrives to awaken us from our winter gloom, Scottish scientists have finally clocked on to why the changing seasons affect our state of mind. Researchers from Edinburgh University have identified a part of the brain which co-ordinates the annual biological clock.

Nurses frustrated with abuse from drunken patients have pinned up posters in hospital waiting rooms in Angus showing the growing number of alcohol-related admissions.

Immigration officials and police have launched a series of dawn raids across the west of Scotland in the first crackdown on so-called sham marriages. They said West Africans have been arranging bogus marriages to British citizens to gain entry to the UK under false pretences.

A woman raped at knifepoint by a teenage heroin addict revealed yesterday that thoughts of her young granddaughter sustained her during the terrifying ordeal. Anne Doherty, 50, above, thought she was going to die when she was attacked while working at a care home.