Up to 150 lives could be saved each year thanks to the rollout of a national bowel cancer screening programme, it was announced today. The move will see the introduction of a nationwide scheme targeting all men and women in Scotland aged between 50 and 74.

New powers allowing police to issue on-the-spot fines for anti-social behaviour have come into force. Dumfries and Galloway Police has promised to use the legislation to help tackle disorder issues across the region more promptly.

The level of ambulance cover on an island is “unacceptable” at present, according to a Highland councillor. Drew Millar claimed that for the whole of the Isle of Skye there was one ambulance with no paramedic in its crew during an eight-hour period last week.

Ten teenagers have been responsible for a massive crime wave in Edinburgh involving mor than 1600 offences, it has been revealed. Children as young as 14 have carried out hundreds of crimes such as robbery, serious assault, housebreaking, fire-raising and extortion.

A new DVD has been launched to provide information on the Criminal Justice System for victims and witnesses of racist crime. The 15-minute programme aims to increase the confidence of ethnic minority communities in the criminal justice system and to encourage victims of racist crime to report incidents to the police.

Up to 100 nurses, lawyers, civil servants and other professional people are contacting Scotland’s national date-rape hotline every year to report being sexually assaulted after having their drinks spiked.

{mosimage}The group Crisis, which operates the country’s only dedicated drug-rape support service, says it is receiving an average of two calls a week, the overwhelming majority coming from professional women who claim they were drugged in wine bars.

The charity says Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Helensburgh are three particular hotspots.

Campaigners say the true scale of the crime is far higher, with some estimates putting the figure at as many as 1,300 victims a year. But police are sceptical about the claims, insisting the common denominator in the cases investigated is the large amount of alcohol drunk by the complainer.

Jane Cumming, from Crisis, the Scottish arm of national date-rape charity The Roofie Foundation, which launched the hotline in 2005, said: “The profile of victims has changed. The calls we are getting are definitely increasingly from the professional classes.

Scotland is “sleepwalking” into a diabetes epidemic that will cause hundreds of thousands of people to die young, experts warn today. Research from Edinburgh University reveals the number of people diagnosed with type-2 diabetes will soar by 60 per cent within the next ten years.

A nursing home manager who spent five years stealing cash from an elderly resident as she lay dying from cancer has escaped a jail sentence. Kerry Smith paid back the cash, despite her 79-year-old victim dying before she saw a penny.

Child dealers of heroin, cocaine and other banned substances are being arrested at the rate of one every four days in the latest sign that Scotland is in the grip of a drugs epidemic. More than 300 children – some as young as 10 – have been charged with supplying in the past three years and a total of 20kgs of drugs seized by police.

Scotland’s army of persistent young offenders has swelled to another record high. Figures released yesterday showed a 6% rise in the number of children classed among the country’s most troubled and troublesome.