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.

People who use Perth and Kinross social work services have had a “generally positive” experience, inspectors said. The Social Work Inspection Agency also stated that the service had given a firm commitment to make improvements.

Health chiefs are still struggling to tackle the high rate of bed blocking in the Lothians, according to new figures. While the number of people across Scotland left languishing in hospital for more than six weeks has been slashed, the NHS Lothian statistics have remained static.

A team of health workers has won a top award for helping to get drug addict offenders clean and back into work, education or training. Made up of nurses, social workers and a doctor, the 30-strong team provides an alternative to prison for criminals who have committed offences to fund their drug habits.

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.

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.

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.

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.