Pensioners at the centre of a controversial row over care fees are to receive £100 from Dumfries and Galloway Council.

Scotland’s drugs minister has said he is “sympathetic” to UK Government plans to upgrade cannabis to a class B drug.

Major health problems including binge drinking and bad eating habits are more common in the west of Scotland – even among the middle classes.

One educates some of the most privileged children in society while the other serves some of the poorest – but it is the further education college in the east end of Glasgow which could lose its charitable status following a ruling yesterday.

A Care worker has been suspended from a sheltered housing complex in Aberdeen following allegations she used a mobile phone to take a photograph of a dead elderly woman lying in an open coffin.

The Big Lottery Fund has announced  an award of £16 million from its well-being programme, matched by a further £2 million from Comic Relief to support ‘Moving People’, a mental health charity partnership led by Mental Health Media, Mind, Rethink and Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.

Someone has a heart attack in Scotland every 15 minutes according to new figures. The British Heart Foundation (BHF) said around one in 10 Scots also live with heart and circulatory disease.

More and more women are being sent to Cornton Vale Prison and more of them display bad health, addiction and history of abuse, according to a new report.

Conditions at Scotland’s only female prison, Cornton Vale, have been heavily criticised in a new HMI report. Despite listing six recommendations to improve the prison in 2006, inspectors found five had not been implemented.

Judges refer to it as the “bog standard murder”. One drunken young man argues with another after a night of binge drinking. In anger he reaches for the sharpest thing to hand, a broken bottle or a knife, and lashes out.