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.

A small cash payment made to hundreds of adults with learning disabilities attending day-care centres is to be scrapped – to save £42,000. The move has been described as “callous” and guaranteed to cause massive upset among some of Glasgow’s most vulnerable citizens.

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.

One in five children reporting sex abuse to a helpline said their abuser was a woman, a new study has revealed. A report into the findings by ChildLine Scotland, said more needs to be done to raise awareness of child sex abuse by women, after the charity found 20 per cent of young victims who called its telephone support line said the perpetrator was female.

Dentists in Scotland’s most deprived areas are to get extra cash to help care for their patients. About 350 dentists are set to qualify for extra payments of up to £9,000 to improve their facilities and allow them to spend more time with patients.

Casual sex is more common today than a decade ago, according to the co-ordinator of the Catholic Church’s controversial “cash-for-babies” scheme, which celebrates its tenth anniversary next week.

A landmark ruling which brought hope to thousands of elderly people waiting for free personal care was yesterday exposed as utterly toothless. The Court of Session heard a decision by the public services watchdog was not legally binding, and regardless of whether it was judged to be right or wrong in law it would not end the row about councils operating waiting lists for free personal care.