• Retired Army general Sir Walter Walker has set up a private surveillance network to monitor industrial militants (especially on Merseyside) and others regarded as political "enemies". It sounds like a Dad's Army version of intelligence gathering where agents report events using secret code numbers: 3 means people are setting up road blocks, 4 means they are looting shops ...

• "The Oil Sheikhs of Liverpool" on page 3 is the first in a series about a time in the 1960s when fortunes could be made by getting planning permission for petrol stations. One successful applicant was an unknown woman using the false name "Ada Evans". The council gave her permission despite advice from officials that it would be a "visual intrusion" in a residential area, that there was already a petrol station 250 yards away and that vehicles leaving the site would be in danger due to a blind spot caused by a bridge.

• Housing cooperatives: what they are and how they work (pages 6 and 7).

• Bear Brand, the troubled hosiery firm, is facing closure with the loss of 300 jobs. The company had been bailed out a year earlier with a £375,000 government loan but the government has turned down a new request for money (page 12).

• Eric Spencer Stevenson, the council architect at the centre of the Kirkby corruption affair has resigned, seven months after the Free Press published its exposé (page 8).

• Trade unionists are joining forces with Friends of the Earth to investigate a Liverpool company which is Britain's only refiner of sperm whale oil (page 9).

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