Jobs in Britain’s manufacturing sector have been slashed by an average of 60% since 1979.

Back then, manufacturing accounted for 25% of all jobs in Britain, but today the figure stands at merely 8%.

The creation of the clothes retailer Zara has catapulted its founder, Amancio Ortega, into becoming the third wealthiest man in the world.

Zara opened its first doors in 1975 in A Coruna in northern Spain. Originally Ortega and his business partner Rosalia Mera wanted to call the shop Zorba after the film, but a bar down the street had already bagged the name, so they opted for Zara instead.

Olhão council has given up trying to collect money owed in rent from its stock of social housing and has simply written it off, to the cheery delight of skint residents

The council agreed in its October assembly meeting to write off rent arrears and in the future to reduce its 15% interest charge on overdue rent, and replace it with a gentler but by no means cheap 5.5% on monies outstanding.

The police force which conducted the dramatic and televised search of Sir Cliff Richard’s home have been criticised by a committee of MPs.

They called the search “utterly inept” and said that South Yorkshire Police should apologise to Sir Cliff for the “enormous and irreparable damage” to his reputation.

Plans are in place for new credit cards in Britain to be issued with fingerprint scanners instead of using PINs.

The card will be activated by the holder putting their finger over a sensor on the card. It would no longer be needed to put the card into a terminal and then tap in the four-digit code.

Amazon reported a loss of nearly half a billion pounds just in the third quarter of the year and predicts that the final quarter of this year will also see a bigger-than-expected loss.

The internet retailing giant reported a third-quarter loss of $437m (£273m) – a considerable increase over the $41m loss it had in the same period last year.

The British private equity fund Apax Partners, which manages a portfolio of more than €20 billion, wants to buy the train crash that is Portugal Telecom and has set Portuguese lawyers the task of poring over the figures and contracts to see if there are any nasty surprises in store for a new owner.

Apax Partners has appointed lawyers to start digging not long after the French company Altice declared an interest in buying PT.

The Iberian lynx has just been allocated a 2,000 hectare protected space in which to live, hunt and hopefully to breed. The added bonus fir this rare species is a ready supply of plump, unsuspecting rabbits courtesy of the ICNF.

A meeting in Mértola, chaired by the Secretary of State for Planning and Nature Conservation, saw the first protocols agreed between the Institute of Nature Conservation and Forestry (ICNF) and the owners of land where the lynx will be able to roam freely without being shot at.