TEN years ago this week, illegal music downloading site, OiNK, was raided by police in Middlesbrough.

A 24-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law after the site was discovered to be registered under his name.

At roughly the same time of the arrest, Dutch police raided an office in Amsterdam, where they seized the site’s servers and database details.

Undercover officers had infiltrated the website to secure data for individual prosecutions amongst 180,000 users, which became a cause of fear for many that used the site.

Detective Sergeant Tony Keogh, of Cleveland Police, told The Northern Echo: "This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online."

Also that week, unions warned Electrolux that the closure of their North-East factory in Spennymoor would threaten thousands of jobs.

The company aimed to move manufacturing to another country such as Poland, where it would be cheaper, after being hit by global competition and falling prices.

Jeff Morland, of the Amicus section of Unite, said: "For every job there is at Electrolux, there are at least three more that depend on it. There are a lot of people who would be affected."

While jobs were threatened one day, there was potential for new jobs on another as permission was granted to build the world’s biggest dry dock at a council planning meeting.

The four-year argument over dismantling controversial “ghost ships” came to a close, when Peter Stephenson, chief executive Able UK, said that the dock would “establish the Tees Valley as world-class centre for the marine and renewable energy industries of the 21st Century.”

Police were called to the five-hour planning meeting in Hartlepool and angry members of the public were removed.

On a lighter note, former professional footballers visited Ferryhill Leisure Centre in County Durham to speak to children as part of the the Show Racism the Red Card campaign.

Former Middlesbrough defender Dean Gordon and ex-Newcastle star John Anderson appeared at the day-long event to answer questions.

Anderson, who played for Newcastle between 1981 and 1992, said: "Sport is very multicultural now. Things have changed today and racism is something that needs to be addressed."