recent posts by category in pages, not in loop subpages list in sidebar

I’m trying to do two things that to me seems like there should be a simple plugin or hack – but with hours of searching I can’t find anything.

1. I need to display a list of recent articles by category on several pages. The reason for this is that I’m doing a quasi-financial site, and I have a page for about 30 ticker symbols. I want to display a “related articles” thing that shows all the posts published and categorized in that symbol’s subcategory.

I’ve seen a lot of plugins, but they only seem to want to work inside the loop. Does anyone know how to get this functionality on a page?

2. I need to display the subpages (these are the ticker symbol pages) parented to a main page called “stocks” in my sidebar. However, I don’t want it to link to the main stocks page (it needs to have a formatted header that says stocks) or show the black Pages text that seems to be the default for wp_list_pages. Any ideas?

Thanks so much.