A former soldier who bravely took on penny-pinching NHS bosses in his fight against terminal cancer has died, aged 37. Mark Bannister's wife has revealed how her husband was forced to LIE to doctors in order to get the life-prolonging treatment he had been denied due to a cruel postcode lottery. But after wasting six months of precious time trying to obtain the drug Avastin, Mark's cancer was too advanced for the medicine to have any effect. The dad-of-two succumbed to the brain tumour he had been battling for nine years at around 6am on Monday morning, with his wife Karen, 33, at his side. In tribute to her husband, who served in Northern Ireland and Bosnia during nine years in the army, grieving Karen said: "The Avastin didn't have any effect but we had to fight for six months in order to get it. "In all that time his tumour had been growing. In the end, he had to claim that he was living at another address in order to get the treatment. Who knows what would have happened if he had got the drug sooner - I truly believe it would have helped him.
A young otter wades through a lake with his eyes set on an older rival’s fish .
Tina O’Brien, 54, from East Midlands, met Frederick Allchorne, now 62, when she was 15 .
With an abandoned tricycle sitting in an empty corridor, this derelict but once grand mansion could be the setting for The Shining .
football club has scored an own goal after it had to embarrassingly rename its stadium in honour of the DEVIL .
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IN THE not so MISTY MOUNTAINS of Wiltshire, there lies an abandoned hobbit house .
A Hereford woman has lost 10st 3lbs after ditching her £260-a-month takeaway habit .
A Cheryl Fernandez-Versini lookalike has slammed skinny-shamers, after seeing her celebrity doppelganger abused for her tiny frame .
Red squirrels are well known for their intelligence and curiosity but when one snapper caught this furry little guy trying to take his own self-portrait he couldn't help but be taken aback .
AT first glance these images could easily be mistaken for photographs, but they are in-fact real life drawings created using nothing but coloured pencils .