WATCH: Little Mix bituin visits cancer charity 

Dreaming of a white Christmas? – find out the North East festive forecast

Santa Paws: Pets get festive in South Tyneside

‘Don’t let rabbits freeze in hutches’ warns South Shields animal carer

Pals to battle it out at next election for South Tyneside seat

‘We fled home full of mice’ – family say Jarrow flat is full of pests

1 Man banned from South Shields pubs after rock attack on woman outside Roxanne’s

2 ‘We fled home full of mice’ – family say Jarrow flat is full of pests

3 Nuisance neighbour booted out of council house after subjecting residents to loud music hell

4 ‘Drink-drive’ arrest after passenger hurt when car ploughed into garden wall

5 Police called after Xbox-obsessed man ripped up snap of partner’s gran

1 Council faces yet more cuts after losing £7m in funding

3 Extra 600 flock to A&E – medics urge people with non-vital cases to stay away

TWO special guests turned out to spread some seasonal goodwill at a South Tyneside cancer charity.

Little Mix star Jade Thirlwall and Paralympic swimming champion Josef Craig called in at Cancer Connections to meet some of the people the charity helps.

The duo are patrons of the organisation, which is based in Harton Lane, South Shields, and offers therapies, advice and support to cancer patients and their families.

Jade, 21, of Laygate, South Shields, caused excitement among Little Mix fans.

She won the X Factor as part of the group, alongside bandmates Perrie Edwards, Jesy Nelson and Leigh-Anne Pinnock, in 2011.

She said: “It’s really nice to come to Cancer Connections and see the staff and all the people that they help.

“There’s a lot of kids here too and it’s really nice to see them before Christmas – there’s some Little Mix fans and a lot of adult Little Mix fans as well.

“It’s been really lovely just to join in and help out a little bit.”

Josef, 17, from Jarrow, won a gold medal and broke the world record twice at the 2012 Paralympic Games, and also earned an MBE.

He said: “It feels absolutely great to be here.

“I haven’t been here for a while and that saddens me. I feel like it’s time to start giving back a lot more. It’s absolutely fantastic to meet up with people because these are the people that Deborah Roberts and her team are always here for.

“These are people who are suffering with a potentially terminal disease so it’s great that they have this facility. It’s really great to get the chance to talk to everybody.”

Jade also visited Cancer Connections last week to join in the fun at a kids’ Christmas party.

She said: “The Christmas party was so lovely, it was so cute.

“All the little ones were there and they were all excited to see Santa and everyone got a little present.

“It was a really nice atmosphere and it’s nice to have something like that just before Christmas, especially for those that need a little bit of a lift.”

Pair remanded in custody over house assault

For you to enjoy all the features of this website Shields Gazette requires permission to use cookies.

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.

This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.

Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.

The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:

A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the \'Your Online Choices\' website by clicking here.

Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the \'Your Online Choices\' website by clicking here.

This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.

This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don\'t just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.

ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.

Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.

We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.

Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.

Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.

We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.