maciiligan (maciiligan)

In pictures: Hit-filled day two at Victorious Festival Thousands packed Southsea Common for another day of music at Victorious Festival. The summer sunshine gave way to showers on Saturday, prompting festival goers to pull on ponchos and jackets. The Black Keys topped the bill with The Happy Mondays, Nile Rodgers & CHIC, Bastille and Dizzee Rascal among the other performers on Saturday. The festival draws to a close on Sunday with headliners Kasabian, who are joined on the bill by The Streets and Reef.

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Reverend aims to strike a chord with congregation A rock 'n' roll loving Reverend is hoping to hit the right note with his new congregation in his seaside parish. Known as the Rockin' Rev, the Reverend David Croucher moved to Felixstowe, Suffolk with his wife, Chris, in July and was recently announced as the new deacon of St Felix Catholic Church. Croucher said people often question how well the dog collar and guitar go together, however he has played at care homes, monthly folk masses and had a regular slot at a local pub. He said: "It's quite funny because people are often shocked when I tell them I am an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church." Croucher, who was born in South Wales, first picked up a guitar in the 1960s after being inspired by his "favourite band ever", The Shadows. As a teenager he built his own guitar out of pieces of wood. It was not until he had finished his O-Levels that his Dad took him to Cardiff to get a proper guitar for £35, which took two years to pay off.

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It’s always Shark Week in Putin’s world. That doesn’t bode well for Trump’s Ukraine peace hopes “I would say that the orca is, without doubt, a formidable predator, yet it is also a highly intelligent creature, a cunning one,” he said. “The collective West, for its part, was assigned a specific definition in the Soviet era, which remains current to this day – the sharks of imperialism.” Sharks and orcas may not quite be the same class of animal, but Putin continued with his analogy. “The thrust of my remarks was that if anyone attempts to drag us down the food chain and devour us, to consume us, they would be well advised to expect their teeth to be broken,” he said. “And Russia stands ready to do precisely that, despite the insatiable appetites and ever-sharpening teeth of these sharks.”

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It’s always Shark Week in Putin’s world. That doesn’t bode well for Trump’s Ukraine peace hopes Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Kyrgyzstan this week for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, a regional confab that also brought together Xi Jinping of China, Narendra Modi of India and Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran. The leaders convened in the capital Bishkek during a week of high geopolitical anxiety, with a fresh round of tit-for-tat strikes by Iran and the US, Russian drones and missiles pummeling Ukraine and Germany accusing Russia of being responsible for a drone attack targeting Leipzig airport last month. But Putin appeared firmly in his comfort zone. At a press conference late Tuesday, he seemed to go out of his way to make one point explicit: nations exist in a state of Darwinian competition, and Russia will prevail in a survival-of-the-fittest contest.

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