Snakes. Scary, right?

Not so frightened of these creatures was 81-year-old Australian grandmother Faye Morgan, who casually pulled out not one, but two pythons hiding in the barbecue of a Queensland home on Sunday morning.

While the rest of us would likely freak out, Morgan didn’t flinch one bit as she hauled the snakes from the grill into an awaiting plastic container.

“I live for the drama,” Morgan says in the video. “Two of them!” 

According to 7 News, Morgan had spent her whole life on a farm, and so the reptiles didn’t really faze her. She had also pulled one from the same spot 18 months earlier, so it’s certainly no one-off. 

While snakes aren’t so commonly found in the colder months because they’re in a state of semi-hibernation, they’ll occasionally wander out if the temperature outside is warm enough.

Sirsa, India – On August 25, 2017, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was convicted of sexually assaulting two women. Across India, such crimes occur with horrifying frequency, but Ram Rahim isn’t just another sexual predator. He is a self-styled saint who heads one of the largest spiritual organisations in the country.

Through his ashram, the Dera Sacha Sauda, he has amassed an estimated net worth of almost $36m, and claims to have 60 million followers worldwide. His sprawling headquarters in the north Indian city of Sirsa boasts a state-of-the-art hospital, schools, luxury hotels and a sport stadium.

To his devotees, he is the messenger of God, but many say beneath his saintly persona lies a cruel and conniving criminal. Former followers are now coming forward to expose a network of disciples who supplied Ram Rahim with women he could sexually assault, confidantes who allegedly plotted with him to assassinate critics, and doctors who are accused of castrating hundreds of men on Ram Rahim’s orders. Allegations the guru denies.

Why did his devotees conspire with, and cover up for the guru for almost 20 years? And why, even after his criminal convictions, do hundreds of thousands of people continue to worship him?

To understand this blind faith, it’s important to understand the psychology of a cult.

“I believed that he was God,” says Khatta Singh, who was once a fervent follower of Ram Rahim. “We would take his name morning and night, even before sleeping,”

For 10 years, Singh lived in the Dera Sacha Sauda ashram, working his way into Ram Rahim’s inner circle. Like many cult leaders, the guru obsessively controlled his devotees, Singh says.

“He installed cameras around the Dera, and also microphones. When guards would be standing around at night talking, he would record all of it,” he recalls.

“In the morning, he would summon them and ask, ‘At this time were you talking about this?’ They would say, ‘Yes, sir’. So, people started thinking that he knows everything.”

Hans Raj Chauhan is another former follower who lived under the guru’s iron fist. He was just a teenager when his devout parents sent him to live and work in Ram Rahim’s ashram. He says his indoctrination began immediately.

“We could only read literature that our guru had given us,” he tells Al Jazeera.

“You’re not allowed to listen to the radio or watch TV. You have to eat and drink whatever the guru had decided.”

“You have to do everything inside the Dera … We couldn’t go to the market. If we had to buy some clothes or shoes, we’d have to come back very quickly. They would log our movements.”

Chauhan says, like all the disciples living in the ashram, he was brainwashed and cut off from the outside world, including from his family.

“My parents would visit every two or three months, but there was a limit on how long we could meet for. And we would always have one of the guru’s spies standing in the corner. Whatever you said would get back to him.”

What is being reported in the media is only five percent of what he [Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh] has actually done. I’ve seen the girls going in and out of his room myself, because I was standing right there.

Khatta Singh, former follower of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh

Both Singh and Chauhan admit that they knew Ram Rahim was committing heinous crimes, including rape.

“What is being reported in the media is only five percent of what he has actually done,” says Singh. “I’ve seen the girls going in and out of his room myself, because I was standing right there.”

Singh says he even witnessed his guru order other disciples to murder a journalist. He believes he was also involved in the assassination of a former devotee.

“He’s a very dangerous man. I’ve seen it up close. Ram Chander Chhatrapati, Ranjit Singh … He gave the order one day and the next they were killed.”

And then came the day that Chauhan says he, too, was targeted. He says Ram Rahim ordered doctors in the ashram to castrate him, and hundreds of other followers, without their consent.

But Chauhan says even that didn’t destroy his faith in Ram Rahim. Like Khatta Singh, he remained loyal to the guru for years. This blind faith does not surprise author, Bhavdeep Kang.

“Surrender is a very important aspect of the guru-devotee relationship,” says Kang, who has written about India’s best-known gurus. “You have to completely surrender yourself to the God-man, which means even when he’s wrong, he’s right.”

Kang says it can take years for devout followers to extricate themselves from the control of their gurus, because they believe they have too much to lose.

“What the God-man offers you is membership of a larger community. A sense of belonging. You become so invested in that that it becomes very hard to leave. It becomes so much a part of your existence, of who you are,” she says.

Surrender is a very important aspect of the guru-devotee relationship. You have to completely surrender yourself to the God-man, which means even when he’s wrong, he’s right.

Bhavdeep Kang, author

“In some ways, as a devotee, I am more invested in the God-man’s divinity than the God-man himself. Having surrendered myself to you, I have to justify it. I have to justify having given up everything for you.

“So, you build up an image of that person in your head, which is not necessarily based on reality.”

In Ram Rahim’s case, both Singh and Chauhan say fear also played a key role in keeping them loyal to their guru.

“There were a lot of reasons to be afraid,” says Chauhan. “I found out that a very good journalist, Ram Chander Chhatrapati was murdered. Ranjit (Singh) was murdered … So, I was terrified. And being from a poor family, I did not have the guts to speak out.”

Singh says this fear was justified.

“If I had spoken out, it was possible he’d have me and my entire family killed,” he says.

“When I stopped going to the Dera, they sent followers to my house. They’d spit on me. They said, ‘If you say anything, we’re ready for you’. There was so much pressure on me that I just couldn’t speak out.”

Singh and Chauhan are now helping the government prosecute their former guru for murder and castration. But even as Ram Rahim serves a 20-year prison sentence for the sexual assault of two female devotees, hundreds of thousands of disciples continue to flock to his ashram.

“He’s my guru. He’s the answer to all of my questions,” says Prakash Singh Salwara, a spokesman for Ram Rahim and his ashram. “He’s a mother, a father, a brother, a friend. He’s everything.”

Salwara, who has been a devotee for almost 30 years, does not believe any of the charges against Ram Rahim. Instead, he says, his guru is a victim of a conspiracy by journalists, politicians and federal investigators.

“From the beginning to the end, I have tried to understand and investigate these allegations. I never say anything that indicated that a crime has been committed,” he says. “People are saying that this is politically motivated. The truth hasn’t been completely buried. And I believe that someday, it will come out.”

BROCKHAMPTON is back with a new album title and a sort-of release date for their follow-up to SATURATION III. On Sunday (August 26), the group posted a photo that read, “BROCKHAMPTON’s 4th studio album will be released this September,” with the album’s title Iridescence beneath the succinct sentence.

The group’s latest project has gone through a variety of changes after member Ameer Vann was accused of sexual misconduct in early May and subsequently kicked out. Previous titles for the record included Puppy, Team Effort, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Kevin Abstract thanked fans on Twitter for their patience and described how recording their next album in a new country helped his creative process.

“Brand new music brand new feelings iridescence,” Abstract wrote. “Not tryna lead anyone on or anything I just want us to keep making stuff we’re proud of and put it out when we’re ready. I mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say thank you for your patience…I don’t know if I would have been able to write another record if we didn’t come to Europe – thanks for all the positive love man it was surreal this year has been one long ass dream.”

In a July interview with Billboard, Abstract briefly explained the controversial handling of Vann’s exit.

“We got off social media so we could finish working on the album and during that same month that’s when the allegations came up,” Abstract said. “We were really slow to respond to them. I just felt terrible that the fans couldn’t reach us for answers.”

Iridescence will be the boy band’s first album in the wake of their turbulent year. Although, listening to their latest releases — “1999 WILDFIRE,” “1998 TRUMAN,” and “1997 DIANA” — it seems like they’re committed to moving forward.

US Open 2017: Andy Murray, Kyle Edmund, Heather Watson & Cameron Norrie – BBC Sport

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Tom Brady abruptly ended a live radio interview Monday morning after being asked multiple questions about his longtime personal trainer, Alex Guerrero.

During an appearance on WEEI 93.7 FM in Boston, the New England Patriots quarterback was asked about why Guerrero was permitted to travel on the team’s plane recently after not being allowed to do so last season. Brady said he didn’t want to talk in depth about it, and bristled at three follow-up questions about Guerrero.

“I said I don’t want to get into it,” he said.

Then, after one more question about Guerrero from co-host Kirk Minihane, Brady decided that he’d had enough.

“Yeah. Alright, guys. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you later,” Brady said, according to a transcript of the exchange posted by WEEI.

Talking NFL: Join our new fan group, The Ruling Off The Field

More: 32 things we learned in third week of 2018 NFL preseason

More: Browns defensive coordinator: Denzel Ward’s ‘stupid’ tackling got him hurt

Brady has long avoided questions about Guerrero, who was reportedly a source of tension within the Patriots last season. The Boston Globe reported in December that the trainer, whose methods have sometimes differed from those of the Patriots’ official training staff, had been barred from traveling with the team.

This is also not the first time that Brady, 41, has cut an interview short on WEEI, a station on which he made weekly appearances last season. He hung up on the station in January because host Alex Reimer had called his daughter, Vivian, an “annoying little pissant.”

Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.

 

Image: Rick Scuteri/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Dogs are always good, but New Mexico State’s dog is very good.

Striking the Wonder Dog, as he’s called, is tasked with fetching the tee whenever the New Mexico State Aggies play. 

And boy wasn’t he excited to go get that tee when the Aggies played Wyoming on Saturday, as evidence in the game’s broadcast on ESPN. 

Striking, a border collie, has been part of the New Mexico State setup for the past four years, where he was named as a successor to the now-retired Smoki the Wonder Dog.

Fetching the tee during a college football game isn’t Striking’s only job. He’s been part of the Mesilla Valley Search and Rescue team, as well as serving as a wilderness search dog for the state of New Mexico.

Of course, as Boise State fans will probably itch to tell us, Striking isn’t the only tee-fetching dog around.

Boise has Kohl, who is part of the college’s long-standing tradition of special teams dogs. Look, we just hope the gospel of good dogs in sports continue to spread.

[h/t SB Nation]

On August 25, senator and former presidential candidate John McCain died aged 81. In the obituaries that poured in, “war hero” and “maverick” were the most frequent epithets used to describe him. Both these terms, however, frame the irreconcilable paradox of the dysfunctional empire McCain called his homeland – its rosy self-perceptions and the truth of its vile militarism.    

“John S McCain,” declared the New York Times obituary in august mournful fonts, “the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.”

That pretty much sums up the abiding liberal sentiments at the heart of the empire Senator McCain served valiantly. In the same obituary we read, “a son and grandson of four-star admirals who were his larger-than-life heroes, Mr McCain carried his renowned name into battle and into political fights for more than a half-century.”

What did those battles mean for the humanity at large – how many millions have perished around the globe at the receiving end of those waged wars? What did those political fights signify for the poorer and disenfranchised communities at the fractured heart of the empire itself? These are the places where the real obituaries of the senator will be written. 

Upon his passing, we remember McCain for his sustained oppositions to the public spectacle of indecency that Donald Trump commits as US president – and for his agreement with the majority of his policies.  

From Ronald Reagan to John McCain, the quintessence of the Republican Party war against the poor and the weak worldwide breathes fire into the Trump administration. 

A ‘common sense’ conservative

Senator McCain has left behind a brand of conservatism that his supporters consider “common sense” when compared with the politics of his fellow Republicans Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan – two conservative robots who happily embrace any legislation that favours their enduring power, no matter the human misery it may cause.

McCain may indeed have been different from them, but his presence in the legislative body of the US empire was integral to a deeply reactionary, fanatically militaristic legacy that is wreaking havoc in the US and around the globe.  

Being a military man, McCain was adamantly militaristic in his politics. He was a hardline supporter of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, considering the government of Saddam Hussein “a clear and present danger to the United States of America.” He voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002, promising US forces would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqis. 

When the extent of the US atrocities in Iraq became evident in the Abu Ghraib torture chambers, however, he was leading a public outcry against such practices, presumably because he was personally tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was committed to upholding a military code of honour for an army that had done pretty dishonourable acts around the globe. 

McCain never saw the prospect of a war anywhere in the world he did not instantly support – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. He advocated for prolonged wars. He died not seeing his wish to “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” fulfilled. But his legacy is alive and well in Trump’s military logic of US domination around the globe. 

McCain staunchly supported Israel, could not care less for the fate of Palestinians, and for a while even considered the arch-Zionist Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2008. Yet he also backed the Arab revolutions, criticising dictators Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Bashar al-Assad. 

But with his hardline support for sending arms to Syria, he played a key role in aggressively militarising the peaceful resistance to the murderous Assad regime. This militarisation, with the help of Damascus, which released from prison hundreds of fighters the regime had been using against the US in Iraq, enabled the creation of various extremist groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

At the same time, McCain’s criticism of Sisi and Assad was, of course, seriously compromised by his fanatical commitment to the Saudi ruling clan, even and particularly during their slaughter of Yemenis, when he rejected calls to limit the US sale of weaponry to Riyadh. 

Give a pen and a piece of paper to a Yemeni or Iraqi or Palestinian child and ask him or her what “war hero” and “maverick” mean at the receiving end of US militarism.

In many ways, McCain was a typical US politician, projecting an image that he means well, but in effect being integral to a structural violence definitive to a trigger-happy dysfunctional empire. In his moral confusions, he embodied the impossibilities of the American empire parading its moral cake for the whole world to believe and gobbling it up too. 

The moral confusion of an empire

The moral confusion of John McCain, however, was not personal, it was endemic to the nature of the empire he cherished as his homeland. In the figure of John McCain, as in the moral fabric of the US empire, singing the praise of liberty and freedom, while bombing nations to smithereens, there is no reconciling between its innate militarism and its professed moral high grounds on what it calls “human rights.”

McCain and his empire protested too much about liberty and freedom and did too little about it; they did not even know of their guilty conscience. 

As a military man, he served his country with steadfast, unwavering, and straightforward convictions. But as a politician, McCain was caught between the rock of moral opprobrium he had inherited from his military family, and the hard-hitting miseries his militarism had caused at home and abroad. 

He was a contradiction in terms. He was an impossible man. But that contradiction, and that impossibility was the persona US imperialism had solidly, transparently invested in him and he best exemplified it, carried it with convictions and pride. 

We all remember when his infamous singing “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb … Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ classic “Barbara Ann” during a presidential campaign rally delighted the US, Saudi, and Israeli neocons and Zionists to no end.

But in another campaign rally in October 2008, when someone said she did not trust Obama because “he is an Arab”, McCain went out of his way defending his rival for being a “decent family man” and “not an Arab”. Meaning: No decent family man could possibly be an Arab.

This is not being paradoxical, ironic, or even personally racist. This is being true to the contorted moral imagination of a constitutionally racist imperialism, in which “a decent family man” can only be approximated to John McCain himself.

There was and there will always be a moral conundrum in being a John McCain, a consistent inconsistency, for he embodied and personified an empire that lacks any semblance of normative or moral hegemony, a militarism that murders and mourns at one and the same time.  

Any time a mass murderer went on a rampage slaughtering innocent children and adults, McCain was quick to send his condolences: “Cindy & I are praying for the victims of the terrible #LasVegasShooting & their families”, and yet he was the absolute largest recipient of money from the NRA.    

Between Trump and McCain: The future of an empire

The ignominy of Trump in just about anything he says and anything he does, of course, makes McCain look like a towering statue of moral authority – particularly to his liberal admirers.   

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump once infamously said about McCain, “He’s [called] a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” 

The indecency was repeated later when a White House staffer dismissed McCain’s vote because he “was dying anyway”.

Spewing such vulgarities about a man who was captured, tortured, and maimed for life while serving in an army Trump’s wealthy father had protected his son from being drafted into is positively obscene. 

But Trump and Trumpism could not possibly be the measure of anything. Trump is at once at the rotten roots of American politics and yet an aberration to the liberal veneer McCain best personified in his conservatism.

We may indeed be witness to the end of an era by the passing of John McCain. The rise of Trump and Trumpism has ushered the end of the era of blunt and unbridled racism. The sorts of paradoxical tension McCain personified between highfalutin convictions and dastardly actions, between high-horse morality and cold-blooded murder, between exuding compassion while committing war crimes, may have indeed come to an end. 

If Trump is the future of the American empire, we have a clear consistency between racist convictions and murderous acts. There is no camouflaging here. He kills while he shouts insults.   

With the passing of John McCain, the American empire may have indeed lost an iconic figure definitive to its moral mystification of itself, and thus shed all its false pretences to be a shining city on any hill it has not yet bombed or else turned into a military base.

There is a strong sense of liberal nostalgia in much of the obituaries we read about John McCain these days. There is a strong sense of a desire to put this ugly chapter of Trump behind and move back to a polished imperialism of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama – when Daddy was bombing the world 9 to 5, and then coming home for a civilised dinner with his lovely family. 

The vulgarity of Donald Trump is just too much in the face, too much telling it like it is. In mourning John McCain, US liberalism is also mourning its own refined and cultured costume party that camouflages its murderous militarism in the refined garb of soft-spoken and cultured pride in one’s county. 

Read carefully these obituaries – there is a pronounced politics to their mourning. They are positing a “liberal conservatism” (or what they term “common sense” conservatism) to defeat Trump and discredit what passes for the left wing of the Democratic Party at one and the same time. 

Come next presidential election, Americans will have a chance to go one way or the other once again: with the open racism of Donald Trump or the refined militarism of what they call “McCain Democrats”. They will make their choice and the rest of the world will have to decide which way to run for cover.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.  

Listen to live Somerset v Nottinghamshire Outlaws commentary in the T20 Blast quarter-final – Live – BBC Sport

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Lots of weird things wash up on beaches. Sea potatoes. A very old message in a bottle. Unidentifiable sea creatures.

But by golly, this is one huge squid.

The 4.5 metre (14 foot, 9 inch) long cephalopod washed up on the south coast of Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday morning, its size easily eclipsing the mere mortals that dare to lie beside it.

Brothers Daniel, Jack, and Matthew Aplin told Newstalk ZB that they were looking for a place to dive when they spotted the creature.

“My brother said ‘what’s that over there?’ and pointed it out,” Daniel told the radio station. “It was right next to the track so we pulled over and we were like: ‘It’s a big squid’.”

A Department of Conservation spokesperson said while appearances are not common, they do appear from time to time. Just delightful.