“Senator John McCain said Monday that he had ‘no confidence’ in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, citing the secretary’s handling of the war in Iraq and troop levels there that Mr. McCain deems insufficient.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican who is a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, said his comments were not a call for Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation. President Bush ‘can have the team that he wants around him,’ the senator said.” (New York Times )

Sand in This Physics Lab May Eat You Alive: “Beware of playing in any sandboxes you might find in the laboratory of Dr. Detlef Lohse.

Traditional deathtrap quicksand is a slurry of sand, water and clay. The water keeps the sand from sticking together to support weight, and a person who steps in slowly sinks.

Now Dr. Lohse, a professor of applied physics, and his colleagues at the University of Twente in the Netherlands show that it is possible to vanish into a pile of completely dry sand as well. Worse, their sand looks the same as the normal, weight-supporting variety.” (New York Times )

“Twenty-three-year-old painter Christopher Savido poses with his painting ‘Bush Monkeys,’ a portrait of U.S. President George W. Bush, at the Animal gallery on New York City’s lower east side. Curator of the show Bucky Turco said that Savido’s painting of Bush was removed from an art exhibit at the Chelsea Market in Manhattan over the past weekend after the director of the market protested the content of the painting of Bush, which is made of tiny images of chimpanzees in a marsh-like landscape.” (Yahoo! News)

“The Federal Communications Commission has asked for a tape of NBC’s broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics after it received at least one indecency complaint. The Aug. 13 tape-delayed broadcast, featuring the history of Athens and Greece, also included male performers representing ancient Greek Kouroi, life-size stone figures of naked young men dating to the sixth century B.C. It wasn’t clear whether the images were broadcast. ” (Yahoo! News )