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US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked the newly installed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to strip two Pennsylvania measles deaths from the agency's online outbreak tally, sources told Reuters. Kennedy reportedly questioned whether measles had actually caused the fatalities. The CDC records deaths in which measles is the underlying or contributing cause using standardized criteria developed by career epidemiologists — not political appointees.

The request is not a small bureaucratic dispute. The United States is in the middle of its worst measles outbreak in more than three decades, a direct consequence of collapsing MMR vaccination coverage in specific communities. Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000. That status is now in jeopardy. Every death recorded in the CDC tally is a data point that public health officials, hospitals and state governments use to allocate resources and communicate risk.

Kennedy built his political profile leading Children's Health Defense, an organization that spent years promoting the thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. The scientific consensus is unambiguous: the MMR vaccine is safe, highly effective, and does not cause autism. Kennedy's tenure has already featured the firing of the CDC's independent vaccine advisory committee and its replacement with hand-picked skeptics. Attempting to disappear measles deaths from official records fits the pattern.

Erasing inconvenient data does not make the deaths go away. It does make it harder for the public, journalists and state health departments to understand what is happening. That appears to be the point.

An Amazon Air cargo jet overshot the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, plowed onto a public road beyond the airfield, and rammed into vehicles including a van carrying cleaning company workers. Five people were killed and at least five injured. All five fatalities were inside a 2012 Ford van carrying seven passengers, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said Monday.

The aircraft was a Boeing 767-300 operated by 21 Air on behalf of Amazon's cargo network, arriving from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan. It overran Runway 9 around 2 p.m. local time, breached the airport perimeter, and burst into flames. Investigators recovered both the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder Monday and shipped them to NTSB labs in Washington. Two of Miami's four runways remained closed into Monday, disrupting more than 200 flights at one of the busiest US airports over the Labor Day travel weekend.

The crew's status has not been publicly confirmed. Attention will focus on landing speed, braking, runway conditions and whether the aircraft touched down long — the classic causes of runway excursions. Boeing 767 freighters have a mixed safety record in Amazon's contracted fleet; Atlas Air Flight 3591, another Amazon-branded 767 freighter, crashed into Trinity Bay near Houston in 2019, killing all three on board, in an accident the NTSB blamed on inappropriate crew response to inadvertent activation of the go-around mode.

Sunday's crash is the deadliest US aviation event in months and puts Amazon's fast-growing air cargo operation — which relies heavily on third-party carriers rather than a directly employed pilot workforce — under renewed scrutiny.

German launch startup Isar Aerospace put its Spectrum rocket into low Earth orbit on its second-ever attempt, giving continental Europe its first entirely commercially developed orbital launch vehicle. The two-stage rocket lifted off from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. The company's March 2025 debut ended when Spectrum crashed into the sea 30 seconds after liftoff and exploded — a common outcome for first flights of new rockets.

"Launch continues to be the largest bottleneck for the global space industry, and from today on there is a true alternative for commercial and institutional customers," Isar's leadership said. The claim is not empty. Europe's flagship Ariane 6 remains expensive and heavily state-directed, while smaller European launchers have repeatedly failed or slipped schedule. Meanwhile SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy dominate Western commercial launch, and China is aggressively expanding its own capacity.

Spectrum is a small-lift vehicle — nowhere near the payload class of Falcon 9 — but reaching orbit at all validates the commercial European launch thesis that the European Space Agency and national governments have spent years trying to seed. It also provides a European sovereign option for defense, Earth observation and constellation payloads at a moment when reliance on US infrastructure is politically fraught.

The next question is cadence. One successful flight is a milestone; sustainable operations at a profitable price point are the real test. Isar has committed to a rapid follow-up campaign, and other European entrants including Rocket Factory Augsburg and MaiaSpace are close behind.

Jaguar Land Rover will cut 4,000 jobs over the next two years, targeting mostly UK head-office roles, as the British luxury carmaker tries to save £1.7 billion ($2.3 billion) in the face of collapsing sales, US tariffs, cheap Chinese competitors and a delayed electric-vehicle rollout. The company employs 43,000 people globally and confirmed the cuts Monday. Voluntary redundancy applications close October 4; compulsory redundancies with less generous terms will follow if needed.

JLR's revenue fell from £29 billion to £22.9 billion in the year to March, hit hardest by US tariffs and a cyberattack last year that shuttered production for more than a month. Unlike BMW (Spartanburg, SC) and Mercedes (Tuscaloosa, AL), JLR has no US manufacturing base, so every vehicle it sells in America takes the full tariff hit. Its long-delayed electric Range Rover, only just announced, comes years behind competitors — and behind a wave of Chinese EVs priced far lower.

JLR is not alone. Volkswagen's supervisory board last week approved a transformation plan that includes 50,000 more job cuts across the group, on top of tens of thousands announced previously. The pattern is uniform: European incumbents that dominated global luxury and mass-market segments for decades are being squeezed simultaneously by Chinese EV makers with lower cost structures and better software, by Trump-era tariff walls, and by their own delayed pivot to electrification.

UK Chancellor John Healey used a speech Monday, coincidentally scheduled near JLR's Coventry base, to acknowledge the pressure. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds will meet JLR executives this week. But there is no quick fix for a company that took too long to build EVs, too long to hedge against tariffs, and now faces a Chinese industry that isn't waiting.

King Charles III has taken the unusual step of publicly reminding his son and daughter-in-law that they are not working royals. A letter sent Monday on behalf of the King by the Lord Chamberlain — the most senior official in the royal household — went to government departments, military officials and the King's regional Lord Lieutenants, and was released publicly to "help avoid doubt or confusion" following Prince Harry and Meghan's return to the UK from California last month with their two children.

The substance is not new: the 2020 Sandringham Agreement stripped the Sussexes of the ability to represent the sovereign, use their HRH styles, or draw on taxpayer resources. What's new is the venue. Publishing the letter — rather than quietly circulating it — is a shot across the bow. Palace observers say the concern is that Harry and Meghan could, intentionally or not, operate a parallel royal court in Britain, blurring the line between private charity work and official engagements. The letter explicitly instructs organizations to send any questions about protocol or public funds to Buckingham Palace.

The security dimension makes this sharper than a family etiquette memo. Harry has been fighting the UK government for years over the loss of publicly funded police protection, a matter decided by a body called RAVEC. He lost his most recent court challenge earlier this year. The King's letter emphasizes that operational security decisions remain with the relevant police agencies — pointedly not the palace.

Harry appeared in a photo from Tower Bridge Studios on social media, his first public sighting since returning. The couple are expected to make more public appearances this autumn. The King, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024, has made his position on any "half-in, half-out" arrangement unmistakable.

Carlos Alcaraz continued his imperious run at the US Open on Sunday, punching his ticket to the quarterfinals in New York. In a mildly comic post-match moment on ESPN, the Spanish world No. 1 was informed on air that his next opponent would be the winner of Ben Shelton versus Stefanos Tsitsipas — not the player he had assumed. Alcaraz laughed it off; the men's draw has been reshaped by upsets, and even the top seed hasn't been tracking every bracket permutation.

The bigger surprise on the American side is 22-year-old Alex Michelsen, an unseeded Californian who has blitzed his way to the quarterfinals without dropping a set in four matches. Michelsen entered the tournament outside the top 30 and has quickly become the breakout story of the New York fortnight, benefiting from an opened-up section of the draw and playing the fearless, big-hitting tennis that tends to translate on hard courts.

With Jannik Sinner navigating his own path on the opposite side of the draw, Alcaraz remains the man to beat. A quarterfinal against Shelton — a hard-serving American in front of a home crowd — or Tsitsipas would be genuinely competitive, but Alcaraz's form through the first week has been the clearest in the field. The final weekend of the season's last Slam is shaping up as the year's biggest test of whether anyone can knock the Spaniard off.