Sixty-six years ago today, a kid named Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana. Nobody in that steel town could have guessed he’d moonwalk his way into global superstardom. From the Jackson 5 to Thriller, he didn’t just make hits, he rewrote what pop music could be. Love him or question him, you can’t deny the impact: Michael Jackson changed the soundtrack of the 20th century.

Now let’s get into today's biggest stories.

Shots Fired, Literally

The CDC just blew a gasket. Susan Monarez was fired less than a month into the job after refusing to step down. The White House says she was not aligned with the administration’s direction. Her lawyers say she never resigned and never got an official termination notice. The agency’s own site now lists the director’s chair as vacant. That is not subtle. 

The fallout came fast. Multiple senior CDC leaders resigned in protest, including Debra Houry, Daniel Jernigan, Demetre Daskalakis, and Jennifer Layden. Their message was simple. Politics is steamrolling science. They point to pressure on vaccine policy and the rise of skeptics inside the building. That is a tough combo for a public health agency that lives and dies on credibility. 

Enter Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He says the CDC needs an overhaul and has accused the agency of malaise. Monarez, for her part, pushed back on vaccine changes she believed were not evidence based and might even be illegal. That clash became the trigger. She was out by Wednesday. The director’s shortest tenure in memory. 

The rumor mill made it worse. A report claimed the administration could pull COVID vaccines off the market within months. The White House called that speculation and said policy would follow gold-standard science. Fact checkers also note that HHS cannot unilaterally ban approved vaccines. Any removal would have to go through the FDA and would face court fights. Still, markets and staff are reacting to the talk, not the footnotes. Confidence is the ballgame. 

So where are we. The CDC is leaderless. Senior talent is walking. HHS is signaling a hard reset on vaccines and agency culture. Congress is sharpening questions. If the goal is trust, this is the opposite direction. Public health only works when people believe the referees. Right now the referees are arguing at center court while the game goes on.

Rapid Fire

🏙️ The Trump administration is gearing up for a large immigration sweep in Chicago as soon as next week. ICE and CBP are set to lead it, with other agencies in the mix. Armored vehicles are being positioned. A surge of federal agents is expected by Friday, Sept. 5. Officials say this is immigration enforcement, not a broader crime crackdown. The plan mirrors Los Angeles, where DHS says it has made roughly 5,000 arrests since June. Gregory Bovino, who ran the L.A. push, is expected to steer the Chicago operation. That is the playbook.

The National Guard could be tapped for a peacekeeping presence. On Title 10 orders, they would be federalized and barred from law enforcement by the Posse Comitatus Act. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is blasting the move and the lack of coordination with the state and City Hall. He calls it an effort to militarize cities. The big picture is simple. This is an escalation in the long fight between Washington and sanctuary cities. Chicago is the next test.

🇮🇷 Iran’s currency is in meltdown mode. The rial just sank past one million to the dollar on Thursday, street traders in Tehran put it around 1,020,000. To put that in perspective, when the nuclear deal was signed in 2015, one dollar cost 32,000 rials. That’s not a slide. That’s a cliff. Exchange shops even turned off their electronic boards, forcing people into back-alley trades. Ordinary Iranians are scrambling for gold, dollars, or crypto while inflation hovers near 40 percent.

The trigger this time? The threat of “snapback” sanctions. France, Germany, and the U.K. warned earlier this month that Iran’s moves to block nuclear inspections could set it off. Snapback is brutal because it’s automatic, no Security Council veto, no way out. If triggered, it cuts Iran off from oil exports, freezes foreign assets, and revives bans on missiles and arms sales. The market sees that coming, and confidence is cratering. The rial’s plunge, over 3,000 percent in a decade, shows how quickly geopolitics can torch a nation’s economy, leaving ordinary people to carry the weight in soaring prices and shrinking options.

🚗 BYD just leapfrogged Tesla in Europe. The Chinese automaker, short for “Build Your Dreams”, has gone from underdog to heavyweight, selling 13,503 cars in July. That’s a 225 percent jump from last year. Tesla, meanwhile, sank 40 percent to 8,837 sales. Seven straight months of declines. And this isn’t a shrinking market, Europe’s EV sales overall went up. Which means people aren’t ditching electric. They’re ditching Tesla.

The bigger picture: Tesla’s lineup is starting to look stale while BYD is flooding Europe with fresh models, sharp pricing, and new showrooms across the continent. Chinese brands in general have doubled their European market share in just a year. Legacy automakers like Stellantis, Hyundai, and Toyota are also slipping, while Volkswagen and BMW are still inching forward. It’s a turning point, Tesla’s no longer the default. The EV crown in Europe is officially up for grabs, and BYD just grabbed the mic.

World Watch

Israel just pulled off a rare airborne raid near Damascus. Four helicopters dropped dozens of troops into an old army site by al-Kiswah for a two-hour sweep. No firefight. They lifted out and left. It came a day after an Israeli drone strike in the same area killed at least six Syrian soldiers. That sequence, strike, land, extract, says Israel was securing or destroying something specific, not hunting for a headline. 

Zoom out. Israel has hit Syrian military and Iran-linked targets for years, and it’s still doing so even as U.S.-mediated talks try to cool things down in southern Syria. Damascus calls the raids illegal and says Israel is pushing past the old 1974 disengagement lines on the Golan. The talks aim for tighter security arrangements. The reality on the ground is louder. Strikes continue. Diplomats keep talking. That gap is the story.

Today in What the Hell

Nevada just took a punch online. Early Sunday, the state spotted a breach that knocked websites and phone lines offline and closed state offices for two days. Officials now say it was a sophisticated ransomware attack. Some data was taken. Not great. The governor’s site went dark. Workers were sent home. And the numbers still aren’t fully back to normal. 

Cleanup is underway. Some services are back. Others are still crawling. Emergency services stayed up the whole time. Federal partners are on the case, and the state is keeping details tight while they patch the holes. Add it to the growing list of government targets learning the same lesson: your network is only as strong as its weakest login.

That’s all folks

That’s a wrap for today. From power plays in Washington to currency chaos abroad to a carmaker shake-up in Europe, the world is moving fast. We’ll be back tomorrow to cut through the noise and keep it simple.