New York City has bet heavily on converting aging office buildings into apartments to help ease a housing shortage. But the threat of a partial collapse Tuesday by one such conversion in progress highlighted the significant challenges of those construction projects. The former Pfizer building, located on East 42nd Street, was undergoing work to become roughly 1,600 apartment units with amenities such as a rooftop pool and a fitness center. But on Tuesday, structural columns buckled and floors sagged, prompting the evacuation of that building and several others nearby, according to New York City officials. Nearby bus routes that pass were also delayed or partially suspended.
Isaias, an artist and designer living in Atlanta, had a few things in mind for his first trip to China. He knew he wanted to see the urban metropolis of Shanghai, as well as Chongqing, an instagrammable megacity with a cyberpunk aesthetic in China’s mountainous southwest. But his main motivation for flying across the world wasn’t wanderlust. It was an effort to save thousands of dollars on a medical procedure not covered by his insurance at home. He’s one of a growing number of Americans seeking cheaper medical treatment abroad, for everything from cancer to dental care, as healthcare costs at home hit record levels.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/08/business/asia-china-medical-tourism-cheap-healthcare-intl-hnk-dst
Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner said in a video statement Wednesday he was suspending his campaign, taking aim at the Democratic establishment while clearing the way for the party to select a new candidate to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most important contests of November’s midterm elections. Platner’s decision comes after a woman told CNN and Politico he raped her while he was heavily intoxicated nearly five years ago when they were in a casual dating relationship – an allegation Platner denies. “We believe that for the movement to continue it can’t be me — and for that reason we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in an 11-minute video posted on X, adding that he intends to file paperwork to withdraw.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/08/politics/graham-platner-drops-out-maine-senate
Democrats have a number of Graham Platner-related problems even after his exit from the Maine Senate race amid a rape allegation he denies. But high on that list is the sheer amount of egg some of them now have on their faces. Amid his drip, drip, drip of controversies, Platner repeatedly put the party in the position of deciding whether to vouch for a guy who was the odds-on favorite to win its nomination — but who also seemed to have stocked his closet with a remarkable number of skeletons.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/08/politics/democrats-platner-problems-analysis
Let the people decide. That was the defiant message of two of the world’s most famous populists on Tuesday, as Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen announced, within hours of each other, their intention to defy their country’s norms in order to put the same pitch to the same jury, with both French and British mainstream politics now in the balance. In France, Marine Le Pen took to the evening news to launch her defiant fourth run for the presidency, just hours after a court announced that legally she could. In a sweltering courthouse in central Paris, journalists had crammed into overflow rooms to hear, just after lunchtime, a ruling on Le Pen’s appeal against the 2025 criminal conviction that found her, her far-right National Rally party and 11 of its most senior members guilty of embezzling millions of euros worth of European funds to pay the salaries of party-political workers in France.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/08/europe/farage-le-pen-populist-appeal-intl-cmd