Events

Kansas developer Larry Hall bought a missile silo and turned it into a 15-story apartment complex: Hall was able to buy the long since decommissioned silo for a fraction of its construction cost. He then spent $20m (£15m) transforming it into a cushy bolthole replete with a library, swimming pool, climbing wall, video arcade, shooting range, bar, cinema, and seven floors of private living space. Half floor units sell for $1.5m, full-floor units for $3m and penthouses for $4.5m, cash only. Fifty-five...

Paris has essentially shut down for the past 12 days as transport unions protest pension reform: Au onzième jour de mobilisation contre la réforme des retraites, le trafic restait fortement perturbé dans les transports publics, dimanche 15 décembre. A Paris, le trafic des métros était particulièrement compliqué, avec quatorze lignes complètement fermées. Dans le métro parisien, les lignes automatiques 1 et 14 fonctionnaient normalement, avec un risque de saturation, de même que les lignes Orlyval...

Jeremy Corbyn on Thursday presided over the worst election result of a major UK party since Arthur Henderson lost 235 seats to Stanley Baldwin's Conservatives in 1931. Today Corbyn wrote an op-ed in the Observer today that shows he never had the right stuff to become PM, and needs to go. "I take my share of responsibility," he says, not seeming to understand that the party leader bears complete responsibility for an election loss of this magnitude. He goes on: Writing in the Observer, the Labour leader...

At the moment, Elizabeth Warren has won more votes on her own in an election than anyone else running for the Democratic Party nomination. Here are some of the numbers: Warren, US Senate, 2012: 1,696,346Booker, US Senate, 2014: 1,043,866Bloomberg, New York Mayor, 2005: 753,090Biden, US Senate, 2008: 257,539Sanders, US Senate, 2012: 207,848Buttigieg, South Bend, Ind., Mayor, 2015: 8,515 Until she dropped out, Kamala Harris had won more votes than anyone else, with 7,542,753 voting for her in 2016 for US...

As the final results of yesterday's election came in, journalists around the world started analyzing them. A sample: The Guardian mourned not only the complete expulsion of Labour from Scotland, but also how seats Labour held since 1935 flipped. Jonathan Freedland puts the blame entirely on Jeremy Corbyn, who, meanwhile, is "very proud" of the party manifesto that scared millions of people away from the party. The Economist sees it as clearly Corbyn's defeat. Corbyn has promised to step down as Labour...

If I lived in the UK, I would probably not only support, but run for office, as a Liberal-Democratic candidate. The LDP has always seemed to me the right compromise: labo[u]r is what made this nation great, and we need to keep our commitments to the people who built our great nation; but we're 40 years past coal strikes, come on, let's keep up. Also, wealth is great, but let's not get carried away, come on, it's bad for the country to have billionaires. So I am quite bothered to report that the leader...

Polls in the UK closed a few minutes ago, and Ipsos-Mori are reporting a likely Conservative majority of 86 over a crippled Labour Party: Conservatives: 368 - up 51 Labour: 191 - down 71 SNP: 55 - up 20 Liberal Democrats: 13 - up 1 Plaid Cymru: 3 - down 1 Greens: 1 - no change Brexit party: 0 Others: 22 (18 of these will be Northern Ireland MPs) If the numbers hold into the night, Boris Johnson will have scored the largest Conservative majority, and Jeremy Corbyn the worst Labour numbers, in 40 years....

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder slams his successor for "actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official" that he felt compelled to speak out: In Barr’s view, sharing executive power with anyone “beyond the control of the president” (emphasis mine), presumably including a semi-independent Cabinet member, “contravenes the Framers’ clear intent to vest that power in a single person.” This is a stunning declaration...

Voting in the UK general election started at 1am Chicago time (7am GMT) last night and goes until 4pm Chicago time (10pm GMT) this afternoon. Because we have regular readers in the UK, the Daily Parker will observe UK law and precedent against reporting or commenting on the election while the polls are open. Instead, I'd like to call attention to an article in yesterday's Times outlining the problems with the FBI's wiretap on Carter Page. While the inspector general found that the investigation started...

The US government's 2019 Arctic Report Card finds that melting permafrost has made the arctic a net producer of greenhouse gasses: Especially noteworthy is the report’s conclusion that the Arctic already may have become a net emitter of planet-warming carbon emissions due to thawing permafrost, which would only accelerate global warming. Permafrost is the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers 24 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s land mass, encompassing vast stretches of territory across Alaska, Canada...