Is Keir Starmer Getting The Boot?

A Monstrous Datacenter In Utah & Trump's China Trip

Author

Marcus Gee-Lim
May 14, 2026

Hi readers, happy Thursday! Today we’re covering Labour Party’s leadership crisis, Trump’s China trip, the CIA’s secret war in Mexico, the hantavirus saga (cont’d), a massive datacenter in Utah, U.S. inflation data, and some good news about obesity

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” ― Federico García Lorca

Down & Out At 10 Downing

“Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer Official Portrait” by Number 10 via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Last week, the U.K. held local elections. They were an unmitigated disaster for the incumbent Labour Party, which lost 1,400 seats on local councils across England, as well as its majority in the Welsh parliament (which Labour has controlled for decades). Since that crushing defeat, Labour politicians have been pushing Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign, claiming that he doesn’t have what it takes to secure Labour another victory in the 2029 elections.

Four of Starmer’s ministers have resigned from their jobs in an effort to force the prime minister to quit, and over 80 MPs have either called on Starmer to step down or publish a timeline for a future departure. Technically, the party could force Starmer to leave by issuing a formal leadership challenge, which would require the signatures of at least 81 MPs (20% of all Labour lawmakers). 100 MPs have issued statements in support of Starmer as a response to the backlash.

Despite the bluster, the prime minister himself has shown no signs of budging (yet). “What we witnessed with the last government was the chaos of constantly changing leaders, and it cost this country a huge amount,” Starmer said on Monday. “A Labour government would never be forgiven for inflicting that on our country again.” After King Charles III delivered the King’s Speech yesterday (which outlines the government’s legislative agenda for the year), Starmer promised to accelerate his government’s plans in order to regain the trust of his party.

Trump Touches Down

Yesterday, President Trump touched down in Beijing ahead of a planned diplomatic summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He was joined by a gaggle of U.S. CEOs, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (a last-minute invite), Apple’s Tim Cook (who’s retiring later this year), and Tesla’s Elon Musk (who’s supposed to be on standby to testify in his lawsuit against OpenAI).

Trump and his CEOs were greeted by a brass band and flag wavers as soon as they deboarded. Today, Trump is set to attend a bigger welcome ceremony, hold diplomatic talks with Xi, and visit the Temple of Heaven before attending a banquet. On Friday, he’ll participate in more negotiations with Xi (over lunch) before heading back to the U.S.

Trump and Xi are expected to hammer out a series of trade deals, and also discuss tariffs, rare earths, artificial intelligence, and the Iran war. China, though, seems particularly anxious about the U.S.’s arms sales to Taiwan. “We firmly oppose the United States engaging in any form of military ties ​with China's Taiwan region, and firmly oppose the United States selling weapons to China's Taiwan region. This position is consistent and unequivocal,” said a spokesman for Beijing yesterday. 

The CIA’s Secret War

  • Over the past few months, the CIA has been waging clandestine war on cartels in Mexico. According to a CNN investigation citing multiple sources close to the campaign, the CIA’s Ground Branch has been fighting cartels by assassinating leaders and also providing intel to Mexico’s military. The story first made headlines when two U.S. embassy officials were killed in a car crash in April. It turned out that both of the officials were also CIA operatives, and that they’d participated in a raid on a local meth lab with two other CIA operatives just hours before the accident. Mexico has stated that it hadn’t authorized the CIA forces to be in the country.

  • CNN claims that the CIA has been involved in other assassinations targeting top-level cartel leaders, as well as local linchpins in the cartel machine. “It’s not at all clear that all of their missions are coordinated with the [Mexican] government,” said one of CNN’s sources, which would mean that the CIA could be violating Mexican laws with its assassinations – not that the U.S. cares. “We will do so in concert with local governments when they are willing and able to work with us,” wrote the Trump White House in a recent defense plan announcement. “If they cannot, or will not, we will still take whatever action is necessary to protect our country, especially if the government in question is complicit with the cartels.”

Hunting Down Hantavirus

  • The hantavirus story is, unfortunately, not over yet. Yesterday, a doctor in Paris announced that a French woman who’d contracted the virus while aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship is in critical condition. The woman, according to the doctor, has a severe case of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which causes lung and heart issues. She’s currently being kept alive with the help of an artificial lung which will hopefully give her body time to recover from the illness.

  • On Tuesday, Spain’s health ministry announced that the most recent person to be infected with hantavirus is a Spanish national who tested positive for the disease after leaving the ship. They’re currently being quarantined at a military hospital in Madrid. 

  • Across the world, health officials from Argentina are investigating the origin of the outbreak. Why? A Dutch couple traveling through Argentina were reportedly the first humans to catch this particular strain of hantavirus – which can infect humans when they’re exposed to rodent feces containing the virus – before they boarded the cruise ship. So far, 11 cases of hantavirus have been reported, though only 9 of those have been confirmed by testing.

Additional World News

The Desert vs. A Datacenter

  • Last week, a county in Utah approved a plan to build one of the world’s largest data centers. Once completed, the Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter will span more than 62 square miles (twice the area of Manhattan) across three sites in northwestern Utah. The datacenter will consume roughly 9GW of electricity – more than the entire state of Utah currently uses – and will also require massive amounts of water in an already drought-stricken area.

  • The project is backed by investor Kevin O’Leary (of Shark Tank fame) and an entity called the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA). MIDA appears to be a Utah state government entity that raises revenue for the military in Utah by leasing military land and buildings to private companies. They claim the datacenter will create around 2,000 new jobs after it’s completed.

  • According to recent analysis, the datacenter will produce enough waste heat to raise local temperatures by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) during the day and 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C) at night. Almost 4,000 people have lodged complaints about the project. O’Leary has dismissed most of those objections as being submitted by non-locals, but on Monday, a group named the Box Elder Accountability Referendum filed an application to reverse the project’s approval. If the group is able to gather more than 5,422 signatures from local registered voters, the datacenter’s approval will be put on the local ballot in November elections. 

Inflation Is In Season

  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Producer Price Index (PPI) inflation report for April yesterday. The numbers show that wholesale prices – prices that domestic producers receive for their output, but not prices paid by consumers – rose by 1.4% in April, a large step up from the 0.5% Dow Jones consensus forecast. A large part of the price surge was powered by a spike in gasoline prices (which jumped 15.6%) and trade services (which rose 2.7%). “Inflation is sticky and accelerating. The core reading confirms a deeper structural trend, especially in services,” said one analyst. “The Hormuz crisis is aggravating the problem, but this goes way beyond oil.”

  • The BLS also released its Consumer Price Index (CPI) report on Tuesday. Over the course of April, prices paid by consumers rose 0.6%, slightly higher than the 0.5% projected by the Dow Jones. Energy prices (up 3.8%) and food prices (up 0.5%) were the main drivers of that jump. Overall, this means that consumer prices are projected to rise 3.8% over the course of 2026, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Wages, meanwhile, actually decreased 0.5% in April and are down 0.3% annually.

Additional USA News

 

Obesity Is Thinning Out (Kind Of)

  • How about some good news to cap off the week? Yesterday, a team of international researchers published a report in Nature – the study, which drew on 4,050 population studies involving 232 million individuals across 200 countries between 1980 and 2024, indicates that the ongoing global rise in obesity is not inevitable.

  • Across the period that the data was drawn from, obesity did increase in almost all of the 200 countries covered by the study. But that rise has largely tapered off in high-income countries, where obesity prevalence has either slowed, plateaued, or even declined. While it’s still on the rise in the U.S. and U.K. and many developing countries, obesity has leveled off in Germany, and may have started declining in France. In a positive sign for the future, obesity seems to have plateaued in both boys and girls in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan at 20-23%, 10-12%, 7-12%, and 3-7%, respectively. 

  • Given the vast differences in cultures and economics across the countries covered in the study, it’s hard to pinpoint a “why” for any of these changes, but the trends seem to indicate that we might be able to get a handle on the obesity problem in the future.

Additional Reads

Peanut For Your Thoughts

Kevin O’Leary claimed that two Utah women opposed to the Stratos datacenter are Chinese operatives. Unfortunately for him, they’re real people, and they made a response video.

Editor + Writer: Marcus Gee-Lim

Designer: Joe Stella