One Sentence News / April 13, 2023

Apr 13, 2023

The news simply summarized / Listen to the podcast

Airstrikes on Myanmar village feared to have killed 100

Summary: Myanmar’s military launched airstrikes on a crowd of people gathering outside an office belonging to the country’s opposition movement, killing as many as 100 people, many of them children.

Context: The country’s military, which seized power from an elected government in early 2021 and which has since then been fighting with a dispersed but popular armed resistance movement throughout the country, has been opting for airstrikes against resistance targets a lot more, of late, dropping bombs directly onto crowds of people in areas known to house resistance groups and then in some cases sending in helicopters with heavy guns to shoot at survivors; many international organizations and other governments have condemned the military government of Myanmar for these sorts of attacks, and the Myanmar government generally justifies their actions by saying the pro-democracy people they’re killing are terrorists.

—The Associated Press

EPA lays out rules to turbocharge sales of electric cars and trucks

Summary: The Biden administration has proposed new climate regulations that would have the net-impact of ensuring that two-thirds of new passenger cars sold in the US are electric by 2032, up from just 5.8% in 2022, and that about a quarter of new heavy-duty trucks sold in the US are electric by 2032, up from just 2% in 2022.

Context: These new regulations would accomplish this dramatic shift in less than a decade by requiring new pollution standards for cars and trucks, beginning in 2027; the US Environmental Protection Agency can’t directly mandate a certain percentage of vehicles sold be EVs, but it can limit the amount of pollution produced by the whole of a carmaker’s vehicle portfolio; thus, the idea is to dramatically truncate the amount of pollution carmakers can generate overall, which will in turn necessitate that most of what they sell are EVs from that point forward, to keep their numbers under those limits and stay on the right side of regulators.

—The New York Times

US inflation eased to 5% in March

Summary: New data released by the US Federal Reserve indicates the country’s consumer-price index was up 5% in March from the previous year, which is down from February’s year-over-year increase of 6%.

Context: This means that although we’re still dealing with high levels of inflation, the rate of inflation increase is dropping, and the inflation rate from last month was the lowest we’ve seen since May of 2021; that’s good news for the Fed, which is tasked with bringing this number down, and which has been raising a key interest rate to do so, risking economic damage in the process; it’s expected the Fed will probably slow or even stop their interest rate increases soon, allowing that rate to stay at a high level for a while, cooling the economy a bit and hopefully dropping the inflation rate still further as a consequence, getting it closer to their target rate of 2%.

—The Wall Street Journal

A new report from Ember suggests that wind and solar power achieved a collective record of 12% of global electricity power generation in 2022, and that 2023 could be the year that fossil fuels top-out, their portion of the overall electricity-generation pie declining from this point forward.

—Ember

94%

Percentage by which Tupperware’s stock value has dropped (it’s actually “nearly 94%) over the past year.

That collapse is the consequence of a liquidity crunch and a lack of relevance in a market that’s largely moved on to container brands that are carried in stores and marketplaces like Walmart and Amazon (and increasingly, which favors products made from glass and silicon, rather than plastic).

—Quartz

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