Anyone have news of what happened to the August 2024 case of a Tesla running over a Police officer?
Here’s another one, putting a LAPD motorcycle officer in hospital:
Some of the northbound lanes along the 405 Freeway in the Brentwood area were shut down Thursday afternoon following a crash involving an LAPD officer. As the CHP closed two lanes as well as the HOV lane for about an hour, officers investigated the collision between the motorcycle officer and a Tesla and a Mercedes SUV.
As the Dawnproject has been warning for years, and we keep seeing over and over again in tragic news stories, the “unsafe” Tesla design runs over and kills children.
A teenage girl was left with life-threatening injuries after a Tesla driver collided with her in a West Yorkshire village. The serious crash happened at about 8.15am today on Rochdale Road near the West Vale Primary School in the village of Greetland near Halifax. The girl was on foot when she collapsed into the road. The driver of a black Tesla Model Y crashed into her as they were travelling from Stainland Road up Rochdale Road towards Saddleworth Road.
When Russia alone vetoed a Sudan ceasefire 1-14 at the UN, they claimed to be fighting colonialism. The irony is rich: Russia is blocking peace to protect their own colonial exploitation of Sudan’s civil war.
Russia invokes sovereignty while simultaneously undermining it in Ukraine, Sudan, and across Africa, which reveals a pattern where “anti-colonialism” really means “no one else gets to interfere with our interference.”
Russia’s veto doesn’t just represent opposition to a ceasefie. Putin is out to preserve a carefully cultivated position of chaotic influence in Sudan. By maintaining the devastating conflict’s status quo (over 10 million people displaced), Russia protects its ability to play both sides of the civil war, a strategy that serves multiple strategic objectives.
Money Laundering: Gold and Ports
Russia’s interests in Sudan are primarily concentrated in two areas: gold and maritime access. Through relationships with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Russia maintains access to Sudan’s highly inflated gold deposits to offset international sanctions. Simultaneously, through ties with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), Russia secures potential access to Port Sudan, a strategic Red Sea location vital for international trade and naval presence… ahem, exporting gold.
The gold trade isn’t just about profit, it’s about creating untraceable channels for moving money outside Western oversight. When Russia claims to oppose “colonial” intervention, they’re really protecting their shadow financial networks. A peaceful, let alone unified, Sudan likely would slam the cookie jar lid on Putin’s greedy fingers.
Ceasefire and increased international oversight surely would disrupt many lucrative hidden Russian operations:
Interestingly, the UN resolution’s failure to address the UAE’s substantial support for the RSF provides additional context on Russian money laundering through civil war.
This omission highlights how regional politics and competing interests complicate international efforts to resolve violence in Sudan. Russia’s veto, while appearing isolated, actually serves multiple parties who benefit from limited international oversight.
Beyond Sudan there’s a broader African strategy by Russia. Sudan in fact mirrors an approach taken in other African nations like Mali, Chad, and Niger. Maintaining a veneer of influence while stirring up chaos, Russia creates “opportunities” to undermine local authority (e.g. ignore sovereignty):
These various strategic interests come at a devastating humanitarian cost. Continuation of conflict directly impacts tens of millions of Sudanese civilians, leading to displacement, food insecurity, and loss of life. The international community’s inability to implement a ceasefire exemplifies how Russia can interfere to supersede humanitarian concerns with selfish gains, while trolling everyone about freedom from foreign interference.
Russia’s veto, drawing widespread international criticism, demonstrates the complexity of geopolitics. Regional conflicts often still represent broader international strategic objectives, always at the expense of civilian populations. Understanding Russia’s underlying motivation of greed becomes crucial for any meaningful attempt at conflict resolution.
The international community now faces the challenge of addressing not just the immediate conflict, but the external interests that continue to fuel it. Until underlying dynamics of exploitation by Russia change, achieving lasting peace in Sudan is blocked by Putin.
Over 10 million displaced Sudanese civilians and over 25K dead serve as collateral damage in Russia’s cynical game of profiting from chaos while preaching about sovereignty. Their lovely veto reveals their real position on sovereignty: African nations should be free from everyone’s influence except Moscow’s. The cost of this hypocrisy is measured in Sudanese lives.
Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimates that over 61,000 people died in Khartoum between April 2023 and June 2024, with violence claiming over 26,000 lives, far exceeding ACLED’s figure of 20,178 deaths nationwide during the same period. Alarmingly, over 90% of all deaths went unrecorded, suggesting a significantly underestimated toll in other regions.
Some estimate over 20 million people are facing starvation.
The buried lede here is that someone had to use Facebook to make an official statement about elections.
In a Facebook address Tuesday watched by tens of thousands of people, Venancio Mondlane again demanded a recount of the October 9 vote which the electoral commission said was won by the Frelimo party in power for almost half a century.
“We lost 50 people shot by the authorities who were supposed to protect these people,” said Mondlane, referring to a police crackdown on waves of protests he called against the election.
The conflict stems from Mozambique’s post-colonial history, one of my longest and most focused research areas, as I wrote on this blog in 2006:
It begs the question what Mozambique would have looked like if someone hadn’t assassinated Mondlane (February 3, 1969). Killing a powerful liberal-but-left American university professor of history, a respected leader within FRELIMO, ended his moderating influence over a freedom movement. FRELIMO was operating more peacefully under Mondlane as he and immediate colleagues left out rigid dogma or hierarchy; they openly invited interplay of conflicting views and positions. His assassination by the US regressed freedom and propelled turmoil.
Basically FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) ruled since independence from Portugal’s fascist dictatorship in 1975. The party transformed from the fight for liberation into (arguably due to American assassination and subterfuge) political dominance, maintaining power through a combination of legitimate support and contested electoral processes.
Several key aspects stand out in terms of today’s news:
How much of this violence is attributable to Facebook owning the platform in Mozambique for public discourse? I’m not saying Facebook necessarily was causal in the violence, rather that it’s more a symptom of broader issues in Mozambican democracy. The platform’s unnatural high-exit barriers and undemocratic privatization of infrastructure reflects the lack of alternative spaces for political opposition to communicate with supporters. And also that Facebook may be causal.
When Facebook becomes the de facto platform for political communication, it intentionally creates a dangerous anti-democratic dependency where a private foreign company effectively controls access to political discourse. Facebook’s algorithms and content moderation policies tend to amplify political tensions and shape how opposition movements organize and communicate. This isn’t unique to Mozambique, given we saw similar dynamics in Myanmar, Ethiopia and… the United States.
Facebook causing violence, like Tesla causing chemical spills, isn’t the core issue here as bad as it may seem, however. Facebook’s dominance was a symptom of institutional weaknesses that has setup a transition into becoming the cause (perhaps similar to how FRELIMO went from liberation to domination). A foreign-state service monopoly mindset of American businessmen likely exacerbates this. The key issue is in fact the privatization of what should be public democratic infrastructure.
Just as FRELIMO’s transition from liberation movement to ruling party was enabled by control of state resources, Facebook’s transition from communication platform to political infrastructure was enabled by network effects and data monopolies.
The critical difference lies in accountability. While FRELIMO must at least maintain some veneer of democratic legitimacy in a government role within Mozambique, Facebook faces no such local (or even international) constraints. This creates an unprecedented situation where crucial democratic infrastructure is controlled by an entity with no democratic accountability to the population it serves.
The Myanmar and Ethiopia parallels also obscure how Mozambique represents something distinct and more like the United States. We are witnessing a case where Facebooks’s role in political communication was normalized before its potential for amplifying violence was fully understood. This makes it an important case study in how privatized democratic infrastructure becomes dangerously entrenched even in the absence of acute crises.
Arguably the “soft” path to platform dependency might actually be more dangerous than the more visible crises in Myanmar or Ethiopia.