As Israel readies troops for ground assault, Gaza awaits urgently needed aid from Egypt

Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with airstrikes Thursday, including in the south where Palestinians were told to take refuge, as the Israeli defense minister ordered ground troops to prepare to see Gaza “from the inside”, though he didn’t indicate when the ground assault would begin.

Gaza’s overwhelmed hospitals tried to stretch out ebbing medical supplies and fuel for generators, as authorities worked out logistics for a desperately needed aid delivery from Egypt. Doctors in darkened wards across Gaza performed surgeries by the light of mobile phones and used vinegar to treat infected wounds.

Amid the violence, President Joe Biden pledged unwavering support for Israel’s security, “today and always,” while adding that the world “can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians” in the besieged Gaza Strip.

In an address Thursday night from the Oval office, hours after returning to Washington from an urgent visit to Israel, Biden drew a distinction between ordinary Palestinians and Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. He linked the current war in Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying Hamas and Russian President Vladimir Putin “both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.”

Biden said he was sending an “urgent budget request” to Congress on Friday, to cover emergency military aid to both Israel and Ukraine.

Meanwhile, an unclassified U.S. intelligence assessment delivered to Congress estimated casualties in an explosion at a Gaza City hospital this week on the “low end” of 100 to 300 deaths. The death toll “still reflects a staggering loss of life,” U.S. intelligence officials said in the report, seen by The Associated Press. It said intelligence officials were still assessing the evidence and their casualty estimate may evolve.

Biden and other U.S. officials already have said that U.S. intelligence officials believe the explosion at al-Ahli Hospital was not caused by an Israeli airstrike. Thursday’s findings echoed that.

The Israeli military has relentlessly attacked Gaza in retaliation for the devastating Oct. 7 Hamas rampage in southern Israel. Even after Israel told Palestinians to evacuate the north of Gaza and flee south, strikes extended across the territory, heightening fears among the territory’s 2.3 million people that nowhere was safe.

Palestinian militants fired rockets into Israel from Gaza and Lebanon, and tensions flared in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

In a fiery speech to Israeli infantry soldiers on the Gaza border, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant urged the forces to “get organized, be ready” to move in. Israel has massed tens of thousands of troops along the border.

“Whoever sees Gaza from afar now, will see it from the inside,” he said. “It might take a week, a month, two months until we destroy them,” he added, referring to Hamas.

Israel’s consent for Egypt to let in food, water and medicine provided the first possible opening in its seal of the territory. Many Gaza residents are down to one meal a day and drinking dirty water.

Egypt and Israel were still negotiating the entry of fuel for hospitals. Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said Hamas has stolen fuel from U.N. facilities and Israel wants assurances that won’t happen. The first trucks of aid were expected to go in Friday.

With the Egypt-Gaza border crossing in Rafah closed, the already dire conditions at Gaza’s second-largest hospital deteriorated further, said Dr. Mohammed Qandeel of Nasser Hospital in the southern town of Khan Younis. Power was shut off in most of the hospital and medical staff were using mobile phones for light.

At least 80 wounded civilians and 12 dead flooded into the hospital after witnesses said a strike hit a residential building in Khan Younis. Doctors had no choice but to leave two to die because there were no ventilators, Qandeel said.

“We can’t save more lives if this keeps happening,” he said.

The Gaza Health Ministry pleaded with gas stations to give fuel to hospitals and a U.N. agency donated some of its last fuel.

The agency’s donation to Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest, would “keep us going for another few hours,” hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia said.

Al-Ahli Hospital was still recovering from Tuesday’s explosion, which remains a point of dispute between Hamas and Israel. Hamas quickly said an Israeli airstrike hit the hospital, which Israel denied. The AP has not independently verified any of the claims or evidence released by the parties.

The blast left body parts strewn on the hospital grounds, where crowds of Palestinians had clustered in hopes of escaping Israeli airstrikes. The U.S. assessment noted “only light structural damage,” with no impact crater visible.

Near al-Ahli, meanwhile, another explosion struck a Greek Orthodox church housing displaced Palestinians late Thursday, resulting in deaths and dozens of wounded. Abu Selmia, the Shifa Hospital director general, said dozens were hurt at the Church of Saint Porphyrios but could not give a precise death toll because bodies were buried under rubble.

Palestinian authorities blamed the blast on an Israeli airstrike, a claim that could not be independently verified. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchy of Jerusalem condemned the attack and said it would “not abandon its religious and humanitarian duty” to provide assistance.

The Gaza Health Ministry said 3,785 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, the majority women, children and older adults. Nearly 12,500 were injured, and another 1,300 people were believed buried under rubble, authorities said.

More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, mostly civilians slain during Hamas’ deadly incursion. Roughly 200 others were abducted. The Israeli military said Thursday it had notified the families of 203 captives.

More than 1 million Palestinians, about half of Gaza’s population, have fled their homes in the north since Israel told them to evacuate, crowding into U.N.-run schools-turned-shelters or the homes of relatives.

For the first time since Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in 1967, a major tent camp arose to house displaced people. Dozens of U.N.-provided tents lined a dirt lot in Khan Younis.

The deal to get aid into Gaza through Rafah, the territory’s only connection to Egypt, remained fragile. Israel said the supplies could only go to civilians and that it would “thwart” any diversions by Hamas. Biden said the deliveries “will end” if Hamas takes any aid.

More than 200 trucks and some 3,000 tons of aid were positioned at or near Rafah, according to Khalid Zayed, the head of the Red Crescent for North Sinai.

Under an arrangement reached between the United Nations, Israel and Egypt, U.N. observers will inspect the trucks before entering Gaza. The U.N., working with the Egyptian and Palestinian Red Crescent, will ensure aid goes only to civilians, an Egyptian official and European diplomat told the AP. A U.N. flag will be raised on both sides of the crossing as a sign of protection against airstrikes, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media.

It was not immediately clear how much cargo the crossing could handle. Waleed Abu Omar, spokesperson for the Palestinian side, said work has not started to repair the road damaged by Israeli airstrikes.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told Al-Arabiya TV that foreigners and dual nationals would be allowed to leave Gaza once the crossing was opened.

Israel said it agreed to allow aid from Egypt because of a request by Biden — which followed days of intense talks with the U.S. secretary of state to overcome staunch Israeli refusal.

Israel had previously said it would let nothing into Gaza until Hamas freed the hostages taken from Israel. Relatives of some of the captives were furious over the aid announcement.

“The Israeli government pampers the murderers and kidnappers,” the Hostage and Missing Families Forum said.

The Israeli military said Thursday it killed a top Palestinian militant in Rafah and hit hundreds of targets across Gaza, including militant tunnel shafts, intelligence infrastructure and command centers. Palestinians have launched barrages of rockets at Israel since the fighting began.

Violence was also escalating in the West Bank, where Israel carried out a rare airstrike Thursday, targeting militants in the Nur Shams refugee camp.

Six Palestinians were killed, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, and the Israeli military said the strike killed militants and resulted in 10 Israeli officers being wounded. More than 74 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the war started.

AP

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

US to divert shells for Ukraine to Israel – Axios

The US will give Israel tens of thousands of 155mm artillery shells that were originally set aside for Ukraine, Axios reported on Thursday. The Israeli military reportedly told the Pentagon that it needed the shells to prepare for a ground invasion of Gaza.

The US maintains a stockpile of ammunition at a facility in Israel, which only US forces have access to. Earlier this year, the US began taking shells from this facility and another stockpile in South Korea in order to meet Ukraine’s massive demand for ammo.

Israeli officials told the news site that the US will now be refilling this stockpile with ammunition from its own stocks that had been earmarked for Ukraine, at the direct request of the Israeli government. The officials said that the shells will arrive in Israel in the coming weeks.

The report comes a day after US President Joe Biden visited Israel. After Biden met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, the latter said that the US president had promised him a “massive, unprecedented” package of military aid. 

It is unclear from his statement whether the Israeli PM was referring to the artillery shells.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas erupted at a crucial time for Ukraine. With its summer counteroffensive over having achieved only minimal gains at an enormous human cost, Kiev is currently lobbying European nations that can’t manufacture the arms it needs, while American officials are reportedly preoccupied with rushing weapons to Israel.

“We need some support from the leaders,” Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said during an impromptu visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels last week. “It’s important there are long-distance missiles, or long-distance weapons ... The problem: How to get it?”

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has insisted that Washington can afford to fight two foreign wars. However, funds allocated to Ukraine by Congress are drying up, and President Joe Biden is now reportedly trying to convince an increasingly Ukraine-skeptic Republican Party to okay $60 billion in military and economic aid for Kiev by tying it to a $10 billion package for Israel, which the GOP would traditionally be more amenable to supporting.

Israel has not yet made heavy use of artillery in its war against Hamas, opting instead to pound Gaza with airstrikes while artillery and tanks engage in sporadic exchanges of fire with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon and the Golan Heights. However, Israeli troops are currently massed along the Gaza border in preparation for a ground operation, which Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday would take place “soon.”

Artillery would be “urgently” needed for such an offensive, Israeli officials told Axios.

** Putin visits command post of Russian armed forces in Rostov-on-Don

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the command post of the Russian armed forces in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where he was briefed about the special military operation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.

"While returning from Perm, President Putin made a detour to Rostov-on-Don, where he visited the command post of the Russian armed forces," he said.

Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov briefed the Russian president about the current situation in the special operation zone.

"Conversations with other high-ranking military commanders were held as well," Peskov added.

Later, Gerasimov reported to Putin that Russian troops kept fulfilling their objectives in accordance with the plan of the special military operation.

"The combined group of forces is fulfilling objectives in accordance with the operation’s plan," Gerasimov reported.

Putin regularly visits the command post of the Russian special military operation in Rostov-on-Don. In particular, he held a meeting here and heard the military’s reports on August 19. He also made a stop in Rostov-on-Don in mid-March, at the time when he visited Mariupol. Putin also was at the building on December 31, 2022, when he addressed the country on New Year’s Eve.

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ukrainian troops face new Russian assault on eastern town of Avdiivka

Ukrainian troops are facing a new Russian onslaught in the largely destroyed eastern city of Avdiivka, while making some progress on their counteroffensive in the southern theatre, senior military officials said on Thursday.

General Valery Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine's commander-in-chief, posted a video on Telegram in which he appeared to be conferring with officers in Avdiivka and in Kupiansk, a town further north where Russian forces have intensified attacks in recent weeks.

"The enemy is not relenting in attempts to break through our defences and surround (Avdiivka)," Zaluzhniy wrote in a commentary attached to the video.

"The enemy is actively bringing in assault units and large amounts of armoured equipment and using aircraft and artillery."

Oleksandr Shtupun, spokesperson for the southern group of Ukrainian forces, told national television there was constant pressure on Avdiivka, about 20 km (12 miles) west of the Russian-held city of Donetsk.

"They regrouped and launched new assaults there," he said.

Russian forces subjected Avdiivka to fierce attacks last week, but the shelling had tapered off in the last few days.

Avdiivka has become a watchword for Ukrainian resistance. The town, known for its large coking plant, held out in 2014 against Russian-backed separatists who secured swathes of eastern Ukraine and it.

And like Bakhmut to the northeast, captured by Russian forces in May, it has endured months of attacks since Russia's full-scale February 2022 invasion. Officials say some 1,600 residents remain from a pre-war population of 32,000.

Kupiansk was recaptured by Ukrainian troops late last year in a lighting advance through the country's northeast, but Russian forces have stepped up attacks in a bid to retake it.

Zaluzhniy said Ukrainian forces around Kupiansk were "maintaining their defence in the most difficult of conditions".

Russia's accounts of the fighting said its forces had destroyed a command point near Avdiivka and repelled 11 Ukrainian attacks near Kupiansk.

Spokesperson Shtupun said Ukrainian troops engaged in the country's four-month-old counteroffensive had made a degree of headway in the southern theatre, where they are trying to advance to the Sea of Azov to sever a land bridge linking Russian positions in the east and south.

He said troops had advanced 400 metres (a quarter mile) to the southwest of the village of Verbove in Zaporizhzhia region.

Verbove is a few kilometres east of Robotyne, a village recaptured by Ukraine last month in the southward drive.

The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank and non-profit research group, said Ukrainian forces appeared to have broken through on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in the southern Kherson region. Kyiv did not comment on the report.

When Ukrainian troops retook parts of Kherson region last year, Russian forces abandoned its biggest city, also called Kherson. They now shell the city from the opposite bank.

RT/Tass/Reuters

I grew up thinking that a judicious mix of crime, sex and money might not only help a publisher turn a good profit but could also be the catalyst for a better society. But my friend, the Publisher/Editor-In-Chief of NaijaTimes,Ehi Braimah, subscribes to a slightly different model.

When he sent me a collection of the editorials by the online newspaper to review, it was obvious that he believes it is possible to change society – for the better – by using a genre different from my old, familiar mix. Which is a bit of a surprise because in his former life, Ehi was old school.  

He has had such an extraordinarily buoyant social life as a younger man, he appears to be afraid of getting old. That’s probably why instead of reproducing the old school journalism that extolled sex, money and crime, he is charting a different pathway for a better society, as you would find in the new book from the stable of NaijaTimes.

My first impression of the book, For A Better Society – A Compilation of Editorials Published in NaijaTimes from September 2020 to July 2023, published by Bookcraft and released this year, is that it reflects the importance the author puts on newspaper commentary with the notion that it holds a crucial place in the overall objective of news production.

The numbers

Newspapers – print and online alike – use the weight of their editorials to achieve any or all of these three objectives: 1) influence public opinion, 2) promote critical thinking, and 3) cause people to take action.

Perhaps it might be useful to give a sense of the analytics of the NaijaTimeswebsite. According to open-source statistics of the site as of October 13, 2023, it currently ranks 1,142,571 globally, with a country ranking of 12,882 and trending up.

That’s not bad, considering that the brand is still in its infancy. Ten percent of its users, which is the highest percentage, comes from Nigeria; 7.56 percent from Antigua and Barbuda; 2.72 percent from the Maldives; 2.46 percent from the United States; and 2.39 percent from Jersey. Other parts of the world, combined, account for 74.79 percent.

Perhaps a far more relevant statistic would be the demographics of the users of NaijaTimes, especially those who read its editorials. Unfortunately, since I’m not a staff, I’ll need to use a hacker’s ingenuity to reach the backend, a skill that is obviously against the ethos of a better society!

We can argue that traditional newspapers with both hardcopy and online presence appear to stick more to publishing daily editorials as part of their content. Many strictly online news platforms do not dedicate much energy and time to editorial publishing for reasons ranging from mode of operation, a lack of proper editorial board, the virtuality associated with content production, and a lack of commitment. The ones that do, publish editorials at intervals – say, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Not NaijaTimes!

In 35 months, NaijaTimes published 115 editorials broadly covering nine areas, each of which constitutes a chapter in this book – governance, politics, economy, education, security, health & environment, international affairs/diplomacy, sports and tributes/obituaries.

The major events that define the period covered by this book are: Covid-19, the #EndSARS protests, the 2023 general elections, and the state of the Nigerian economy. And, maybe we should add notable deaths around the world, and the FIFA World Cup in Qatar to the mix?

#EndSARS and all that

You don’t have to travel far into the pages of For A Better Society before we are thrown right into one of the most defining moments in our recent history. On Page 4 of the book, the editorial: “End SARS protests: Time to address the hard facts,” published on October 18, 2020, the newspaper draws readers’ attention to perhaps why the massive protests eventually yielded little.

It reads: “While those in the South are in support of a complete disbandment of SARS, those in the North are not; rather, they are calling for a comprehensive reformation of the squad… Of course, this kind of argument is expected in a plural society like ours, but we call for caution so that the differences in approach do not distract from the essence of guaranteeing the rights and privileges of members of the society and saving them from the brutality of security agencies.”

In Chapter Six, four out of the nine editorial publications under the Health and Environment deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. No single event highlighted 2020 like the pandemic, and because NaijaTimes itself was launched just around the peak of it, the newspaper rightly uses it as the peg of its evaluation of the year.

The other editorial “Crisis in APC and PDP: Do Nigerians need an alternative in 2023?”, published on August 15, 2021, captures the exasperation with the two dominant parties, which set the stage for the emergence of Peter Obi of the Labour Party. Obi’s eventual performance as the best third-place finisher in decades in the election was probably a vindication of the newspaper.

One of the most controversial issues in Nigeria’s economy has been the removal of subsidy on petrol announced by President Bola Tinubu in his inauguration speech on May 29, 2023. The newspaper supports the call for subsidy to be removed and for the government to speedily deregulate the oil and gas sector to allow “free but monitored market interactions to determine exploration, exploitation, processing and supply of petroleum products in the country.”

You know the rest of the story: Subsidy is gone! Subsidy is back!

Mind your language

Perhaps it would be useful to talk briefly, at this point, on the use of language. In my experience, apart from their general staleness and lack of authority, one of the other reasons why a number of readers tend to ignore editorials is the use of ponderous language, like the one I have just used – ponderous!

You may say this collection of editorials looks at the government of Tinubu with rose-tinted glasses. But you cannot say its language is ponderous or ambiguous. It adopts clear, straightforward language and examples in making its case for a better society.

Tribute editorials, for which global brands such as the Times of London and The Economist, are well-known appear to be going out of fashion in our province. Chapter Nine, the final chapter of this book, has a rich array of tributes and obituaries not only because many iconic personalities coincidentally died within the time of its compilation, but also because there is the consciousness to document their journey. From JP Clark to Jerry Rawlings, Diego Maradona to Pele and Queen Elizabeth in-between, For A Better Society got them all covered.  

Except, of course, for brevity and uniformity of length, the book is a compilation of what an editorial should be. The newspaper set for itself, the lofty goal of seeking a “better Nigeria with strong institutions, respect for the rule of law and defending the public interest.” This is not a three-year goal, never mind one that can be achieved easily in a society where almost everyone is talking, few are listening, and fewer still are doing right.

A good editorial

But let me borrow the words of Singh A. and Singh S. (2006), in their book, What Is A Good Editorial? “A good editorial should express an opinion without being opinionated. It should teach without being pedagogic. It should transform without being evangelical. It should engulf without drowning. It should motivate to action without making you dictatorial. It should enlighten without getting you dogmatic, prejudiced and egotistical.”

This book is a solid reference material for policymakers and those who seek knowledge in various fields or those who simply want to read balanced and informed commentaries about specific topics. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re the old school of Ehi’s variety or a product of the Arab spring!

And when Ehi has made his money, he should not forget to pay tithe to Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, whose newspaper, Champion, has the proprietary right of the mantra, “Towards a better society!”

Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP  

In the fast-paced business world, "leadership" often brings images of boardrooms, power suits, corner offices, and strategic plans to mind. However, at its core, leadership is all about people. It's about understanding, empowering, and inspiring them to achieve their full potential.

Let me raise the bar even further. If you're in a leadership capacity now, you should know that leadership at its very best is about investing in people's development and looking after their needs so they are equipped to succeed and deliver excellence.

There's a term for that in the business lexicon: servant leadership.

The highest measure of success for a servant leader is the impact you're making on others under your care. As a starting point to shift your leadership style to a more high-impact, serving model that puts people first, we need daily reminders to keep us on track to be the very best leader we can be. 

One reminder that should be at the forefront of every leader's mind is in the form of a question – a powerful, hold-up-the-mirror question: 

How will I be remembered by my peers, colleagues, and employees?

Would anyone who's ever worked for you put you on their short list of "best bosses?" Would anyone share stories of how being led by you changed their life? How being led by you helped them grow personally and professionally? 

Yes, the bar is pretty high for servant leaders, and not everyone measures up. Why do I say that? Because servant leaders are known to be selfless givers. 

They give of their time, they share their wisdom and knowledge, they pour into their people, and they place their followers' interests ahead of their own. They do all of this because they have a genuine, intrinsic desire to see people succeed.

Becoming a Servant Leader

The opportunity to learn the skills of servant leadership is there for the taking; it's accessible to anyone willing to elevate their leadership game. 

The benefits also are tremendous. When you arrive at the moment where your servant leadership is crystalized, people will respond with uncommon loyalty and commitment. From a purely business standpoint, this means higher performance and employee engagement.

Here's the bottom line: If you want to watch your own leadership growth and likability skyrocket, do the courageous act of placing others in the position to be and do their very best. When you do that, you are on your way to becoming an exceptional and respected servant leader. 

Inc

Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has asked the supreme court to grant his application seeking to tender fresh evidence against President Bola Tinubu.

Abubakar also asked the court to overlook technicalities to allow him to present the evidence in the interest of justice.

The former vice-president and his party are challenging Tinubu’s victory at the presidential poll and the verdict of the election tribunal upholding the outcome of the February 25 election.

Abubakar had alleged that Tinubu’s academic records were fraught with discrepancies and forgeries.

His request for the US court for the northern district of Illinois to compel Chicago State University (CSU) to release Tinubu’s academic records has since been granted.

The PDP candidate is now seeking to introduce these records at the apex court.

However, in a counter affidavit and written address filed through his team of lawyers, led by Wole Olanipekun, Tinubu gave several reasons why his academic records obtained from CSU cannot be considered by the supreme court.

Responding on points of law, Abubakar said the issue before the court has grave consequences and should be considered in its merit.

“The supreme court, as the apex court and indeed the policy court, has intervened time and again to do substantial justice in such matters of great constitutional importance, as it did in the case of AMAECHI vs. INEC (2008) 5 NWLR (Pt. 1080) 227 and OBI vs. INEC (2007) 11 NWLR (Pt. 1046) 565,” he said.

“The supreme court applied the principle of ubi jus ibi remedium to ensure substantial justice is done in such novel scenarios.

“The need to rebuff, eschew and reject technicality and the duty of court to ensure substantial justice is very germane in this matter, given the gravity of the constitutional issue involved in deciding whether a candidate for the highest office in the land, the office of president of the country, presented a forged certificate or not.

“Presenting forged documents by any candidate, especially by a candidate for the highest office in the land, is a very grave constitutional issue that must not be encouraged.”

Meanwhile, in a 20-paragraph affidavit deposed to in support of the application, Abubakar argued that if the apex court grants the application, there would be no need for “any further argument other than the written address in support of same showing that the second respondent is in violation of the provisions of section 137 (1) (j) of the constitution by presenting a certificate disclaimed by the institution from where he purportedly procured same”.

The PDP candidate told the court that he is not contending whether or not Tinubu attended the Chicago State University but that the president submitted a forged certificate to the electoral commission.

“That the case is not whether the 2nd respondent attended Chicago State University but whether he presented a forged certificate to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC),” he said.

The Cable

Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, is insisting that Peter Obi, candidate of Labour Party in the 2023 Presidential election, defeated President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Lawal had raised dust when he said the candidate who came third according to the results declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) won the election.

Felix Morka, National Publicity Secretary of the APC, had asked Lawal to refrain from peddling falsehood.

Morka, who described Lawal as a burden to himself, said the former SGF was in need of counselling.

In a lengthy statement on Wednesday, the former SGF, who at a time was the APC National Vice Chairman, North East, said some key allies of Tinubu’s administration had reached out to him for peace.

The statement was titled: “Political Discourse: The APC reaction and its castigation of my person”.

While describing APC as a self-centered party, Lawal said, “The thief knows who stole the item”.

“I woke up this morning to a very pathetic social media trending write-up, apparently a response to my article on the current political discourse by one Felix allegedly of the APC. I suspect he was assigned this role because it is in the nature of sycophants and people consigned to second class status to be assigned roles that their masters are wary of taking on.

“Usually, the dirty, unsavoury jobs are contracted out to such. In the bible, a certain Felix ( after which this Felix was probably named), was a freed slave who had a reputation of cruelty as the ruler of Judea in order to please his master, the emperor Claudius (of whose mother Felix was a slave).

“When we founded APC way back in 2013/2014, we envisaged it would be a national party that would carry along all the different socio-political and religious tendencies of the nation. In those days, we were careful not to sideline any of the religions or tribes of the country in the composition of the membership and leadership of the party. We wanted a party that would embrace all Nigerians. It was this that informed the principle that both the National Chairman and Secretary would not be of the same religion, tribe or region.

“All that is now left for the party is a change of name, but even this may not take long since it already has the Kadmul Islam as its National Chairman, and a Muslim as National Secretary. The Deputy National Chairman North (who acts in the absence of the Chairman), National Organizing Secretary, National Legal Adviser, and three National Vice Chairmen and more, are Muslims. Good for them.

“And talking of electoral value, both the National Chairman and the National Secretary just dramatically lost in the May election. I suspect Mallam Felix didn’t do well in his own constituency either. Mark my words, all critical decisions will be taken behind his back during the afternoon prayers sessions which he will be unable to attend.

“As to the substance of the response itself, I find it deliberately obtuse, skirting around the real issues raised in my press statement. It was empty of substance and logic; a true product of a sycophantic mind that has no capacity to understand the subtle nuances underlying a message delivered to a discerning audience.

“Mallam Felix, your masters got the message loud and clear because some of them have reached out to me for dialogue on the issues raised. But in line with your lower status in the scheme of things you are not aware that all the issues I raised were designed in a manner to deliver a message to a discomfited government that is populated by longstanding friends of mine who appear to have abandoned common sense and patriotism for unbridled personal goals and filthy lucre. And they got the message; which you cannot. In this discourse, you are a remote outsider, so shut up.”

Daily Trust

Israel will let Egypt deliver some aid to Gaza, as doctors struggle to treat hospital blast victims

Israel said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver limited humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. The first crack in a punishing 10-day siege on the territory came one day after a blast at a hospital killed hundreds and put immense strain on Gaza’s struggling medical system.

The announcement to allow water, food and other supplies happened as fury over the blast at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Hospital spread across the Middle East, and as U.S. President Joe Biden visited Israel in hopes of preventing a wider conflict in the region.

There were conflicting claims of who was behind the explosion on Tuesday night, but protests flared quickly as many Arab leaders said Israel was responsible. Hamas officials in Gaza blamed an Israeli airstrike, saying hundreds were killed. Israel denied it was involved and released a flurry of video, audio and other information that it said showed the blast was instead due to a rocket misfire by Islamic Jihad, another militant group operating in Gaza. Islamic Jihad dismissed that claim.

The Associated Press has not independently verified any of the claims or evidence.

Israel shut off all supplies to Gaza soon after Hamas militants rampaged across communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7. As supplies run out, many families in Gaza have cut down to one meal a day and have been left to drink dirty water.

The bloody devastation at al-Ahli threw the siege’s impact into sharp relief. Video from the scene showed the hospital grounds strewn with torn bodies, many of them young children. Hundreds of wounded were rushed to Gaza City’s main hospital where doctors, already facing critical supply shortages, were sometimes forced to perform surgery on the floors, often without anesthesia.

A steady stream of ambulances, taxis, cars and at least one motorcycle also arrived at a hospital in Khan Younis. Men jumped from the vehicles and scrambled to open doors, with hospital staff and bystanders helping carry the injured.

One man rushed in carrying a limp child in his arms. A girl with her head wrapped with a makeshift bandage was helped from a car. Many injured had to be carried by multiple men or hoisted onto gurneys.

As soon as one vehicle was unloaded, another arrived to take its place.

Biden said Egypt’s president agreed to open the crossing and to let in an initial group of 20 trucks with humanitarian aid. If Hamas confiscates aid, “it will end,” he said. The aid will start moving Friday at the earliest, White House officials said.

Egypt must still repair the road across the border that was cratered by Israeli airstrikes. More than 200 trucks and some 3,000 tons of aid are positioned at or near the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only connection to Egypt, said the head of the Red Crescent for North Sinai, Khalid Zayed.

Supplies will go in under supervision of the U.N., Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told Al-Arabiya TV. Asked if foreigners and dual nationals seeking to leave would be let through, he said: “As long as the crossing is operating normally and the (crossing) facility has been repaired.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the decision was approved after a request from Biden. It said Israel “will not thwart” deliveries of food, water or medicine from Egypt, as long as they are limited to civilians in the south of the Gaza Strip and don’t go to Hamas militants. The statement made no mention of fuel, which is badly needed for hospital generators.

Relatives of some of the roughly 200 people who were taken hostage and forced back to Gaza during the attack reacted in fury to the aid announcement.

“Children, infants, women, soldiers, men, and elderly, some with serious illnesses, wounded and shot, are held underground like animals,” said a statement from the Hostage and Missing Families Forum. But “the Israeli government pampers the murderers and kidnappers.”

Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel resumed Wednesday after a 12-hour lull. Israeli strikes on Gaza continued, including on cities in the south that Israel had described as “safe zones” for civilians.

In his brief visit, Biden tried to strike a balance between showing U.S. support for Israel, while containing growing alarm among Arab allies. Upon his arrival, Biden embraced Netanyahu, said the hospital blast appeared not to be Israel’s fault and expressed concern for the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. He also announced $100 million in humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Israeli military held a briefing Wednesday laying out its case for why it was not responsible for the explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital.

Spokesman Daniel Hagari said the military was not firing in the area when the blast occurred. He said Israeli radar confirmed a rocket barrage was fired by Islamic Jihad militants from a nearby cemetery at the time of the blast. Independent video showed one rocket in the barrage falling out of the sky, he said.

The misfired rocket hit the parking lot outside the hospital, he said. Were it an airstrike, there would have been a large crater there; instead, the fiery blast came from the misfired rocket’s warhead and its unspent propellant, he said.

Hamas called Tuesday’s hospital blast “a horrific massacre” caused by an Israeli strike.

Islamic Jihad said Israeli orders issued days before for al-Ahli to be evacuated, and a previous strike at the hospital, proved the hospital was an target. The group added that the scale of the explosion, the angle of the explosive’s fall and the extent of destruction all pointed to Israel.

The Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Hosam Naoum, said the hospital, run by the Episcopal Church, received at least three Israeli military orders to evacuate in the days before the blast. Israeli shelling hit it Sunday, wounding four staff, he said. Israel ordered all 22 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate last week. The Israeli military accuses the militants of hiding among civilians.

Hundreds of Palestinians had taken refuge in al-Ahli and other hospitals in Gaza City, hoping to be spared bombardment after Israel ordered all residents of the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south.

On Wednesday morning, the blast scene was littered with charred cars. One man who had been sheltering there with his family, Mohammed al-Hayek, said he was sitting with other men in a hospital stairwell Tuesday night when he stepped away for coffee.

“When I returned, they were torn to pieces,” he said.

The death toll was in dispute. The Health Ministry initially said at least 500 had died, but revised that number to 471 on Wednesday. Al-Ahli officials said the toll was in the hundreds.

The Gaza Health Ministry said 3,478 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, and more than 12,000 wounded, mostly women, children and the elderly. Another 1,300 people across Gaza are believed to be buried under the rubble, alive or dead, health authorities said.

More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, mostly civilians slain during Hamas’ deadly incursion. Militants in Gaza have launched rockets every day since toward cities across Israel.

Israel has been expected to launch a ground invasion into Gaza, though military officials say no decision has been made.

AP

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Drop the ‘theatrics’ if you want to talk, Putin tells Kiev

Western rhetoric on the Ukraine conflict appears to be shifting in the right direction, although Kiev must end its “theatrics” and remove legal obstacles before peace talks can resume, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

“If the Ukrainian side really wants negotiations to happen, it should be done without any theatrics,” the Russian leader told journalists on Wednesday at a press conference in China.

Putin stated that Ukraine must abolish a law which has declared peace talks impossible as long as he remains in power. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed the ban more than a year ago, as his government pursued a military victory over Russia with Western military assistance.

The Russian leader claimed that Kiev has little to show its foreign backers despite months of fighting, and that some Western officials are apparently deviating from their declared goal of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

“This transformation leads in the right direction,” Putin said. “I commend that. But it is not enough.”

The Russian president named EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell as an example of a Western figure shifting his stance.

On a visit to China last week, Borrell stated during a press conference with Foreign Minister Wang Yi that “we count on China to support Ukraine peace negotiations.”

China has long advocated a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine crisis.

Putin made the comments on Ukraine when asked by journalists to provide details of his discussions with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom he met in Beijing on Tuesday.

The Russian leader said he had not told Orban anything that contradicted Moscow’s public stance on the Ukraine conflict.

Commenting on claims that Orban was “pro-Russian,” Putin said the prime minister was actually “pro-Hungarian,” and suggested that detractors are jealous of his “courage to defend the interests of his people,” unlike many European politicians today.

Putin and Orban both traveled to China to participate in the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, and met on the sidelines of the event.

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ten civilians killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine, Kyiv reports progress in south

Russian attacks overnight and on Wednesday killed at least 10 civilians in Ukraine, while senior Ukrainian military officials said their troops had made some headway in counteroffensive operations in the southern theatre.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, said the death toll had risen to five from four in a morning missile strike on a residential building in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia.

Officials said a 31-year-old woman was killed in an attack on the village of Obukhivka in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk and a man and a woman were killed in an overnight attack on the southern region of Kherson.

On Wednesday evening, Ukraine's Interior Ministry said two bodies had been pulled out from under the rubble of a food shop hit by a Russian missile near the southern city of Mykolaiv.

Local officials in Sumy region, on the Russian border, said an "infrastructure site" had been hit in a drone attack, but provided no further details.

"The evil state continues to use terror and wage war on civilians. Russian terror must be defeated," Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

The apartment building in Zaporizhzhia suffered serious damage to one entrance from the third to the fifth storeys, he said. A picture posted by Zelenskiy on Telegram showed the building with a gaping hole in the middle, its entrance destroyed and windows smashed.

In Obukhivka, near the city of Dnipro, residents said a strong explosion blew out windows and knocked people to the ground. Officials said about 20 houses were damaged.

"A woman all covered in blood ran out from one of the houses, shouting and crying. I think that her daughter died," Victor, 32, a construction worker, told Reuters television. "We entered the house and saw a dead girl."

SOUTHERN ADVANCE CONTINUES: GENERAL

Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, in charge of Ukraine's operations in the south, said Ukrainian forces were proceeding with their planned advance towards the Sea of Azov.

Troops from the Tavria, or southern, group of forces "are continuing their offensive. They have had partial success to the south of Robotyne," Tarnavskyi wrote on Telegram.

Robotyne is one of a group of villages in the south that Ukraine wants to secure as part of the advance - aimed at severing a land bridge linking Russian positions in the south and east.

Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesperson for southern troops, also reported progress near Robotyne.

Shtupun told national television that shelling had eased around the town of Avdiivka, the focus of fierce Russian attacks in the past week west of the Russian-held town of Donetsk. But troops in the sector were preparing for a variety of scenarios.

Ukrainian troops are also trying to recapture land in eastern regions.

The General Staff, in its evening report, said its forces had repelled attacks in several areas of the 1,000-km (620-mile) front line - including 15 around the long-contested town of Maryinka in Donetsk region and 10 further north near Kupiansk.

Russia's Defence Ministry gave few details of its troops' operations, but said a depot of Ukrainian aviation equipment had been destroyed in central Dnipropetrovsk region.

Reuters could not verify accounts from either side.

World leaders attending the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Marrakesh this week have some difficult decisions to make.

For starters, numerous developing economies – including Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Zambia – are teetering on the edge of default or have already defaulted. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ recent “global stocktake” climate report shows that we are far from reaching the 1.5º Celsius target for global warming.

While robust economic growth could provide the necessary resources to tackle these challenges, the IMF foresees global sluggishness and a prolonged fight against inflation. Without international cooperation, countries may become ensnared in a slow, messy, and expensive effort to manage their debts, combat climate change, and stimulate growth.

This is not the first time that the world has faced such a crisis. As economic historian Martin Daunton notes in his forthcoming book, The Economic Government of the World 1933-2023, policymakers from 66 countries convened at the 1933 London Economic Conference to address challenges eerily similar to the ones we face today: debt, protectionism, financial instability, and polarization. With the world economy in freefall and commodity prices crashing, demand for industrial goods evaporated. As unemployment surged, so did the tensions between domestic political agendas and international economic concerns.

The London conference seemed doomed from the start, as political and economic turmoil elevated extremist leaders. In Italy, the post-World War I economic downturn facilitated Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. In Germany, Adolf Hitler had recently been appointed Chancellor. Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist, and China was embroiled in a civil war, having been invaded by Imperial Japan just two years earlier.

There were deep disagreements within both the United States and the United Kingdom over the appropriate response to the crisis. As tensions escalated between the US, the UK, and France over wartime debt, an American journalist labeled the conference a “plot to cancel debts owed to America.”

The London conference oscillated between calls for international cooperation and their dismissal by those who, in the words of US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, were “futilely and foolishly striving to live a hermit’s life.” Despite more than a month of wrangling, participants left without any resolutions. Daunton attributes this to disagreements between politicians, central bankers, and the “motley collection” of experts in attendance over the problems facing the world economy and how to address them.

In Marrakesh, representatives of 190 countries, each grappling with its own internal disputes, will attempt to strike a balance between international cooperation and domestic politics. Daunton’s book offers several cautionary tales for them to consider.

While the first part of Daunton’s book, which focuses on the response to the Great Depression, offers little encouragement, the second, which covers the Bretton Woods era, features more successful examples of effective international cooperation. The creation of multilateral institutions like the IMF and the World Bank facilitated a greater understanding of global economic problems and potential solutions, as experts could aggregate and analyze data from all member countries.

In contrast to many other works, Daunton highlights those relegated to the periphery of this emerging order, as his narrative delves into the politics of Ghana, India, and the developing world during the Cold War. In the 1960s, the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which was succeeded by the World Trade Organization) reduced industrial tariffs. With their concerns and interests sidelined, developing countries turned to alternative international forums such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the New International Economic Order.

The third part of Daunton’s book charts the rise of the “hyper-global” and “neoliberal” Washington Consensus. As the IMF and World Bank became agents of globalization, the WTO was established, and rentier capitalism spread across economies, reaching deep into the European Union.

The final part of Daunton’s narrative begins with the 2008 financial crisis and explores the threats to today’s global order. Daunton then proposes a range of potential paths to a “fairer, more inclusive capitalism,” including tougher competition enforcement, progressive taxation, job initiatives, leveling-up, de-financialization, and implementing a Green New Deal.

A theme that runs throughout the book is the contentious nature of international cooperation. Early on, we learn that in the 1930s, US President Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust” presented him with a plethora of conflicting views on foreign economic policy. It was not until FDR sided with his more internationalist officials that the protectionism and currency instability of the Great Depression began to subside.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the UK considered three competing global economic visions. The first emphasized full employment, which required countercyclical policies, international buffer stocks to maintain stable demand and prices, and public works financed by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank’s lending arm) to offset labor-market fluctuations.

The second vision focused on the sterling area, imagining a world divided between the US dollar and the pound in which the UK would maintain imperial preferences and look to Africa as an expanding market. At the heart of the third perspective was the Anglo-American relationship, suggesting that Britain should align neither with its own empire nor with Europe, but instead collaborate with the US within a dollar-based economy. Contemporary British politics echoes these discussions, as officials debate whether to strengthen relations with Europe, the Commonwealth (as part of its Indo-Pacific strategy), or the US.

In every era explored, Daunton presents readers with a rich tapestry of competing ideas, underscoring the challenge of forging multilateral agreements between dozens of countries, each with its own internal disputes. As Daunton observes, we again find ourselves in an era of uncertainty and debate over the structure of the global political economy.

Over the past 30 years, international cooperation has often been conflated with globalization, market liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and capital flows. But domestic and international debates are now characterized by other issues, including job quality and social welfare, climate change, the geostrategic implications of global supply chains, technological competition driven by national-security considerations, and the growing normalization of sanctions and economic warfare.

While these priorities are at odds with the globalization-facilitating cooperation that Daunton describes, the agreements and institutions forged over the past century enable us to achieve a new and different form of cooperation. Policymakers and the representatives of international organizations attending the Marrakesh meetings have studied both domestic and international challenges, allowing them to explore collaborative solutions and highlight the concerns of member countries during negotiations.

Though this process may appear inefficient and laborious, it remains indispensable to a world that values state sovereignty and fosters international cooperation. While Daunton’s book underscores the numerous obstacles facing such efforts, it also illuminates the myriad ways a functional international order can emerge.

Project Syndicate

• In 2012, someone stole 50,000 bitcoin from the Silk Road, an illegal dark web marketplace. Over time, the value of the stolen bitcoin skyrocketed to more than $3 billion dollars and for years it remained one of the biggest mysteries in the world of cryptocurrency.
• Almost a decade after the 2012 hack, the thief made a critical mistake that allowed the IRS-CI to crack the case.
• CNBC obtained never-before-seen footage that shows how investigators linked the thief to the crypto heist.

Athens, Georgia, is home to the University of Georgia, and the police there are used to college town-type crimes: break-ins, bar fights and assorted rowdiness. That kind of thing.

But the 911 call that came in on the night of March 13, 2019, was unlike anything the Athens-Clarke County Police Department had ever encountered.

On the phone was 28-year-old Jimmy Zhong, a local party boy and Georgia alum who frequented Athens’ drinking establishments. He wasn’t like the other town rowdies – Zhong was also a computer expert who had an unusually robust digital home surveillance system.

Now, he was calling to report a crime: hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto currency that he said had been stolen from his home. Thinking of all that lost money, Zhong was distressed.

“I’m having a panic attack,” Zhong told the dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by CNBC.

Zhong turned down the dispatcher’s offer of an ambulance, and began trying to explain the situation. “I’m an investor in bitcoin, which is like an online thing,” he said.

What happened next would bring an end to a nearly decade long manhunt and solve one of the biggest crimes of the crypto era. And it also would lead to the largest seizure of cryptocurrency from an individual in the history of the Department of Justice.

Zhong’s emergency call that winter evening sent investigators down a long digital trail that led back to the earliest days of bitcoin and revealed a dark truth about the universe of hackers and coders responsible for the creation of cryptocurrencies. It’s a world where heroes and villains traded places and could even be the same people.

None of it would go at all the way Zhong wanted.

The 911 call didn’t produce a suspect in the theft from Zhong’s house. Athens police were dealing with one of their first crypto cases and unfamiliar with the shadowy underworld, and they failed to make progress in the case.

So Zhong turned to local private investigator Robin Martinelli, who owns and operates Martinelli Investigations in nearby Loganville, Georgia.

A former sheriff’s deputy turned PI, Martinelli was far from an expert in crypto. She specialized in process serving, cheating spouses and custody investigations, the type of probes that once got her firm featured on an episode of “The Montel Williams Show.”

Martinelli had recently undergone surgery to amputate one leg, leaving her to conduct her surveillance operations with the help of a prosthetic.

Still, she was motivated to solve Zhong’s case.

“When you wake up and don’t put two feet on the ground, but you still have to run a company, you got to get out there and kick ass,” Martinelli told CNBC in an interview for the new documentary, “Crypto 911: Exposing a Bitcoin Billionaire.”

She began by examining Zhong’s robust surveillance video archive of his home. In looking at footage from the night of the crime, Martinelli spotted a slender male figure.

“We could tell that they had like a hood on – a gray hood – but then they had almost like a black ski mask,” Martinelli said.

The suspect appeared to know his way around Zhong’s house, which led Martinelli to believe that he was a friend or at least someone who had heard Zhong boast about his bitcoin stash. From the video, Martinelli was able to determine the suspect’s height and even the size of his hands.

She said she began her investigation by putting Zhong’s friends under surveillance, following them to their homes and downtown bars on Broad Street and College Avenue. She put trackers on cars and scoured social media and conducted background checks.

As she watched Zhong’s bar friends come and go, Martinelli formed a low opinion of the group. She described them as “very, very casual, plastic, not really caring, maybe using Jimmy a little bit.”

Martinelli said Zhong appeared resistant to her theories, especially when they began to focus on his circle of friends. Martinelli eventually settled on one suspect in particular who she believed had stolen 150 bitcoins from Jimmy. At the time, that amount of the digital currency was worth nearly $600,000.

Zhong didn’t want to hear it, she said.

“He would get upset when I would kind of mention somebody would had to have known where this cash was,” Martinelli said. And she understood why Zhong was so hurt by the idea that someone close to him could have betrayed him.

“Jimmy wanted to be loved,” she said. “Jimmy wanted friends.”

Even as Martinelli soured on the friend group, she was warming up to her client, who she perceived as an odd man in search of friends.

“Jimmy was a good guy,” she said. 

A lot of people around Athens felt similarly about him.

In the years before the theft, Zhong was known for throwing a lot of money around town. He was the kind of guy who would buy a round of expensive shots for the whole bar, hundreds of dollars vanishing in seconds down eager throats.

Although he lived in a modest off-campus bungalow, near student housing and the downtown college bar scene, he stayed at fancy hotels, including the Ritz Carlton, the Plaza and the Waldorf Astoria, according to court documents CNBC reviewed. He shopped at high-end stores such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Jimmy Choo. He drove fancy cars, including a Tesla.

He bought a second home, a lake house with a dock in Gainesville, Georgia, a short drive from Athens. He stocked it with jet skis, boats, a stripper pole, and lots and lots of liquor.

His parties were epic.

Zhong was living his best life with no visible source of income. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t really have a job. He told his friends that he’d gotten into bitcoin early, mining thousands of coins in the earliest days of the technology. Zhong told people he dabbled in crypto as far back as 2009, the year bitcoin was invented by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto and a small crew of developers tied online to the anonymous crypto creator.

Whatever Zhong was doing, he was making mountains of cash. And he was willing to splurge.

In 2018, when his beloved Georgia Bulldogs football team made the Rose Bowl, Zhong rounded up a small group of friends for a pilgrimage to Los Angeles. 

“It really felt like with Jimmy, there were no limits,” Stefana Masic, a Georgia alum and one of the friends on the trip, told CNBC. 

Masic said not only did Zhong pay for all the tickets, but he also rented a private jet for the cross-country flight. And he gave each friend up to $10,000 for a Beverly Hills shopping spree on Rodeo Drive. They spent it on outfits, accessories and baubles to wear in the city.

“I had never flown private before, and I never stayed in such a nice Airbnb

. It was cool because, you know, I got to experience a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t.”

As he was cheering on his team in LA, Zhong couldn’t have known that a small group of agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit, led by officials in the same city, were painstakingly trying to solve a crime that dated back years. 

What had captured the investigators’ attention was a 2012 hack in which someone had stolen 50,000 bitcoins from a site on the dark web called Silk Road, according to court documents CNBC reviewed. That site was one of the earliest crypto marketplaces, where anonymous buyers and sellers exchanged all manner of illicit material. It was full of drugs, guns, pornography and other stuff people wanted to keep secret.

Over the years, the value of the bitcoin stolen by the Silk Road hacker had soared to more than $3 billion, according to court documents. Investigators could track the location of the currency on the blockchain, which is a public ledger of all transactions. But they couldn’t see the identity of the new owner of the funds. So they watched and waited for years as the hacker transferred funds from account to account, peeled some away, and pushed some of it through crypto “mixers” designed to obscure the source of the money.

Finally, Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics company that was tracing the digital wallets containing the stolen Silk Road assets, saw the hacker made a tiny mistake. He transferred around $800 worth to a crypto exchange that followed established banking rules, including so-called know your customer processes, requiring real names and addresses of account holders.

The account was registered in Zhong’s name. The transaction took place in September 2019, six months after Zhong’s 911 call to the local police.

That alone wasn’t enough to prove Zhong was the hacker. They had to be sure.

So the IRS called the Athens-Clarke County Police Department and asked for some help, according to sources at both agencies. At the time, the police investigation into Zhong’s own crime report had been languishing.

“I got a call from an IRS agent,” Lt. Jody Thompson, who leads the local property and financial crimes unit, told CNBC.  “And he said, ‘can I come by and speak to you about Jimmy?’ And I was like, sure, I remember this case.”

After that, Thompson joined forces with IRS-CI special agent Trevor McAleenan and Shaun MaGruder, CEO of a cyber intelligence company called BlockTrace. MaGruder’s company works with the IRS as an embedded contractor and was hired for its experience untangling complicated blockchain transactions. 

Together, the three investigators said they devised a plan. They would approach Zhong using a ruse, telling him they were investigating the crime that he’d called about, the one in which a thief had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars of his bitcoin.

In reality, they were investigating Zhong for a crime they believed he had committed. A crime whose proceeds were now worth billions of dollars. 

When the three men knocked on the door of his lake home in Gainesville, Zhong opened it enthusiastically, according to body camera footage CNBC exclusively obtained. He believed the police officer and the two specialists were there to help solve his crypto cold case.

“If you guys solve this for me, I will invite you out for a party,” Zhong told the trio on the body camera footage.

The video shows the officers pouring on the praise. They called his front door “beautiful.” They called his speakers “crazy,” and they complimented his dog, Chad. They asked for a tour of the house. Body camera footage shows the men tapping on stone floors, looking in closets and checking out wood paneling. Zhong didn’t know it, but they were scouring for secret compartments. 

Zhong brought investigators to his basement, equipped with a full bar and a stripper pole.

“Is this your workout?” McAleenan asked Zhong.

“Nope, that’s for girls,” Zhong replied.

The body camera footage also shows they got a good look at Zhong’s security system, asking him to explain each of its features and capabilities. Zhong is also captured showing them a metal case he said he once used to store $1 million in cash so he could impress a woman.

“Did it work?” asked Lt. Thompson.

“Nope,” Zhong said.

“It never does,” Thompson replied.

The law enforcement officers learned that Zhong had a flamethrower on the premises. And they saw his AR-15 rifle hanging on the wall.

MaGruder said Zhong’s level of sophistication was apparent.

“He was navigating that keyboard like I’ve never seen someone navigate a keyboard,” MaGruder said. “He didn’t have to use a mouse because he knew all the hotkeys.”

Playing on the ruse, the officers asked Zhong to open his laptop and explain how he came to have the bitcoin in the first place. Zhong sat on the couch next to the investigators and entered his password, asking them to turn away as he typed.

When he opened the laptop, law enforcement could see his bitcoin wallet.

“Lo and behold, he had $60 or $70 million worth of bitcoins right there next to us,” MaGruder told CNBC in an interview. 

The evidence was enough to convince the investigators they were on the right track. As he exited Zhong’s lake house, MaGruder told CNBC he thought to himself, “This is incredible. I think we found our guy.”

The first visit allowed the investigators to obtain a federal search warrant for Zhong’s home, McAleenan said. McAleenan, MaGruder, and Thompson returned with an enormous team of officers on Nov. 9, 2021.

Before the officers raided the house, McAleenan had to explain to Zhong that he wasn’t really trying to help him. He was trying to convict him.

“I said, Jimmy, you know me as ‘Trevor.’ I’m actually Trevor McAleenan. I’m a special agent with IRS Criminal Investigation, and we’re here to execute a federal-approved warrant on your house,” McAleenan said.

“And he kind of had this look like, ‘Am I being punked?’” McAleenan added.

At that moment, another officer slid a device known as a “jiggler” into Zhong’s laptop, causing the cursor to continually move and giving law enforcement access to the password-protected contents of the computer, McAleenan said.

Officers flooded into the home, cracking open every crevice in search of evidence. McAleenan said in an upstairs closet, they found a popcorn tin with a computer hidden inside that held millions of dollars worth of bitcoin.

Using sniffer dogs trained to detect electronics, McAleenan said they found a safe buried in concrete under some basement floor tile. Court documents said the safe contained precious metals, stacks of cash and physical bitcoins minted in the early years of crypto. They also found a wallet with bitcoin from the original hack of Silk Road in 2012.

Zhong was busted.

“Really late at night we were able to say we were successful,” McAleenan said. “We found the evidence that we were looking for. And the house lit up. I mean, every agent on the site cheered.”

As they sorted through the evidence, agents discovered something else about the unusual Mr. Zhong. He was, in crypto slang, an “original gangster,” or OG.

Investigators discovered that as far back as 2009, the year bitcoin was invented, Zhong was among a small group of early coders who worked to develop and perfect the technology. He was a smaller contributor than some of the other OG players who have since become famous in the bitcoin community, McAleenan said. But investigators concluded that he made contributions to the original bitcoin code and offered ideas to the early developers on key topics like how to reduce blockchain size.

In other words, a hacker who had been involved in the development of bitcoin itself went on to become one of the biggest bitcoin thieves of all time.

“He is one of the, as we dubbed it, the original gangsters, OGs, as far as bitcoin core software developers,” McAleenan said. “He had been in this space for quite a while.”

The irony of Zhong’s role in the history of bitcoin is emblematic of the culture that built the cryptocurrency in the first place, said Nathaniel Popper, author of “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.”

“Everybody came to this for their own reason,” Popper told CNBC. “And it was, as a result of that, a very sort of eclectic and eccentric group of people.”

“Bitcoin was always shot through with irony,” Popper said. “Yes, there was something ironic about a bitcoin proponent stealing bitcoin from another bitcoin proponent. But I think that was also in some ways a part of what defined bitcoin.” 

Zhong was charged with wire fraud. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to one year and a day in federal prison. Zhong, now 33 years old, began his sentence at the federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama, on July 14, 2023.

In the end, Zhong didn’t get to keep the stolen bitcoin. The U.S. government seized those assets. Officials opened a process that allowed victims of the hack to apply to get their bitcoin back, according to a forfeiture document CNBC reviewed.

Nobody came forward to claim the loot. That’s not surprising, given that users of Silk Road in 2012 were largely drug dealers and their customers. The federal government simply sold off the stolen bitcoin and will keep the proceeds. Some of the revenue generated will likely be shared with the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, in recognition of the local officers’ help in the case, according to the IRS-CI.

As he left the courthouse after his sentencing on April 14, CNBC attempted to question Zhong about his role in the crime. Zhong covered his head with his coat and left without saying a word. 

In his statement to the judge before sentencing, Zhong said having billions in stolen bitcoin made him feel important. 

Zhong’s attorney, Michael Bachner, says the theft never actually damaged the U.S. government.

“The government has certainly not been hurt by Jimmy’s conduct whatsoever,” Bachner told CNBC. “If Jimmy had not stolen the coins and the government had in fact seized them from [Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht] they would have sold them two years later in 2014 as they did with other coins.”

At that point, the government “would have gotten $320 a coin or made somewhere about $14 million,” Bachner said. “Now, as a result of Jimmy having them, the government has gotten a $3 billion profit.”

Zhong asked for no jail time because he was concerned about the fate of Chad, his 13-year-old dog. Zhong has had a difficult life. On the autism spectrum, Bachner said he was severely bullied at school. And he found solace over the years in an online community where he could deploy his computing skills. 

As for the original crime against Jimmy Zhong — the bitcoin theft in Athens that led him to the 911 call in March 2019 — that crime has never been solved. The perpetrator remains at large.

Zhong’s dog, Chad, is staying with a friend.

CNBC