title: Black turtle bean

text: It is also common to keep the boiled water of these beans (which acquires a black coloring) and consume it as a soup with other ingredients for seasoning (known as "sopa negra", black soup, or as "sopa de frijoles", bean soup), as a broth ("caldo de frijol", bean broth) or to season or color other dishes (aforementioned "gallo pinto", for example).


title: Black turtle bean

text: Samples of black turtle beans were reported in 2006 to contain total anthocyanins in their dried seed coats of 0−2.78 mg/g.


title: Paloma (cocktail)

text: The paloma (Spanish for "dove") is a tequila-based cocktail. This drink is most commonly prepared by mixing tequila, lime juice, and a grapefruit-flavored soda such as Fresca, Squirt, or Jarritos and served on the rocks with a lime wedge. Adding salt to the rim of the glass is also an option.


title: Paloma (cocktail)

text: Alternatively, the grapefruit soda can be replaced with fresh white or red grapefruit juice ("jugo de toronja") and club soda (sugar optional).


title: Paloma (cocktail)

text: A simple paloma is a two-ingredient cocktail consisting only of tequila and grapefruit-flavored soda. A more complex variant of the Paloma is the cantarito, which in addition to lime juice, also has lemon juice and orange juice.


title: Paloma (cocktail)

text: The paloma is more flavorful than its closest relative, the greyhound, which consists of grapefruit juice and either gin or vodka mixed and served over ice.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Rajeev Ram ( ; born March 18, 1984) is an American professional tennis player who is a former world No. 1 in doubles.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Ram is a five-time major champion, having won the 2020 Australian Open, the 2021 US Open, and the 2022 US Open in men's doubles with Joe Salisbury, as well as Australian Open mixed doubles titles in 2019 and 2021 alongside Barbora Krejčíková. Ram also won a mixed doubles silver medal with Venus Williams at the 2016 Summer Olympics, and finished runner-up in men's doubles at the 2021 Australian Open, and in mixed doubles at the 2016 US Open. He reached his career-high doubles ranking of world No. 1 on 3 October 2022, and has won 23 doubles titles on the ATP Tour, including four at Masters 1000 level. Ram has qualified for the ATP Finals on six occasions, winning the title in 2022, having finished as runner-up in both 2016 and 2021.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Prior to his retirement from singles in 2017, Ram reached a career-high ranking of world No. 56 in April 2016, and won two ATP singles titles, at the Hall of Fame Tennis Championships in both 2009 and 2015. He made his Davis Cup debut for the United States in 2021, and competed at the 2016 and 2020 Olympic Games.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Ram was born to Indian parents Raghav and Sushma Ram. Table tennis, cricket, and music are some of his interests.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: In his junior career, Ram won a total of nine national junior titles, including singles and doubles. Amongst his titles were the National Claycourt 14-and-under singles title, the boys' 16-and-under national championship, the 18-and-under Easter Bowl title, and the Target Cup tournaments. In addition to his nine junior titles, Ram played high school tennis at Carmel, earned All-State honors, became the state singles champion, and earned a scholarship in both 1998 and 1999.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Rajeev earned a wildcard entry into the Juniors' 2001 US Open. Ram participated in all of the Grand Slam junior tournaments. He was the runner-up in juniors doubles at the 2002 Wimbledon, partnered with Brian Baker.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Ram then delayed enrollment at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign until January 2003 so that he could continue to play tennis as an amateur on the pro circuit. During his one semester as a ringer at Illinois, he won the national doubles title with Brian Wilson and helped the Fighting Illini go undefeated (32–0) and win the 2003 NCAA team championship.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: In 2007, he won five doubles Challenger titles partnering Bobby Reynolds, and reached three other finals on his way to a career-high doubles ranking of No. 62.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: On July 5, 2008, Ram won the Nielsen USTA Pro Tennis Championship in Winnetka, Illinois for his first career Challenger-level singles title.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: On July 10, 2009, Ram accomplished the unusual feat of winning four professional-level tennis matches in one day. At the Campbell's Hall of Fame Tennis Championships in Rhode Island, the tournament had been rained out early in the week, pushing back many scheduled matches. On July 10, Ram advanced to the singles semifinals with wins over Samuel Groth and Jesse Levine and then partnered with Jordan Kerr to advance to the doubles semifinals with wins over Arnaud Clément/Olivier Rochus and Nicolas Mahut/Fabrice Santoro. Mahut, Santoro, and Rochus each played three matches that day, though none of them won all their matches. Ram then beat Rochus and Sam Querrey on consecutive days to capture his first ATP title. He accomplished the rare feat of winning a title as a Lucky loser and also captured the doubles title.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: In Atlanta in July 2010, he won his first doubles title with American Scott Lipsky, defeating Rohan Bopanna and Kristof Vliegen for the outdoor hard-court Atlanta Tennis Championships. In the semifinals, Lipsky and Ram had defeated John Isner and James Blake. In November, they won a tournament in Eckental, Germany.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Ram started 2011 strong, partnering with Lipsky in February to take the indoor hard court San Jose Open (over Christopher Kas from Germany and Alexander Peya from Austria) and the outdoor hard court Delray Beach titles (over Alejandro Falla from Colombia and Xavier Malisse from Belgium). In June, he and Lipsky advanced to the quarterfinals at the 2011 French Open.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: At the 2014 US Open (tennis) he reached his first Grand Slam semifinal partnering Scott Lipsky where they were defeated by top seeds and eventual champions, the Bryan brothers.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: At the Hall of Fame Tennis Championships, he reached his second career final and won his second career ATP singles title by defeating Ivo Karlovic.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: At the Delray Beach Open, Ram reached his third career final and first singles final outside the grass courts of the Hall of Fame Open, losing to Sam Querrey. At the Olympic Games, he won silver with Venus Williams in mixed doubles. Less than a month later, Ram and CoCo Vandeweghe advanced to the mixed doubles final at the US Open, where they were defeated in straight sets by Mate Pavić and Laura Siegemund.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Ram, with his partner Joe Salisbury won the Australian Open men's-doubles tournament, defeating Max Purcell and Luke Saville in the final. As a result, he reached a career-high of world No. 5 in doubles, on February 3, 2020.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Ram and partner Barbora Krejčíková won Australian Open mixed-doubles tournament, defeating Matthew Ebden and Samantha Stosur.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: He also competed in the men's doubles tournament with partner Joe Salisbury to defend their title, but lost to Ivan Dodig and Filip Polášek in the final.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: He reached the final and won his third Masters 1000 in Canada at the National Bank Open with Salisbury, defeating world No. 1 and No. 2 Croatians, Pavic and Mektic, his second final for the year at a Masters level after the Italian Open, where they lost to the Croatian pair. As a result, he returned to the top 5, on August 16, 2021.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: At the 2021 US Open Ram partnering with Salisbury reached the final, defeating Matthew Ebden/Max Purcell in a nearly three hour-long match, saving four match points in the quarterfinals and Sam Querrey/Steve Johnson (tennis) in the semifinals. The pair won the men’s doubles tournament, defeating Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares in the final. As a result, he reached a career-high of world No. 4 in doubles, on September 20, 2021.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: He became World No. 2 on April 4, 2022 after reaching the quarterfinals at the 2022 Miami Open, losing to eventual champions Hubert Hurkacz and John Isner, with his partner Joe Salisbury who became World No. 1. He won the 2022 Monte-Carlo Masters with Salisbury defeating 6th seeded pair of Robert Farah and Juan Sebastian Cabal.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: He won his second Masters of the season at the 2022 Western & Southern Open with Salisbury. At the 2022 US Open, Ram and Salisbury defended their title, defeating Wesley Koolhof and Neal Skupski in the finals. This was the third Grand Slam title together for Ram and Salisbury. They became just the second team to repeat as men's doubles champions at this Major in the Open Era other than Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde who went also back-to-back in New York. Ram became the oldest first-time World No. 1 in the doubles rankings on October 3, 2022. He is the 18th American to become No. 1 in the rankings.


title: Rajeev Ram

text: Ram made his World TeamTennis debut in 2017 with the San Diego Aviators. He joined the Chicago Smash for its debut season, during the 2020 WTT season set to begin July 12.


title: Watchdog timer

text: A watchdog timer (sometimes called a "computer operating properly" or "COP" timer, or simply a "watchdog") is an electronic or software timer that is used to detect and recover from computer malfunctions. Watchdog timers are widely used in computers to facilitate automatic correction of temporary hardware faults, and to prevent errant or malevolent software from disrupting system operation.


title: Watchdog timer

text: During normal operation, the computer regularly restarts the watchdog timer to prevent it from elapsing, or "timing out". If, due to a hardware fault or program error, the computer fails to restart the watchdog, the timer will elapse and generate a timeout signal. The timeout signal is used to initiate corrective actions. The corrective actions typically include placing the computer and associated hardware in a safe state and invoking a computer reboot.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Microcontrollers often include an integrated, on-chip watchdog. In other computers the watchdog may reside in a nearby chip that connects directly to the CPU, or it may be located on an external expansion card in the computer's chassis.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Watchdog timers are commonly found in embedded systems and other computer-controlled equipment where humans cannot easily access the equipment or would be unable to react to faults in a timely manner. In such systems, the computer cannot depend on a human to invoke a reboot if it hangs; it must be self-reliant. For example, remote embedded systems such as space probes are not physically accessible to human operators; these could become permanently disabled if they were unable to autonomously recover from faults. In robots and other automated machines, a fault in the control computer could cause equipment damage or injuries before a human could react, even if the computer is easily accessed. A watchdog timer is usually employed in cases like these.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Watchdog timers are also used to monitor and limit software execution time on a normally functioning computer. For example, a watchdog timer may be used when running untrusted code in a sandbox, to limit the CPU time available to the code and thus prevent some types of denial-of-service attacks. In real-time operating systems, a watchdog timer may be used to monitor a time-critical task to ensure it completes within its maximum allotted time and, if it fails to do so, to terminate the task and report the failure.


title: Watchdog timer

text: The act of restarting a watchdog timer is commonly referred to as "kicking" the watchdog. Kicking is typically done by writing to a watchdog control port or by setting a particular bit in a register. Alternatively, some tightly coupled watchdog timers are kicked by executing a special machine language instruction. An example of this is the CLRWDT (clear watchdog timer) instruction found in the instruction set of some PIC microcontrollers.


title: Watchdog timer

text: In computers that are running operating systems, watchdog restarts are usually invoked through a device driver. For example, in the Linux operating system, a user space program will kick the watchdog by interacting with the watchdog device driver, typically by writing a zero character to or by calling a KEEPALIVE ioctl. The device driver, which serves to abstract the watchdog hardware from user space programs, may also be used to configure the time-out period and start and stop the timer.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Some watchdog timers will only allow kicks during a specific time window. The window timing is usually relative to the previous kick or, if the watchdog has not yet been kicked, to the moment the watchdog was enabled. The window begins after a delay following the previous kick, and ends after a further delay. If the computer attempts to kick the watchdog before or after the window, the watchdog will not be restarted, and in some implementations this will be treated as a fault and trigger corrective action.


title: Watchdog timer

text: A watchdog timer is said to be "enabled" when operating and "disabled" when idle. Upon power-up, a watchdog may be unconditionally enabled or it may be initially disabled and require an external signal to enable it. In the latter case, the enabling signal may be automatically generated by hardware or it may be generated under software control.


title: Watchdog timer

text: When automatically generated, the enabling signal is typically derived from the computer reset signal. In some systems the reset signal is directly used to enable the watchdog. In others, the reset signal is delayed so that the watchdog will become enabled at some later time following the reset. This delay allows time for the computer to boot before the watchdog is enabled. Without this delay, the watchdog would timeout and invoke a subsequent reset before the computer can run its application software — the software which kicks the watchdog — and the system would become stuck in an endless cycle of incomplete reboots.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Watchdog timers come in many configurations, and many allow their configurations to be altered. For example, the watchdog and CPU may share a common clock signal as shown in the block diagram below, or they may have independent clock signals. A basic watchdog timer has a single timer stage which, upon timeout, typically will reset the CPU:


title: Watchdog timer

text: Two or more timers are sometimes cascaded to form a "multistage watchdog timer", where each timer is referred to as a "timer stage", or simply a "stage". For example, the block diagram below shows a three-stage watchdog. In a multistage watchdog, only the first stage is kicked by the processor. Upon first stage timeout, a corrective action is initiated and the next stage in the cascade is started. As each subsequent stage times out, it triggers a corrective action and starts the next stage. Upon final stage timeout, a corrective action is initiated, but no other stage is started because the end of the cascade has been reached. Typically, single-stage watchdog timers are used to simply restart the computer, whereas multistage watchdog timers will sequentially trigger a series of corrective actions, with the final stage triggering a computer restart.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Watchdog timers may have either fixed or programmable time intervals. Some watchdog timers allow the time interval to be programmed by selecting from among a few selectable, discrete values. In others, the interval can be programmed to arbitrary values. Typically, watchdog time intervals range from ten milliseconds to a minute or more. In a multistage watchdog, each timer may have its own, unique time interval.


title: Watchdog timer

text: A watchdog timer may initiate any of several types of corrective action, including maskable interrupt, non-maskable interrupt, hardware reset, fail-safe state activation, power cycling, or combinations of these. Depending on its architecture, the type of corrective action or actions that a watchdog can trigger may be fixed or programmable. Some computers (e.g., PC compatibles) require a pulsed signal to invoke a hardware reset. In such cases, the watchdog typically triggers a hardware reset by activating an internal or external pulse generator, which in turn creates the required reset pulses.


title: Watchdog timer

text: In embedded systems and control systems, watchdog timers are often used to activate fail-safe circuitry. When activated, the fail-safe circuitry forces all control outputs to safe states (e.g., turns off motors, heaters, and high-voltages) to prevent injuries and equipment damage while the fault persists. In a two-stage watchdog, the first timer is often used to activate fail-safe outputs and start the second timer stage; the second stage will reset the computer if the fault cannot be corrected before the timer elapses.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Watchdog timers are sometimes used to trigger the recording of system state information—which may be useful during fault recovery—or debug information (which may be useful for determining the cause of the fault) onto a persistent medium. In such cases, a second timer—which is started when the first timer elapses—is typically used to reset the computer later, after allowing sufficient time for data recording to complete. This allows time for the information to be saved, but ensures that the computer will be reset even if the recording process fails.


title: Watchdog timer

text: For example, the above diagram shows a likely configuration for a two-stage watchdog timer. During normal operation the computer regularly kicks Stage1 to prevent a timeout. If the computer fails to kick Stage1 (e.g., due to a hardware fault or programming error), Stage1 will eventually timeout. This event will start the Stage2 timer and, simultaneously, notify the computer (by means of a non-maskable interrupt) that a reset is imminent. Until Stage2 times out, the computer may attempt to record state information, debug information, or both. The computer will be reset upon Stage2 timeout.


title: Watchdog timer

text: A watchdog timer provides automatic detection of catastrophic malfunctions that prevent the computer from kicking it. However, computers often have other, less-severe types of faults which do not interfere with kicking, but which still require watchdog oversight. To support these, a computer system is typically designed so that its watchdog timer will be kicked only if the computer deems the system functional. The computer determines whether the system is functional by conducting one or more fault detection tests and will kick the watchdog only if all tests have passed.


title: Watchdog timer

text: In computers that are running an operating system and multiple processes, a single, simple test may be insufficient to guarantee normal operation, as it could fail to detect a subtle fault condition and therefore allow the watchdog to be kicked even though a fault condition exists. For example, in the case of the Linux operating system, a user-space watchdog daemon may simply kick the watchdog periodically without performing any tests. As long as the daemon runs normally, the system will be protected against serious system crashes such as a kernel panic. To detect less severe faults, the daemon can be configured to perform tests that cover resource availability (e.g., sufficient memory and file handles, reasonable CPU time), evidence of expected process activity (e.g., system daemons running, specific files being present or updated), overheating, and network activity, and system-specific test scripts or programs may also be run.


title: Watchdog timer

text: Upon discovery of a failed test, the computer may attempt to perform a sequence of corrective actions under software control, culminating with a software-initiated reboot. If the software fails to invoke a reboot, the watchdog timer will timeout and invoke a hardware reset. In effect, this is a multistage watchdog timer in which the software comprises the first and intermediate timer stages and the hardware reset the final stage. In a Linux system, for example, the watchdog daemon may attempt to perform a software-initiated restart, which can be preferable to a hardware reset as the file systems will be safely unmounted and fault information will be logged. However it is essential to have the insurance of the hardware timer as a software restart can fail under a number of fault conditions.


title: Dirty rap

text: Dirty rap (also known as porno rap, porn rap, sex rap, booty rap, or pornocore) is a subgenre of hip hop music that contains lyrical content revolving mainly around sexually explicit subjects.


title: Dirty rap

text: The lyrics are often overtly explicit and graphic, sometimes to the point of being comical or offensive. Historically, dirty rap often contained a distinctly bass-driven sound, which arose from the popular Miami bass rap scene. However, dirty rap has recently been heavily influenced by Baltimore club, ghetto house, and ghettotech. Many dirty rap songs have been used as soundtracks to pornographic movies since the 2000s, replacing the traditional porn groove.


title: Dirty rap

text: Though the genre had been around since at least the late 1970s, with Blowfly's "Rapp Dirty", it was not until the 1980s, when Oakland rapper Too Short released the 1983 album "Don't Stop Rappin'" containing multiple dirty sex subjects, that sex became a central focus. Although the release did not see much attention outside of his hometown of Oakland, he would continue to use provocative and sexual lyrics throughout his career, gaining him six platinum albums and three gold. The controversial rap group 2 Live Crew brought "dirty rap" to the mainstream with their Miami bass debut "2 Live Crew Is What We Are". With the graphic sexual content of their X-rated party rhymes, 2 Live Crew garnered much negative publicity. However, it wasn't until their 1989 album, "As Nasty as They Wanna Be", that dirty rap became a legitimate genre. After being attacked by conservative critics, censors, and attorneys, 2 Live Crew responded with the 1990 album "Banned in the USA", a much more political and angry album.


title: Dirty rap

text: 2 Live Crew returned to their utterly pornographic roots with 1991's "", which was lambasted by many critics as running the sexually deviant lyrics of "As Nasty As They Wanna Be" into the ground. From "Sport's Weekend" onward, the Crew continued to make dirty rap and party rap.


title: Dirty rap

text: Various rappers followed with dirty rap in the wake of 2 Live Crew's popularity. The group Poison Clan became widely successful, as did the group Bytches With Problems. Salt-N-Pepa released several "dirty rap" songs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1992 hit single "Baby Got Back" could arguably be considered within the dirty rap genre; however, the majority of Mix-A-Lot's work is not sexually explicit enough for him to be considered a true dirty rap artist. Similarly, the new jack swing hip hop group Wreckx-n-Effect scored a dirty rap hit with their 1992 single "Rump Shaker." The pimp rapper Too Short is also a notable contributor and beginner to dirty rap music since he began his first album in 1983, though his topics range from sex to the gangster lifestyle.


title: Dirty rap

text: In the early 1990s, the Baltimore club scene first began gaining an identity separate from house music and mainstream hip hop. Baltimore club, or gutter music, often features sexually explicit lyrics, and has influenced many current dirty rappers. Both ghettotech and ghetto house (or "booty house") also evolved around the same time, and, to an even greater extent than Baltimore club, frequently contain pornographic and sexually explicit content, as exemplified by DJ Assault and DJ Funk, two artists who pioneered ghettotech and ghetto house, respectively.


title: Dirty rap

text: White dirty rappers include the Russian group Malchishnik, active between 1989 and 1994 and known for their song "Seks-kontrol" ("Sex Control"), a diatribe against interracial sex.


title: Dirty rap

text: Dirty rap was a popular subgenre into the 1990s and 2000s, particular in Southern hip hop. Luke Campbell of 2 Live Crew continued to produce dirty rap as a solo artist into the 2000s.


title: Dirty rap

text: Kool Keith described the lyrical content of his 1997 album "Sex Style" as "pornocore". The album features Keith variously portraying himself as characters ranging from pimps to perverts. Keith also uses sexual metaphors to diss other rappers, many of which involve urolagnia. Kool Keith later appeared on the 2001 album "Porn Again", a dirty rap or pornocore concept album by The Smut Peddlers. The Smut Peddlers consisted of Mr. Eon and DJ Mighty Mi from The High & Mighty and rapper Cage.


title: Dirty rap

text: In 2001, Afroman released the comical rap single "Crazy Rap," a song in which he describes sexual activities such as anal intercourse in heavy detail.


title: Dirty rap

text: Khia's hit single "My Neck My Back" (from her 2002 album "Thug Misses") later achieved CHR status – being played on Top 40 radio.


title: Dirty rap

text: The genre made a strong comeback in the Southern hip hop (or "Dirty South") scene starting in the late 1990s and peaking in about 2005 with two hit singles, Ying-Yang Twins' sexually explicit "Wait (The Whisper Song)", as well as David Banner's dirty single, "Play," both produced by the "father of snap", Mr. Collipark. Southern rapper Plies has released several dirty rap singles, such as "Becky" and "Fucking or What". Most of Plies' work focuses on drugs and violence and he is not a full-time dirty artist, although almost all the singles released contained dirty rap.


title: Dirty rap

text: Some examples of dirty rap by East Coast hip hop artists include Akinyele's "Put It in Your Mouth", The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Nasty Girl", Lil' Kim's "Magic Stick", Bravehearts' "Oochie Wally", 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" and "Ayo Technology", featuring Justin Timberlake, which contains references to looking at porn and urges to perform in bisexual activities. Also notable is "Tush" by Ghostface Killah and Missy Elliott.


title: Dirty rap

text: Dirty rap saw another resurgence in the 2010s, particularly in the West Coast hip hop scene. 2014 saw the release of YG's song "Do It To Ya" featuring TeeFlii from the album "My Krazy Life", produced by DJ Mustard. DJ Mustard also has the production credit of some of the other more recent dirty rap songs, including a single called "24 Hours" by TeeFlii.


title: Dirty rap

text: Female artists such as Saweetie, Missy Elliott, Mia X, Lil' Kim, Latto, Flo Milli, Riley Reid, Strings, Gillette, Queen Pen, Azealia Banks, Cupcakke, Foxy Brown, Gangsta Boo, Shawnna, Khia, Lil' Slow, Remy Ma, Trina, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Doja Cat, City Girls, Brooke Candy, Amil, Miami-based Jacki-O, Heather Hunter, Erica Banks, and Megan Thee Stallion are prominent dirty rappers in the once male-dominated genre. CupcakKe rose to fame in late 2015 with her single, "Deepthroat". The dirty music video amassed millions of views on YouTube as well as millions more through other video sharing sites such as WorldStarHipHop and Facebook. All six of her albums and mixtapes have a main theme of dirty rap and sexually explicit lyrics.


title: Dirty rap

text: Many indie rappers, such as Spank Rock, Bonde Do Role, Plastic Little, Peaches, Amanda Blank, and Yo Majesty, created an underground, electro funk or electroclash and dance-influenced version of dirty rap in the mid to late 2000s, dubbed electro-smut by "Spin Magazine". These rappers are heavily influenced by the Baltimore Club and ghettotech scenes.


title: Dirty rap

text: Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B's 2020 dirty rap song "WAP" features heavy influence from two genres that have notably contributed to and influenced the "dirty rap" subgenre; the song features both a heavy bass sound reminiscent of Miami bass as well as a prominent sample from a Baltimore club song, specifically from the Baltimore club artist Frank Ski's 1993 single "Whores in This House."


title: Dirty rap

text: Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo has also been known to use dirty rap lyrics in many of his songs, many of which are deemed very explicit.


title: Dirty rap

text: Kevin Gates has been considered to be the "horniest rapper of all time" due to his extremely graphic sexual lyrics.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients". The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of the patient, and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Medicine has a long history of scientific inquiry about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human disease.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: The concept of a controlled clinical trial was first described in 1662 by Jan Baptist van Helmont in reference to the practice of bloodletting. Wrote Van Helmont:


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: The first published report describing the conduct and results of a controlled clinical trial was by James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon who conducted research on scurvy during his time aboard HMS "Salisbury" in the Channel Fleet, while patrolling the Bay of Biscay. Lind divided the sailors participating in his experiment into six groups, so that the effects of various treatments could be fairly compared. Lind found improvement in symptoms and signs of scurvy among the group of men treated with lemons or oranges. He published a treatise describing the results of this experiment in 1753.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Alvan Feinstein's publication of "Clinical Judgment" in 1967 focused attention on the role of clinical reasoning and identified biases that can affect it. In 1972, Archie Cochrane published "Effectiveness and Efficiency", which described the lack of controlled trials supporting many practices that had previously been assumed to be effective. In 1973, John Wennberg began to document wide variations in how physicians practiced. Through the 1980s, David M. Eddy described errors in clinical reasoning and gaps in evidence. In the mid-1980s, Alvin Feinstein, David Sackett and others published textbooks on clinical epidemiology, which translated epidemiological methods to physician decision-making. Toward the end of the 1980s, a group at RAND showed that large proportions of procedures performed by physicians were considered inappropriate even by the standards of their own experts.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: David M. Eddy first began to use the term 'evidence-based' in 1987 in workshops and a manual commissioned by the Council of Medical Specialty Societies to teach formal methods for designing clinical practice guidelines. The manual was eventually published by the American College of Physicians. Eddy first published the term 'evidence-based' in March 1990, in an article in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" that laid out the principles of evidence-based guidelines and population-level policies, which Eddy described as "explicitly describing the available evidence that pertains to a policy and tying the policy to evidence instead of standard-of-care practices or the beliefs of experts. The pertinent evidence must be identified, described, and analyzed. The policymakers must determine whether the policy is justified by the evidence. A rationale must be written." He discussed evidence-based policies in several other papers published in "JAMA" in the spring of 1990. Those papers were part of a series of 28 published in "JAMA" between 1990 and 1997 on formal methods for designing population-level guidelines and policies.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: The term 'evidence-based medicine' was introduced slightly later, in the context of medical education. In the autumn of 1990, Gordon Guyatt used it in an unpublished description of a program at McMaster University for prospective or new medical students. Guyatt and others first published the term two years later (1992) to describe a new approach to teaching the practice of medicine.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: In 1996, David Sackett and colleagues clarified the definition of this tributary of evidence-based medicine as "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. ... [It] means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research." This branch of evidence-based medicine aims to make individual decision making more structured and objective by better reflecting the evidence from research. Population-based data are applied to the care of an individual patient, while respecting the fact that practitioners have clinical expertise reflected in effective and efficient diagnosis and thoughtful identification and compassionate use of individual patients' predicaments, rights, and preferences.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Between 1993 and 2000, the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group at McMaster University published the methods to a broad physician audience in a series of 25 "Users' Guides to the Medical Literature" in "JAMA". In 1995 Rosenberg and Donald defined individual-level, evidence-based medicine as "the process of finding, appraising, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for medical decisions." In 2010, Greenhalgh used a definition that emphasized quantitative methods: "the use of mathematical estimates of the risk of benefit and harm, derived from high-quality research on population samples, to inform clinical decision-making in the diagnosis, investigation or management of individual patients."


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: The two original definitions highlight important differences in how evidence-based medicine is applied to populations versus individuals. When designing guidelines applied to large groups of people in settings with relatively little opportunity for modification by individual physicians, evidence-based policymaking emphasizes that good evidence should exist to document a test's or treatment's effectiveness. In the setting of individual decision-making, practitioners can be given greater latitude in how they interpret research and combine it with their clinical judgment. In 2005, Eddy offered an umbrella definition for the two branches of EBM: "Evidence-based medicine is a set of principles and methods intended to ensure that to the greatest extent possible, medical decisions, guidelines, and other types of policies are based on and consistent with good evidence of effectiveness and benefit."


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: In the area of evidence-based guidelines and policies, the explicit insistence on evidence of effectiveness was introduced by the American Cancer Society in 1980. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) began issuing guidelines for preventive interventions based on evidence-based principles in 1984. In 1985, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association applied strict evidence-based criteria for covering new technologies. Beginning in 1987, specialty societies such as the American College of Physicians, and voluntary health organizations such as the American Heart Association, wrote many evidence-based guidelines. In 1991, Kaiser Permanente, a managed care organization in the US, began an evidence-based guidelines program. In 1991, Richard Smith wrote an editorial in the "British Medical Journal" and introduced the ideas of evidence-based policies in the UK. In 1993, the Cochrane Collaboration created a network of 13 countries to produce systematic reviews and guidelines. In 1997, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ, then known as the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, or AHCPR) established Evidence-based Practice Centers (EPCs) to produce evidence reports and technology assessments to support the development of guidelines. In the same year, a National Guideline Clearinghouse that followed the principles of evidence-based policies was created by AHRQ, the AMA, and the American Association of Health Plans (now America's Health Insurance Plans). In 1999, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) was created in the UK.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: In the area of medical education, medical schools in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and other countries now offer programs that teach evidence-based medicine. A 2009 study of UK programs found that more than half of UK medical schools offered some training in evidence-based medicine, although the methods and content varied considerably, and EBM teaching was restricted by lack of curriculum time, trained tutors and teaching materials. Many programs have been developed to help individual physicians gain better access to evidence. For example, UpToDate was created in the early 1990s. The Cochrane Collaboration began publishing evidence reviews in 1993. In 1995, BMJ Publishing Group launched Clinical Evidence, a 6-monthly periodical that provided brief summaries of the current state of evidence about important clinical questions for clinicians.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: By 2000, use of the term "evidence-based" had extended to other levels of the health care system. An example is evidence-based health services, which seek to increase the competence of health service decision makers and the practice of evidence-based medicine at the organizational or institutional level.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: The multiple tributaries of evidence-based medicine share an emphasis on the importance of incorporating evidence from formal research in medical policies and decisions. However, because they differ on the extent to which they require good evidence of effectiveness before promoting a guideline or payment policy, a distinction is sometimes made between evidence-based medicine and science-based medicine, which also takes into account factors such as prior plausibility and compatibility with established science (as when medical organizations promote controversial treatments such as acupuncture). Differences also exist regarding the extent to which it is feasible to incorporate individual-level information in decisions. Thus, evidence-based guidelines and policies may not readily "hybridise" with experience-based practices orientated towards ethical clinical judgement, and can lead to contradictions, contest, and unintended crises. The most effective "knowledge leaders" (managers and clinical leaders) use a broad range of management knowledge in their decision making, rather than just formal evidence. Evidence-based guidelines may provide the basis for governmentality in health care, and consequently play a central role in the governance of contemporary health care systems.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: The steps for designing explicit, evidence-based guidelines were described in the late 1980s: formulate the question (population, intervention, comparison intervention, outcomes, time horizon, setting); search the literature to identify studies that inform the question; interpret each study to determine precisely what it says about the question; if several studies address the question, synthesize their results (meta-analysis); summarize the evidence in evidence tables; compare the benefits, harms and costs in a balance sheet; draw a conclusion about the preferred practice; write the guideline; write the rationale for the guideline; have others review each of the previous steps; implement the guideline.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: For the purposes of medical education and individual-level decision making, five steps of EBM in practice were described in 1992 and the experience of delegates attending the 2003 Conference of Evidence-Based Health Care Teachers and Developers was summarized into five steps and published in 2005. This five-step process can broadly be categorized as follows:


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Systematic reviews of published research studies are a major part of the evaluation of particular treatments. The Cochrane Collaboration is one of the best-known organisations that conducts systematic reviews. Like other producers of systematic reviews, it requires authors to provide a detailed study protocol as well as a reproducible plan of their literature search and evaluations of the evidence. After the best evidence is assessed, treatment is categorized as (1) likely to be beneficial, (2) likely to be harmful, or (3) without evidence to support either benefit or harm.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: A 2007 analysis of 1,016 systematic reviews from all 50 Cochrane Collaboration Review Groups found that 44% of the reviews concluded that the intervention was likely to be beneficial, 7% concluded that the intervention was likely to be harmful, and 49% concluded that evidence did not support either benefit or harm. 96% recommended further research. In 2017, a study assessed the role of systematic reviews produced by Cochrane Collaboration to inform US private payers' policymaking; it showed that although the medical policy documents of major US private payers were informed by Cochrane systematic reviews, there was still scope to encourage the further use.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Evidence-based medicine categorizes different types of clinical evidence and rates or grades them according to the strength of their freedom from the various biases that beset medical research. For example, the strongest evidence for therapeutic interventions is provided by systematic review of randomized, well-blinded, placebo-controlled trials with allocation concealment and complete follow-up involving a homogeneous patient population and medical condition. In contrast, patient testimonials, case reports, and even expert opinion have little value as proof because of the placebo effect, the biases inherent in observation and reporting of cases, and difficulties in ascertaining who is an expert (however, some critics have argued that expert opinion "does not belong in the rankings of the quality of empirical evidence because it does not represent a form of empirical evidence" and continue that "expert opinion would seem to be a separate, complex type of knowledge that would not fit into hierarchies otherwise limited to empirical evidence alone.").


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Several organizations have developed grading systems for assessing the quality of evidence. For example, in 1989 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) put forth the following system:


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Another example are the Oxford CEBM Levels of Evidence published by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. First released in September 2000, the Levels of Evidence provide a way to rank evidence for claims about prognosis, diagnosis, treatment benefits, treatment harms, and screening, which most grading schemes do not address. The original CEBM Levels were Evidence-Based On Call to make the process of finding evidence feasible and its results explicit. In 2011, an international team redesigned the Oxford CEBM Levels to make them more understandable and to take into account recent developments in evidence ranking schemes. The Oxford CEBM Levels of Evidence have been used by patients and clinicians, as well as by experts to develop clinical guidelines, such as recommendations for the optimal use of phototherapy and topical therapy in psoriasis and guidelines for the use of the BCLC staging system for diagnosing and monitoring hepatocellular carcinoma in Canada.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: In 2000, a system was developed by the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) working group. The GRADE system takes into account more dimensions than just the quality of medical research. It requires users who are performing an assessment of the quality of evidence, usually as part of a systematic review, to consider the impact of different factors on their confidence in the results. Authors of GRADE tables assign one of four levels to evaluate the quality of evidence, on the basis of their confidence that the observed effect (a numeric value) is close to the true effect. The confidence value is based on judgments assigned in five different domains in a structured manner. The GRADE working group defines 'quality of evidence' and 'strength of recommendations' based on the quality as two different concepts that are commonly confused with each other.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Systematic reviews may include randomized controlled trials that have low risk of bias, or observational studies that have high risk of bias. In the case of randomized controlled trials, the quality of evidence is high but can be downgraded in five different domains.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: In the case of observational studies per GRADE, the quality of evidence starts off lower and may be upgraded in three domains in addition to being subject to downgrading.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: In guidelines and other publications, recommendation for a clinical service is classified by the balance of risk versus benefit and the level of evidence on which this information is based. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force uses the following system:


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: GRADE guideline panelists may make strong or weak recommendations on the basis of further criteria. Some of the important criteria are the balance between desirable and undesirable effects (not considering cost), the quality of the evidence, values and preferences and costs (resource utilization).


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Despite the differences between systems, the purposes are the same: to guide users of clinical research information on which studies are likely to be most valid. However, the individual studies still require careful critical appraisal.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Evidence-based medicine attempts to express clinical benefits of tests and treatments using mathematical methods. Tools used by practitioners of evidence-based medicine include:


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Evidence-based medicine attempts to objectively evaluate the quality of clinical research by critically assessing techniques reported by researchers in their publications.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: There are a number of limitations and criticisms of evidence-based medicine. Two widely cited categorization schemes for the various published critiques of EBM include the three-fold division of Straus and McAlister ("limitations universal to the practice of medicine, limitations unique to evidence-based medicine and misperceptions of evidence-based-medicine") and the five-point categorization of Cohen, Stavri and Hersh (EBM is a poor philosophic basis for medicine, defines evidence too narrowly, is not evidence-based, is limited in usefulness when applied to individual patients, or reduces the autonomy of the doctor/patient relationship).


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: A 2018 study, "Why all randomised controlled trials produce biased results", assessed the 10 most cited RCTs and argued that trials face a wide range of biases and constraints, from trials only being able to study a small set of questions amenable to randomisation and generally only being able to assess the "average" treatment effect of a sample, to limitations in extrapolating results to another context, among many others outlined in the study.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Despite the emphasis on evidence-based medicine, unsafe or ineffective medical practices continue to be applied, because of patient demand for tests or treatments, because of failure to access information about the evidence, or because of the rapid pace of change in the scientific evidence. For example, between 2003 and 2017, the evidence shifted on hundreds of medical practices, including whether hormone replacement therapy was safe, whether babies should be given certain vitamins, and whether antidepressant drugs are effective in people with Alzheimer's disease. Even when the evidence unequivocally shows that a treatment is either not safe or not effective, it may take many years for other treatments to be adopted.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: There are many factors that contribute to lack of uptake or implementation of evidence-based recommendations. These include lack of awareness at the individual clinician or patient (micro) level, lack of institutional support at the organisation level (meso) level or higher at the policy (macro) level. In other cases, significant change can require a generation of physicians to retire or die and be replaced by physicians who were trained with more recent evidence.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: Physicians may also reject evidence that conflicts with their anecdotal experience or because of cognitive biases – for example, a vivid memory of a rare but shocking outcome (the availability heuristic), such as a patient dying after refusing treatment. They may overtreat to "do something" or to address a patient's emotional needs. They may worry about malpractice charges based on a discrepancy between what the patient expects and what the evidence recommends. They may also overtreat or provide ineffective treatments because the treatment feels biologically plausible.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: It is the responsibility of those developing clinical guidelines to include an implementation plan to facilitate uptake. The implementation process will involve will include an implementation plan, analysis of the context, identifying barriers and facilitators and designing the strategies to address them.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: The Berlin questionnaire and the Fresno Test are validated instruments for assessing the effectiveness of education in evidence-based medicine. These questionnaires have been used in diverse settings.


title: Evidence-based medicine

text: A Campbell systematic review that included 24 trials examined the effectiveness of e-learning in improving evidence-based health care knowledge and practice. It was found that e-learning, compared to no learning, improves evidence-based health care knowledge and skills but not attitudes and behaviour. No difference in outcomes is present when comparing e-learning with face-to-face learning. Combining e-learning and face-to-face learning (blended learning) has a positive impact on evidence-based knowledge, skills, attitude and behaviour. As a form of e-learning, some medical school students engage in editing Wikipedia to increase their EBM skills, and some students construct EBM materials to develop their skills in communicating medical knowledge.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: "Arabic Kuthu" is a 2022 Indian song and the first single in the soundtrack of the Tamil-language film "Beast", directed by Nelson. Starring Vijay and Pooja Hegde, the film is produced by Kalanithi Maran under the studio Sun Pictures. The track is composed by Anirudh, who also sang the track with Jonita Gandhi, while the lyrics for the track were written by actor Sivakarthikeyan. The first single to be released from the album, being highly expected from fans, was delayed multiple times.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: The single released on Valentine's Day (14 February 2022). It became the most-viewed and liked South Indian song within 24 hours, garnering 25 million views within a short period, and also the fastest South Indian song to cross 50 million views. Arabic Kuthu Lyrical Video Song has now crossed more than 480 million views & Arabic Kuthu Music Video crossed 300 Million Views in YouTube.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: This film marks Anirudh's third collaboration with Vijay after "Kaththi" (2014) and "Master" (2021), and with Nelson after "Kolamaavu Kokila" (2018) and "Doctor" (2021). Anirudh composed the tracks during mid-July 2021. In order to experiment with the film's music, he had composed this particular track in the Arabic music genre and had featured lyrics in Tamil and Arabic languages. The opening phrase, "Halamithi Habibo" translates to "I dreamed of my lover". Sivakarthikeyan wrote this track in mid-August 2021.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: According to reports, the track is a fusion Arabic music and Kuthu (a type of Tamil folk music) as the name of the track. It also had the influence of dance and pop music. This track was sung by Anirudh and Jonita Gandhi, who previously sung for "Chellamma" in "Doctor". Anirudh, in his interaction with fans during a Facebook chat session, stated that the work on the first single has been completed and will be released later, and further clarified that all the updates regarding the film will be revealed post-completion of the film's shooting.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: The music video features Vijay and Pooja Hegde dancing for the single. The music is choreographed by Jani Master. In a deleted tweet, Jani had announced that the rehearsals for the song might take place during mid-April 2021, and the song will be shot within seven days, starting from the first week of May 2021. But shooting did not take place in that date, due to Vijay's decision to halt shooting in concern with the rise in COVID-19 cases in Tamil Nadu, and also Hegde being diagnosed with COVID-19. The song was shot at Gokulam Studios during September 2021. To promote the single, Nelson shot a promotional video for the track featuring Vijay, Anirudh, Sivakarthikeyan and himself, during December 2021. The song is featured as part of a dance party which both Vijay and Pooja Hegde attended.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: The single was highly anticipated by fans, and was rumoured to be released on Anirudh's birthday (16 October 2021) and later scheduled for release on Diwali (4 November 2021), which however did not happen. Makers stated that Sun Pictures' commitments to the release of Rajinikanth-starrer "Annaatthe", and also the death of Puneeth Rajkumar insisted the makers not to release any update regarding the film on Diwali, which was posted on Ananda Vikatan's exclusive article about the film. The single was earlier planned to be released on New Year's Eve (31 December), and later to Pongal (14 January 2022), but could not be launched on that date.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: The track was released on the occasion of Valentine's Day (14 February 2022), as Anirudh occasionally released singles on that date. The full video was released on 9 May 2022.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: Vijay and Pooja Hegde's rolling step in the music video became a signature step and was recreated by millions, in many short-video and social media platforms. Hedge's "ArabicKuthuChallenge" was viral in social media, and many recreated the signature step.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: "The Indian Express" stated Sivakarthikeyan's lyrics as the highlights which "likely to go right over the head of the listeners". The review further added "The hook line of the song is 'malama pitha pithadhe' and it's hard to tell what it means. One can't even confidently tell if it has any base in the Arabic language. And that seems to be the fun part of the song. Composer Anirudh wants to make a point that as long as the music is enjoyable, people don't sweat over incomprehensible lyrics. You see, music has no language." Asuthosh Mohan of "Film Companion South" called it as an "interesting fusion of Arabic and kuthu styles, repurposed to his (Anirudh's) own sensibility" and concluded that the track "works as a no-frills earworm that promises to get better with the visuals and choreography". Mohan explored the similarities of the track to that of "Mettalaa Hajbo" by Moroccan artist Karima Gouit, in terms of mood and rhythm. Khushboo Ratda of "Pinkvilla" reviewed: "Vijay's swag, Pooja Hegde's dance moves and Anirudh's music makes it a party anthem". A review from "Medium" was critical of the ordinariess tune, produced by Anirudh and wrote "This song is the epitome of what Anirudh is nowadays. He once was this admirable music director who had fresh ideas and melodies to make a catchy hook; a song that would be a treat for the senses, but then he quickly devolved into a quirky pony."


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: Many celebrities such as Shilpa Shetty, Jacqueline Fernandez, Rakul Preet Singh, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Keerthy Suresh, Rashmika Mandanna, Varun Dhawan, Atlee, Sivaangi Krishnakumar, Jai, Amritha Aiyer, Yashika Aannand, Vedhika and Anupama Parameswaran too recreated the music video by dancing the signature step.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: Arabic Kuthu Challenge video had a cultural impact on several sportsperson including the cricketers Devon Conway, Narayan Jagadeesan, Chezhian Harinishanth, Washington Sundar, Abhishek Sharma, Priyam Garg, Jagadeesha Suchith and Subramaniam Badrinath recreated hook step. Players of Manchester United F.C. take part in the challenge and danced the step. Indian badminton player P. V. Sindhu also recreated the step.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: The track garnered over 17 million views in less than 10 hours, and eventually surpassed the 24-hour records of "Oo Antava Oo Oo Antava" from "" (2021) and "Kalaavathi" from "Sarkaru Vaari Paata" (2022), which garnered over 14 and 16 million views within 24 hours, respectively. It registered over 25 million real-time views within 24 hours, setting an all-time record for South India's most viewed song in 24 hours, and also reached the 20-million mark within less than 24 hours. It garnered over 2.5 million likes and became the most-liked South Indian song, and the second-most liked Indian song within 24 hours, behind the title track of "Dil Bechara" (2020). On 18 February, the song had garnered about 50-million views and became the fastest South Indian song to achieve this feat.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: According to the digital media company Genius, the track was listed as one among the top 5 songs (in the fourth position) at the global charts. The song reached 100 million views within 12 days breaking the record of "Rowdy Baby" which took 17 days to hit 100 million views.


title: Arabic Kuthu

text: On 8 April 2022, Pooja Hegde, Anirudh and Nelson performed the song at a press meet held at Hyderabad for the film's promotion.


title: David Frum

text: David Jeffrey Frum (; born June 30, 1960) is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, who is currently a senior editor at "The Atlantic" as well as an MSNBC contributor. In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.


title: David Frum

text: Frum formerly served on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the British think tank Policy Exchange, the anti-drug policy group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and as vice chairman and an associate fellow of the R Street Institute.


title: David Frum

text: Born in Toronto, Ontario to a Jewish family, Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum (née Rosberg), a well-known, Niagara Falls, New York-born journalist and broadcaster in Canada, and the late Murray Frum, a dentist, who later became a real estate developer, philanthropist, and art collector. His father's parents migrated from Poland to Toronto in 1930. Frum's sister, Linda Frum, was a member of the Senate of Canada. He is married to the writer Danielle Crittenden, the stepdaughter of former "Toronto Sun" editor Peter Worthington. Frum also has an adopted brother, Matthew, from whom he is estranged. The couple has three children. He is a distant cousin of economist Paul Krugman.


title: David Frum

text: At age 14, Frum was a campaign volunteer for an Ontario New Democratic Party candidate Jan Dukszta for the 1975 provincial election. During the hour-long bus/subway/bus ride each way to and from the campaign office in western Toronto, he read a paperback edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago", which his mother had given to him. "My campaign colleagues jeered at the book—and by the end of the campaign, any lingering interest I might have had in the political left had vanished like yesterday's smoke."


title: David Frum

text: He graduated from the University of Toronto Schools in 1978 where he was the school captain. At Yale University, he simultaneously earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in history, graduating in 1982. He was in "Directed Studies", a type of "Great Books" curriculum and a member of the Tory Party of the Yale Political Union.


title: David Frum

text: After graduating from Harvard Law School, Frum returned to Toronto as an associate editor of "Saturday Night". He was an editorial page editor of "The Wall Street Journal" from 1989 until 1992, and then a columnist for "Forbes magazine" in 1992–94. In 1994–2000, he worked as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, as a contributing editor at neoconservative opinion magazine "The Weekly Standard", and as a columnist for Canada's "National Post". He worked also as a regular contributor for National Public Radio. In 1996, he helped organize the "Winds of Change" in Calgary, Alberta, an early effort to unite the Reform Party of Canada and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.


title: David Frum

text: Following the 2000 election of George W. Bush, Frum was appointed to a position as a speechwriter within the White House. He would later write that when he was first offered the job by chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson,


title: David Frum

text: While still a Canadian citizen, he was one of the few foreign nationals working within the Bush White House. He filed for naturalization and took the oath of citizenship on September 11, 2007. Frum served as special assistant to the president for economic speechwriting from January 2001 to February 2002. Conservative commentator Robert Novak described Frum as an "uncompromising supporter of Israel" and "fervent supporter of Ariel Sharon's policies" during his time in the White House. Frum is credited by his wife with inventing the expression "Axis of Evil", which Bush introduced in his 2002 State of the Union address. During Frum's time at the White House, he was described by commentator Ryan Lizza as being part of a speechwriting brain trust that brought "intellectual heft" and considerable policy influence to the Bush Administration.


title: David Frum

text: Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Frum hosted pseudonymous Muslim apostate and critic of Islam, Ibn Warraq at an hour-and-a-half lunch at the White House.


title: David Frum

text: While serving in the Bush White House and afterward, Frum strongly supported the Iraq War. In later years, however, he would express regret for that endorsement, saying that it owed more to psychological and group identity factors than reasoned judgment:


title: David Frum

text: "It's human nature to assess difficult questions, not on the merits, but on our feelings about the different 'teams' that form around different answers. To cite a painful personal experience: During the decision-making about the Iraq war, I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War—and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War. Yet in the end, it is not teams that matter. It is results. As Queen Victoria's first prime minister bitterly quipped after a policy fiasco: 'What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass.'"


title: David Frum

text: He also later acknowledged that it remains unclear how the US "could have delivered better success in Iraq" in terms of replacing Saddam with a "more humane and peaceful" government.


title: David Frum

text: Frum left the White House in February 2002. Commentator Robert Novak, appearing on CNN, claimed that Frum was dismissed because his wife had emailed friends, saying that her husband had invented the "axis of evil" phrase. Frum and the White House denied Novak's allegation.


title: David Frum

text: Frum opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court of the United States, on the grounds that she was insufficiently qualified for the post, as well as insufficiently conservative.


title: David Frum

text: Shortly after leaving the White House, Frum took up a position as a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think tank. During the early days of his stint there, Frum coauthored "" with Richard Perle, which was a bold presentation of the neoconservative view of global affairs and an apologia of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.


title: David Frum

text: His position lasted from 2003 until March 25, 2010, when his paid position was terminated and he declined to accept the offer of a non-paying position. Frum later stated that he was asked to leave AEI because of his vocal criticism of the Republican party's no-holds-barred opposition to Obamacare.


title: David Frum

text: In 2005, Frum faced a libel lawsuit filed by the Canadian chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations after he suggested in a column for the "National Post" that CAIR was sympathetic to terrorists. Frum first vowed to fight the lawsuit, but instead the paper published an editor's note acknowledging that "neither Sheema Khan nor the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada advocates or promotes terrorism."


title: David Frum

text: On October 11, 2007, Frum announced on his blog that he was joining Rudolph Giuliani's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.


title: David Frum

text: On November 16, 2008, "The New York Times" reported that Frum would be leaving "National Review", where he was a contributing editor and online blogger. Frum announced to readers of his blog that he would be starting a new political website, NewMajority.com, describing it as "a group blog, featuring many different voices. Not all of them … conservatives or Republicans." He hoped the site would "create an online community that will be exciting and appealing to younger readers, a generation often repelled by today's mainstream conservatism." The website was launched on January 19, 2009. On October 31, 2009, its title was changed to FrumForum, to avoid confusion with other political organizations that used "New Majority" in their names. In 2012 it was merged into The Daily Beast, where his blog continued. Citing personal reasons shortly after the deaths of his father and father-in-law, Frum suspended his blog on June 3, 2013 but resumed writing for The Daily Beast in September 2013.


title: David Frum

text: Frum joined "The Atlantic" as a senior editor in March 2014. During the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Frum issued a series of tweets labeling as "fake" a photo of two blood-covered Palestinian youths bringing their father's body to a hospital in Khan Younis; the man had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Frum apologized on "The Atlantic". Frum was criticized by "Washington Post" media writer Erik Wemple and by fellow correspondent for "The Atlantic", James Fallows, who termed Frum's tweets "a major journalistic error."


title: David Frum

text: Frum's first book, "Dead Right", was released in 1994. It "expressed intense dissatisfaction with supply-siders, evangelicals, and nearly all Republican politicians", according to a negative review by a Frum opponent, Robert Novak. Frank Rich of "The New York Times" described it as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement," William F. Buckley, Jr. found it "the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation," and Daniel McCarthy of "The American Conservative" called it "a crisply written indictment of everything its author disliked about conservatism in the early '90s."


title: David Frum

text: He is also the author of "What's Right" (1996) and "How We Got Here" (2000), a history of the 1970s, which "framed the 1970s in the shadow of World War II and Vietnam, suggesting, 'The turmoil of the 1970s should be understood … as the rebellion of an unmilitary people against institutions and laws formed by a century of war and the preparation for war.'" Michael Barone of "U.S. News & World Report" praised "How We Got Here", noting that "more than any other book … it shows how we came to be the way we are." John Podhoretz described it as "compulsively readable" and a "commanding amalgam of history, sociology and polemic."


title: David Frum

text: In January 2003 Frum released "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush", the first insider account of the Bush presidency. As the title suggests, Frum also discussed how the events of September 11, 2001 redefined the country and the president: "George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man." His book "" was co-written with Richard Perle. It provided a defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and advocated regime change in Iran and Syria. It called for a tougher policy toward North Korea, and a tougher US stance against Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations in order to "win the war on terror" (from the book's subtitle).


title: David Frum

text: He published "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again" in 2008. In 2012, his book "Why Romney Lost (And What The GOP Can Do About It)", attributed Mitt Romney's defeat in the 2012 U.S. presidential election to an economic message out of touch with the concerns of middle-class Americans and to a backward-looking cultural message. Frum's first novel, "Patriots", was published in April 2012. It is a political satire about the election and presidency of a fictional conservative American president. In 2018, Frum published "Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic", about the dangers posed by the Trump presidency to American democracy. He was interviewed for the book on the New Books Network. In 2020, he published a second volume about the Trump era and its consequences, "Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy".


title: David Frum

text: Frum was a commentator for American Public Media's "Marketplace" from 2007 until his final appearance on October 12, 2011. Frum has made numerous appearances on the weekly radio program "Left, Right & Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, California. On the KCRW program, Frum presented the conservative viewpoint.


title: David Frum

text: Frum supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He helped write George W. Bush's famous "Axis of Evil" speech to describe the governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Frum is a supporter of Israel. He opposed President Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal. In 2009, Frum described his political beliefs as follows:


title: David Frum

text: I'm a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I've attended every Republican convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of "The Wall Street Journal" and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the '' Bush, the 'Axis of Evil' Bush. I served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I could go on, but you get the idea.


title: David Frum

text: In June 2011, following the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York state, Frum's weekly column for CNN.com was titled "I was wrong about same-sex marriage." In it he described the evolution of his opinion from a "strong opponent" 14 years prior; while he had feared that its introduction would cause "the American family [to] become radically more unstable," he now feels that "the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test." In 2013, Frum was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the "Hollingsworth v. Perry" case.


title: David Frum

text: In a 2013 opinion column for CNN, Frum discussed the need for a "Plan B On Guns" because of a lack of votes in Congress for gun control legislation. Frum specifically urged the commissioning of a surgeon general's report on firearms health effects on individual ownership (writing that "such a report would surely reach the conclusion that a gun in the home greatly elevates risks of suicide, lethal accident and fatal domestic violence"), and he called for Senate hearings regarding the practices of firearms manufacturers. He compared these to hearings conducted in the 1990s about tobacco companies.


title: David Frum

text: On May 15, 2017, he called on Donald Trump to resign the presidency during a time when the Trump campaign's willingness to accept Russian aid during the election brought about accusations that Trump had committed treason. Frum appeared on stage with Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign CEO and White House Chief Strategist, in the November 2, 2018 edition of the Munk Debates in Toronto, ON., where they debated the future of populism in western politics.


title: David Frum

text: In 2018, he wrote, "The advanced democracies have built the freest, most just, and best societies in human history. Those societies demand many improvements, for sure—incremental, practical reforms, with careful attention to unintended consequences. But not revolution. Not the burn-it-all-down fantasies of the new populists."


title: David Frum

text: Frum is a proponent of immigration reform, arguing that "reducing immigration, and selecting immigrants more carefully" would lead to increased economic benefits and restore "the feeling of belonging to one united nation, responsible for the care and flourishing of all its people".


title: David Frum

text: Frum supported John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, writing "I vote for John McCain". In an article for National Review Online that he posted days before the 2008 election, he gave ten reasons why he was going to vote for McCain instead of Barack Obama. Frum had previously been a vocal critic of Republican presidential candidate McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate on the grounds that Palin was unqualified to assume the presidency. Speaking of Palin's performance during the campaign, Frum stated, "I think she has pretty thoroughly—and probably irretrievably—proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States." Nevertheless, he ultimately stated his support for Palin, writing "But on Tuesday, I will trust that she can learn. She has governed a state—and … it says something important that so many millions of people respond to her as somebody who incarnates their beliefs and values. At a time when the great American middle often seems to be falling further and further behind, there may be a special need for a national leader who represents and symbolizes that middle."


title: David Frum

text: After the 2012 election, Frum said that Romney would have been "a really good president" but that he had allowed himself to be "twisted into pretzels" by the more extreme factions of the Republican Party who immediately abandoned him after he lost the election.


title: David Frum

text: Frum stated that he voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He is identified with the Never Trump movement, Republicans who opposed the election of Donald Trump and continued to oppose Trump during his presidency. In October 2019 Frum called Trump "very, very guilty" of attempting to influence Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump's political opponent Joe Biden. During Trump's term, Frum wrote two books criticizing Trump, his policies, and his incompetence at governing: "Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic" and "Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy".


title: David Frum

text: In 2022, when the Republican party prohibited its candidates from participating in future Presidential Debates, Frum attributed the decision to the "Trump Cinematic Universe," an involuted cartoon version of reality accessible to "[O]nly those conversant with the pro-Trump right's internal myths and legends."


title: David Frum

text: In 2009, Frum denounced various anti-Obama conspiracy theories as "wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps".


title: David Frum

text: In his blog, Frum described the Tea Party as "a movement of relatively older and relatively affluent Americans whose expectations have been disrupted by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. They are looking for an explanation of the catastrophe—and a villain to blame. They are finding it in the same place that (Michele) Bachmann and her co-religionists located it 30 years ago: a deeply hostile national government controlled by alien and suspect forces, with Barack Obama as their leader and symbol." He explained Bachmann's political views, some of which he called "paranoid": "It emerges from a religious philosophy that rejects the federal government as an alien instrument of destruction, ripping apart a Christian society. Bachmann's religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today's hard economic times."


title: David Frum

text: On August 14, 2009, on "Bill Moyers Journal", Frum challenged certain Republican political tactics in opposing health care and other Democratic initiatives as "outrageous," "dangerous," and ineffective. As Congress prepared to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010, Frum again criticized the Republican strategy of refusing to negotiate with President Obama and congressional Democrats on health care reform, saying that it had resulted in the Republicans' "most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s". Before making this statement, Frum had been associated with the American Enterprise Institute. He resigned from the AEI a few days later. Following the temporary withdrawal of a Republican effort to repeal the ACA in 2017, Frum wrote an article in the "Atlantic" in which he chastised fellow Republicans and conservatives for failing to take his advice to behave with moderation and humility.


title: David Frum

text: In a September 2011 article, "Tablet Magazine" wrote: "as the Tea Party has come to dominate the GOP, Frum has been transformed in a remarkably short period of time from right-wing royalty to apostate" and quoted him as saying: "There's a style and a sensibility in the Republican Party right now that I find myself removed from, [but] you can do more good for the country by working for a better Republican Party than by leaving it to the extremists. What have they done to deserve that inheritance?"


title: David Frum

text: Writing for "New York" magazine in November 2011, Frum described his reaction to fellow Republicans, who had distanced themselves from him, saying, "Some of my Republican friends ask if I've gone crazy. I say: Look in the mirror." He described the development of an "alternative reality" within which the party, conservative think-tanks, and right wing commentators operate from a set of lies about the economy and nonexistent threats to their traditional base of supporters. He expressed concern over the inability of moderate Republicans to criticize their conservative brethren, contrasting this to the 1960s split between moderate Ripon Republicans and conservative Goldwater Republicans, when moderates such as Michigan governor George Romney were publicly critical of the conservatives.


title: David Frum

text: Frum considers himself "a not especially observant Jew". Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln are among his favorite historical figures. Marcel Proust is his favorite novelist.


title: Black Cube

text: Black Cube (BC Strategy Ltd) is a private intelligence agency based in London, Tel Aviv and Madrid, which drew widespread condemnation for its work surveilling and assisting with efforts to slander the reputations of women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual violence and journalists reporting on them.


title: Black Cube

text: The company was founded in 2010 by former Israeli intelligence officers Dan Zorella (in Hebrew: דן זורלא) and Avi Yanus (in Hebrew: אבי ינוס). Its employees include former members of Israeli intelligence units. Often, it has supported Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) activities.


title: Black Cube

text: Black Cube provides intelligence, evidence, and advisory services in multi-jurisdictional legal and white collar crime cases. Its clients include primarily very high net worth individuals, oligarchs and corporations around the world, about whom Black Cube exposed fraud, bribery, money laundering, corruption and asset dissipation. The company uncovered high-level corruption in Italy, Panama, and Mexico. It is estimated that Black Cube managed to trace and recover billions of dollars in hidden assets around the world.


title: Black Cube

text: Black Cube's tactics have resulted in a number of international controversies. In Romania, two of its employees were convicted of criminal charges involving harassment and hacking.


title: Black Cube

text: BC Strategy Ltd. or Black Cube as it is more commonly known—with offices in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris—was founded in 2010 by Avi Yanus (in Hebrew: אבי ינוס), who was an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) strategic planning officer, and Dan Zorella (in Hebrew: דן זורלא), who was in IDF Military Intelligence. Yanus and Zorella met at the Technion University in Haifa, where they both did undergraduate studies in economics and Yanus then completed his PhD in organizational behavior. By 2018, Black Cube had been involved in operations in over sixty countries.


title: Black Cube

text: Since 2011, Black Cube has been involved with providing evidence to a number of high-profile cases in multiple countries, including Canada, Italy, Israel, Mexico, Panama, the United Kingdom and the United States. The company describes itself as a "select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units that specialises in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges."


title: Black Cube

text: "Forbes Israel" described highly influential individuals on Black Cube's International Advisory Board, including Meir Dagan, a former chief of Mossad—Israel's national intelligence agency—from 2002 to 2011, and Black Cube's president. Their IAB includes Efraim Halevy, who was also a head of Mossad for 30 years. Other IAB members include Yohanan Danino, Giora Eiland, Adrian Leppard, Robert Amaee, Asher Tishler, Paul Reyniers, Golan Malka, and Itiel Maayan.


title: Black Cube

text: In a court deposition Yanus described the bilateral relationship between the IDF and Black Cube's civilian market, where former Israeli intelligence operators advise Black Cube and provide it with a business network. "Forbes Israel" described how Black Cube is one of many "prominent business intelligence firms" such as GPW, and K2, that are part of a global market that "expanded by 80 billion dollars in 2015 alone" These intelligence firms attract people who previously worked IDF's Military Intelligence. Salaries are high in the business intelligence sector. Dozens of these firms were established as the demand grew. Forbes Israel called this a "new trend in Israeli exports."


title: Black Cube

text: In 2014, Israel's "Globes" published a favorable article about Black Cube after they won several high-profile cases. In their 2018 article, "Forbes Israel" called Black Cube the "Mossad" of the "business world" in 2018.


title: Black Cube

text: Black Cube has been criticized by the international press. In his November 6, 2017 "The New Yorker" article, Ronan Farrow described them as an "army of spies" who attempted to stifle stories about Harvey Weinstein's sexual assaults by seeking to discredit the women Weinstein attacked and the journalists who investigated his crimes. A lengthy June 2021 report in the Canadian newspaper, the "Globe and Mail"—one in a series of articles that were highly critical of its methods—detailed the many ways Black Cube agents worked to fabricate evidence against innocent civilians, including a Canadian judge and journalists. In August 2021, the podcast Darknet Diaries featured a first-hand account of Black Cube operatives targeting journalists and Citizen Lab staff member John Scott-Railton. In his 2021 publication, "Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies", former investigative reporter with "The New York Times", Barry Meier, described the "oversized impact" Black Cube and other private spies in their "murky world"—were "suddenly having on politics, business and our personal lives."


title: Black Cube

text: The first case that brought Black Cube to the attention of the media, was the legal dispute between Vincent Tchenguiz, a major donor to the Conservative Party (UK) and an investor in the SCL Group and the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Tchenguiz first hired Black Cube in 2011, following his arrest on March 10, 2011, as part of the SFO investigation into the collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. and continued to use their services on a number of cases. Black Cube analysed the network of relationships surrounding the collapse of the bank, and helped build a successful challenge to the SFO arrests and search warrants, causing the judge to declare the SFO's actions unlawful in 2013. Tchenguiz's lawsuit against Black Cube, alleging fraudulent invoices, was dropped in an undisclosed settlement agreement.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2014, Black Cube was hired by Israeli businessman Nochi Dankner, to examine a court decision assigning control of IDB Holding Corp. Ltd. to Motti Ben Moshe. Black Cube investigated the sources of capital of Ben Moshe, revealing an ongoing investigation by German regulatory authorities into Ben Moshe's company ExtraEnergy, and locating a witness who held evidence of money laundering and tax evasion by Ben Moshe.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2019, the Israeli investigative television program "Uvda" (which airs on channel 12) released a report detailing how Dan Zorella had met with then-president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila in 2015 to hire Black Cube for "Operation Coltan", an operation to spy on Kabila's political opponents. Black Cube investigators rented out the entire floor of a hotel in Kinshasa to serve as a base of operations. Opposition figures expressed outrage at the revelations.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2015, Black Cube assisted Taiwanese businessman Nobu Su, owner of the shipping company TMT, in his efforts to gain permission to appeal a 2014 judgement in favor of Lakatamia Shipping in which Su was found personally liable for the amount of almost $47m. Black Cube delivered intelligence to Su's legal team showing that 20% of the judgement amount was due to a company called Slagen Shipping, which had ceased operations at the time of the establishment of the claim, thereby rendering it unable to act as a claimant, both reducing the quantum of the judgement significantly, and causing the appeal to be granted.


title: Black Cube

text: Black Cube was hired to assist Kfar Giladi Quarries in their highly publicized dispute with Caesarstone in Israel. Black Cube engaged a Caesarstone engineer in conversation during a group bicycle trip in Kfar Giladi. In the recording, the engineer contradicted the allegations that were made by Caesarstone in the arbitration proceeding with Kfar Giladi. After six years of deliberations, Judge Boaz Okun ordered Caesarstone to pay more than $14m as compensation to Kfar Giladi.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2016, Black Cube was involved in exposing bribery and corruption in a set of Italian arbitrations between AmTrust and an Italian named Antonio Somma totaling €2bn. Somma admitted to the company's undercover agents that he could control the arbitration panels, and that he had an agreement to pay the chair of the arbitration panel 10% of any money they awarded him. Following Black Cube's findings, the arbitrator was dismissed and in July 2016, the two sides reached a settlement on the total of 60 million euros instead of the initial 2 billion euro claim.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2016, Black Cube was hired by Rami Levy, the owner of Rami Levy Chain Stores Hashikma Marketing who is considered a champion of low prices in Israel, to verify his suspicions that he was being targeted by a rival chain in a negative media campaign. Black Cube provided Levy with evidence that the PR agent who worked for Levy's competitor, Victory supermarket chain, exposed the negative campaign that they carried out aimed at damaging Levy's public reputation. Levy later used those materials in a lawsuit against his competitor.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2016, France's Alstom and its Israeli partner Afcon hired Black Cube to assist them with their dispute against the Israel Railways' electrification bid, which the Spanish company SEMI won. Black Cube presented recordings of officials from the Israel Railway discussing malfunctions that occurred in the bid. Based on these findings, in January 2018, the Superior Court in Israel issued an agreement of compromise according to which the work on the railway will be divided between all three of the companies and that Black Cube's clients' work will be priced at 580 million NIS, after they originally lost the bid.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2017, Black Cube made headlines after it was revealed that in 2016 the film executive Harvey Weinstein had hired private investigators—including Kroll and Black Cube—with its highly trained "ex-Mossad agents"— in his efforts to suppress allegations by numerous women that he had sexually harassed or assaulted them. In his July 2016 contract with Black Cube, Weinstein clarified that the explicit goal of the investigation was to stop the abuse allegations from surfacing. In his November 6, 2017 "The New Yorker" article, entitled "Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies", Ronan Farrow described in detail how Black Cube agents tracked and met journalists and actresses. They focused in particular on Rose McGowan, who later publicly accused Weinstein of rape. Over the course of a year, Black Cube and other agencies, "target, or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories." One agent, Stella Penn Pechanac, used an alias to pose as a women's rights supporter interested in hiring McGowan for a formal dinner speech, enabling her to secretly record conversations with the actress. Black Cube apologized for taking the case in November 2017. , Manhattan federal prosecutors investigating Weinstein were probing into the firm's activities on his behalf, and McGowan's separate racketeering suit against it remained active. During Weinstein's 2020 trial for assault in Manhattan, Black Cube's spying on behalf of Weinstein was entered into evidence in January. In November 2017, Black Cube set up a fake recruitment firm, and flew an employee and a former employee of a hedge fund company to London for fake job interviews, in order to gain proprietary information about the hedge fund, according to "The New York Times". Black Cube refused to comment. In New York State, private investigators are required to be licensed, but the "Times" could not find a record of a license for Black Cube or B.C. Strategy.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2017, Gefen Biomed filed a NIS 60 million lawsuit which claims that entrepreneurs Moshe (Mori) Arkin and others deliberately misled or deceived minority shareholders in biomed company cCam Biotherapeutics. The lawsuit is based on evidence collected by Black Cube, which conducted recorded interviews with key figures in cCam that prove a deliberate and systematic attempt to conceal exit talks with Merck for up to $625 million.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2017 aides to U.S. President Donald Trump had contracted with Black Cube in order to undermine the Iran Nuclear Deal by discrediting former Obama administration officials Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes. They looked for evidence of unsubstantiated and false claims that Kahl and Rhodes were being enriched by Iran lobbyists and that they were cheating on their spouses. The goal was to seek damaging information about former Obama administration officials and help the Trump administration undermine the Iran nuclear deal. Black Cube claimed in response that it had no relation to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, or to the Iran nuclear deal. In August 2018, "The New Yorker" connected Black Cube's research to a memo circulated in the Trump White House in early 2017 alleging former Obama officials 'conspired with reporters' "to undermine President Trump's foreign policy" in hopes of saving Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal. In October 2018, Haaretz newspaper revealed that Black Cube's activities were aimed at tracking transfers of Iranian funds and assets in order to forfeiture them, following US court rulings against Iran in favor of victims of terror attacks. Furthermore, it was published that the goal of the intelligence gathering was tracing unknown Iranian assets and revealing Obama's administration collaboration with Iran, in violation of US or international law, in order to find other possible parties to sue such as banks.


title: Black Cube

text: A detailed June 12, 2021 report in Toronto, Canada's "Globe and Mail" described Black Cube's "Bay Street sting that went bust" as "Project Camouflage". It was revealed in Ontario provincial court documents that Black Cube's client Toronto-based private-equity firm Catalyst owned by Newton Glassman had paid about $CDN 11 million to Black Cube for an effort code-named 'Project Maple Tree' to "embarrass" and improperly discredit Ontario Justice Frank Newbould. Catalyst Capital Group and West Face Capital had been involved in a lengthy and multi-pronged legal battle after West Face acquired WIND Mobile, a Canadian wireless provider in 2014. In his August 18, 2016 Ontario Superior Court of Justice decision, Justice Newbould ruled against Catalyst in favor of West Face, and said that Catalyst's owner, Newton Glassman was "aggressive," "argumentative" and "considerably difficult." Justice Newbould awarded West Face $1,239,965, saying that Glassman was "certainly playing hardball attacking the reputation and honesty of West Face" because he had lost the opportunity to acquire Wind. In retaliation, Glassman hired Black Cube, to dispatch agents to discredit Newbould and West Face, according to a March 31, 2021 "Wall Street Journal" article. Through this story, Black Cube received coverage in Canadian media.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2018, Black Cube was hired by Bank Hapoalim to trace the assets of Motti Zisser, who left behind a high debt to the bank. Black Cube provided intelligence of Zisser having a number of assets in Europe which were transferred from him to his son David through a sophisticated network of shell companies. As a result of the intelligence gathered by Black Cube, Bank Hapoalim was granted an injunction that applied an effective freeze on all the companies of the Zisser Family, which resulted in a settlement of the Zisser family returning 95 million NIS to the bank.


title: Black Cube

text: In 2018, Black Cube supported Viktor Orban's re-election campaign gaining taped telephone conversations of individuals associated with George Soros who was actively opposing Orban's re-election. According to Tamar Zandberg, Hungary was “carrying out an anti-Semitic campaign against Soros” and that Benjamin Netanyahu, which she stated that his Likud has dangerous ties to "extreme right-wing parties in Europe", openly supported Orban's anti-Semitic re-election campaign. She stated that Black Cube's support for Orban is an "Israeli embarrassment."


title: Black Cube

text: In 2019, Black Cube uncovered proof of bribery and corruption between lawyer Janio Lescure of Panama and various judges and magistrates in the country, including Judge Oydén Ortega of the Supreme Court. Black Cube was able to procure audios of Lescure admitting his close relationships with judges, state officials, and mafiosos as well as his ability to control court verdicts, bypass inspections of illegal activities, and avoiding paying taxes.


title: Black Cube

text: In October 2018, Associated Press reported that two University of Toronto cybersecurity researchers were being pursued by undercover operatives with false identities who were inquiring about the researchers' work concerning the Israeli spyware company NSO Group. The operatives also appeared to be trying to goad the researchers into making anti-Semitic or otherwise damaging remarks. After a sting operation organised by one of the researchers and the AP, one operative was photographed and later identified as a former Israeli security official who had previously worked on a case linked to Black Cube. Responding to the revelation, NSO Group denied contracting Black Cube, and Black Cube likewise denied involvement.


title: Black Cube

text: In February 2019, Associated Press reported that at least four more individuals - three lawyers, and one journalist - were pursued by undercover operatives for their work on NSO. Undercover agents again tried to goad the individuals into making racist or anti-Israel remarks. Channel 12, an Israeli television channel, obtained and aired the secret recordings made by the undercover operatives shortly before the AP published the revelations. Channel 12 confirmed that Black Cube undercover investigators were involved, and claimed the individuals being investigated by Black Cube were attempting to smear NSO Group on behalf of Qatar. At the time, Black Cube declined to comment besides a generic reply that it follows the law in all jurisdictions it operates in. An April 2022 article in The New Yorker included more denials from both NSO and Black Cube but included a quote from NSO chief Hulio Shalev that contradicted those denials: