from the too-late dept

I’ve obviously talked a great deal about how RFK Jr. and his activity as the Secretary of HHS has been a massive health liability for the American public. The implementation of his batshit anti-vaxxer stances have, of course, grabbed most of the headlines here, especially given the recent pushback he received from the courts, but it’s also worth noting the other craziness he’s spouted at the same time. He co-signed Trump’s nonsense about Tylenol giving all the kids autism. He’s overseen the worst measles outbreak in America in several decades. It seems likely he lied to Congress about his “work” in Samoa. He has vindictively repealed grant funding to groups that disagree with him on public health matters. He’s very interested in teenager sperm counts. He once took his grandkids swimming in a river known to be filthy with human waste.

It’s bad for the health of America. The Trump administration hasn’t really seemed to care all that much about that fact, of course, but it certainly does care about retaining power through the midterms. To that end, it seems the White House has finally woken up to the idea that most Americans hate what Kennedy and HHS are doing and has decided to pare back his activity because it’s a political liability.

The White House has taken steps to assert tighter control over HHS amid leadership and messaging changes tied to concerns that department Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s focus on vaccine policy could pose political risks heading into the 2026 midterm elections, The Wall Street Journal reported March 13.

While Mr. Kennedy remains in good standing with President Donald Trump, administration aides have grown frustrated with what they described as disorganization and missteps inside HHS, according to the report. Among them: a delayed response to a measles outbreak in Texas, backlash over mental health grant cuts and internal tension surrounding the FDA’s approval of a generic abortion pill.

We somehow are not at a place yet where the Trump administration realizes that they put a loon in charge of public health and are looking at making a leadership change. But they can read the polling as well as I can and they damned well know that the majority of America is not happy with Kennedy’s performance generally, and especially unhappy with his anti-vaxxer bullshit. To that end, the White House is making several moves to try to steady the waters and keep Kennedy and HHS out of the headlines.

Basically, it looks like they’re trying to provide a bit of more adult supervision, moving Chris Klomp up from managing Medicare to managing Kennedy… er… being Kennedy’s deputy, while moving Peter Thiel’s former righthand man, Jim O’Neill, out of his HHS Deputy Secretary role and over to the FDA where there’s hope he “reduce internal friction.”

The problem is that Captain Brain Worm remains at the top of all of this. Trump and his advisers know the country doesn’t like what HHS has done. They see the chaos, the resignations, and the bullshit that gets spewed out in press conferences and courtrooms alike. It would be nice if the government did this for reasons having to do with the American people rather than for its own political ramifications, but I suppose I’ll take what I can get under the circumstances.

Filed Under: chris klomp, donald trump, health & human services, jim o’neill, maha, rfk jr.

The FCC has officially added foreign-made routers to its Covered List, a list of equipment deemed a national security threat to the United States. This means no new foreign-produced routers can be sold in America, unless they are granted a special exemption.

If you are wondering what that means for your current router sitting in your living room, don’t panic yet. For now, the ban only affects new router approvals.

Why is the US government worried about your router?

According to the National Security Determination issued on March 20, 2026, routers have become the target for hackers and state-sponsored cyber attackers. In the public notice the FCC released today, it said, “From disrupting network connectivity to enabling local networking espionage and intellectual property theft, foreign-produced routers present unacceptable risks to Americans.”

The notice points to a series of high-profile attacks as evidence, stating that “routers produced abroad were directly implicated in the Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks which targeted critical American communications, energy, transportation, and water infrastructure.” 

The conclusion from national security agencies is blunt. Foreign routers are giving bad actors a “built-in backdoor to American homes, businesses, critical infrastructure, and emergency services.”

Does this mean you need to replace your router?

Not immediately. The notice does not address routers already in use by the public. It only talks about the routers’ sales going forward.

Foreign routers that have FCC authorization can still be sold. Router manufacturers that produce their devices abroad can apply for the Conditional Approval, which buys them time while they develop a plan to move manufacturing to the US. 

You can find the names of brands under the Covered List and those that received Conditional Approval on the FCC’s website. Popular brands like TP-Link, which were already under investigation by the US government, will need to either relocate manufacturing or apply for these exemptions to continue selling new models in the US.

This is a significant move that will reshape the router market. Whether it will translate into better security for everyday users remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the era of affordable, foreign-made routers dominating American homes could soon be coming to an end.

The inbox has long been the softest entry point in enterprise security. As phishing campaigns grow more convincing, more personalised, and increasingly powered by generative AI, the tools designed to stop them have been locked in a reactive cycle: wait for the attack, analyse it, respond. IRONSCALES, the Atlanta-based email security vendor, is betting that cycle is about to break.

Ahead of this week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, the company announced a new threat intelligence initiative alongside live demonstrations of the three AI agents it shipped in its Winter 2026 platform release. Together, the moves represent IRONSCALES’ push to reposition itself from a detection vendor into something closer to a preemptive security partner, one that models attacks before they arrive rather than cataloguing them after the fact.

What the new intelligence series actually does

The “Email Attack of the Day” series, which IRONSCALES is debuting at RSAC 2026, draws on anonymised threat data from its network of more than 17,000 customer organisations. The concept is straightforward: surface real-world email attack patterns as they emerge, publish them with technical context, and give security teams the intelligence to recognise new tactics before they proliferate.

It is not an entirely novel format. Other vendors publish threat advisories and campaign breakdowns routinely. But IRONSCALES is framing the series as a complement to its broader shift toward what it calls “Phishing 3.0” defences, where intelligence feeds directly into adaptive detection rather than sitting in a separate research silo.

Three AI agents, one architecture

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The centrepiece of the RSAC demonstrations will be the three AI agents IRONSCALES introduced in its Winter 2026 release earlier this month: Red Teaming, Phishing SOC, and Phishing Simulation. Each is purpose-built rather than layered on top of a general-purpose large language model, a design choice Audian Paxson, principal technical strategist at the company, has described as more efficient for encoding domain-specific expertise.

The Red Teaming agent performs continuous reconnaissance against an organisation’s public footprint, scanning everything from social media presence to executive communications and org charts. It then generates tailored attack simulations and feeds them into the platform’s detection models. The idea is to harden defences against the specific phishing campaigns an attacker would build for that particular organisation, not just the generic threats circulating broadly.

The Phishing SOC agent, meanwhile, handles forensic investigation of suspicious emails. IRONSCALES says it delivers what amounts to a Level 2 analyst’s assessment in minutes, examining five investigative tracks and producing a verdict that would otherwise consume hours of human analyst time. For managed service providers juggling dozens of client environments, the speed difference matters.

The third agent, Phishing Simulation, takes the reconnaissance data gathered by its Red Teaming counterpart and uses it to create hyper-personalised training simulations. Rather than recycling generic phishing templates, it targets an organisation’s highest-risk employees with scenarios drawn from real OSINT data and delivered in their native language.

The wider context: an arms race that favours the attacker

IRONSCALES is making these moves against a backdrop that has grown considerably more hostile. According to research cited in the company’s own announcements, 88 per cent of organisations report falling victim to AI-powered security incidents within the past 12 months. KnowBe4’s 2025 Phishing Threat Trends Report found that more than 82 per cent of phishing emails analysed contained indicators of AI assistance. A Hoxhunt analysis documented a 14-fold surge in AI-generated phishing over the 2025 holiday period alone.

The economics have shifted, too. Where crafting a convincing spear-phishing campaign once required time and skill, generative AI has compressed the effort to minutes and a handful of prompts. IBM security researchers demonstrated that AI could build a phishing campaign as effective as one created by human experts, needing just five prompts instead of 16 hours of work.

RSAC 2026 itself reflects this anxiety. Agentic AI, the category of autonomous systems capable of planning and executing multi-step operations, dominates this year’s conference agenda. Microsoft’s keynote addresses securing AI agents at enterprise scale. Multiple vendors are unveiling deepfake detection tools. The conversation has moved decisively from whether AI will reshape email security to how quickly defenders can close the gap.

Encryption and deepfake protection round out the release

Beyond the AI agents, the Winter 2026 release includes integrated email encryption for outbound messages, a feature IRONSCALES designed to address compliance requirements without adding friction. The system applies encryption through two modes: policy-based protection for regulated content and user-initiated encryption for sensitive workflows.

The release also extends the company’s deepfake protection for Microsoft Teams, which IRONSCALES first introduced in 2025. Enhanced voice detection now learns employee voice patterns passively from normal meeting participation, flagging impersonation attempts even when cameras are switched off. It is a notable addition given that deepfake-driven fraud increased more than 700 per cent year over year, according to Cyble’s 2025 Executive Threat Monitoring data, and Gartner surveys indicate that 62 per cent of organisations experienced a deepfake attempt in the past year.

From reactive to preemptive, at least in theory

The underlying pitch from IRONSCALES is a closed-loop architecture: reconnaissance feeds detection, detection feeds training, and training feeds back into better recognition. Eyal Benishti, the company’s CEO, has described the approach as distinct from competitors who use OSINT-driven attack generation solely for employee training. IRONSCALES, he argues, uses it to improve detection first.

Whether that distinction proves meaningful in practice will depend on how the agents perform at scale across diverse customer environments. The email security market is crowded, and the claim of preemptive protection is one that several vendors are now making simultaneously. But the architectural bet, purpose-built agents feeding a shared adaptive model trained on data from 17,000 organisations, is at least a testable proposition.

Attendees at RSAC 2026 can see the platform demonstrated live at Booth #4600 in the North Expo. For everyone else, the real test will be whether the next wave of AI-powered phishing campaigns encounters defenders who saw them coming.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a mixed bag. I enjoyed the blue group, which matches up people with the same first name. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Strike!

Green group hint: Fire it in there!

Blue group hint: Like Springsteen.

Purple group hint: Great force.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Found in a bowling alley.

Green group: Baseball pitches.

Blue group: Famous Bruces.

Purple group: Power ____.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is found in a bowling alley. The four answers are bowling ball, bumper, gutter and pin.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is baseball pitches. The four answers are changeup, cutter, slider and slurve.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is famous Bruces. The four answers are Bowen, Lee, Smith and Sutter.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is power ____. The four answers are forward, hitter, lifter and play.

An entire S$150 million industry is being built around fresh pet food in Singapore

For decades, the answer to feeding your pet was simple: open a bag of kibble, scoop some into a bowl, and that’s it—you were done.

Dry kibble has always dominated the global pet food market, and Singapore is no exception. It is cheap to produce, easy to store, and heavily marketed. For most pet owners, it has simply always been “the way.”

But increasingly, pet owners are asking harder questions. What exactly goes into those brown pellets? What is their nutritional value? And why do so many pets, even on premium kibble, still suffer from chronic ailments?

For a growing number of Singapore pet owners, the answer has been to ditch the bag entirely. They are turning to fresh pet food—minimally processed, human-grade meals made from real ingredients like sous vide chicken and bone broth. It costs a lot more, but they’re willing to splurge.

To meet the demand, a new wave of local brands has emerged, reshaping a market that, for decades, had remained largely unchanged.

Among them are PetCubes and BOM BOM: two Singapore-based fresh pet food companies that are both seeing market traction that their founders could not have anticipated when they first started out.

Taking pet nutrition to a new level

For Dr Francis Cabana, Director of Nutrition at PetCubes, the journey into pet food began far from domestic kitchens.

With a PhD in Animal Nutrition, his career has spanned zoos and rescue centres around the world, eventually bringing him to Mandai, where he worked with the Singapore Zoo. There, he began consulting for a local pet food startup—PetCubes—which would later become his full-time focus.

Founded in 2013, PetCubes claims to be Singapore’s first fresh pet food company, entering the market at a time when the concept was virtually unheard of.

“Back then, pet owners really only had two options: highly processed kibble or time-consuming home cooking,” he shared. “We wanted to bridge that gap with something that was both convenient and biologically appropriate.”

But being first came with challenges. Early growth was slow, and convincing pet owners and even veterinarians required extensive education.

“Every conversation was a hard-fought battle,” he said. “We were essentially teaching the market from scratch.”

Over time, however, that persistence paid off. Today, PetCubes operates its own ISO 22000 and HACCP-certified facility in Singapore and has expanded across Hong Kong and Malaysia. It has also achieved a milestone few fresh pet food brands can claim: being stocked in veterinary clinics locally.

While PetCubes emerged from industry expertise, BOM BOM was born out of a deeply personal experience.

Its founder and CEO, Jason Wang, didn’t set out to start a business. In fact, he was preparing for retirement when his dog, Kyubi, began suffering from a host of chronic health issues, from digestive problems to joint conditions.

Frustrated by the lack of clear answers from conventional treatments, Jason began researching pet nutrition himself.

“What started as a personal journey quickly became a much bigger realisation,” he explained. “Many of the issues Kyubi faced were linked to diet, specifically, highly processed kibble.”

Unable to find a product that met his standards, Jason began preparing fresh meals himself. The results were dramatic: within weeks, Kyubi showed visible improvements in his digestion, skin, and energy levels, to the point where friends began asking him to prepare meals for their pets as well.

Eventually, the kitchen-based passion project he started in 2016 became BOM BOM, formally established in 2017.

Today, the company serves around 10,000 customers in Singapore and operates a 5,000 sq ft SFA-licensed facility in Tiong Bahru. It also has a presence in South Korea, with a 9,000 sq ft factory set up in Seoul to cater to its customers there.

The business’s growth has been largely bootstrapped, expanding at over 30% CAGR over the past decade, shared Jason.

What really goes into the bowl

The shift towards cooked pet food is driven largely by pet humanisation: the idea that pets are family members deserving of the same quality of care and nutrition as humans.

While dry kibble still dominates due to convenience and affordability, its growth has plateaued. In contrast, the fresh and cooked pet food segment—still only about 10–20% of the market, according to Jason—is expanding rapidly.

The fresh dog food market in Singapore was estimated to have reached about S$150 million in 2025, driven by rising pet ownership and premiumisation trends.

Pet owners who have made the switch are noticing real, tangible changes in their pets’ health.

Dr Francis notes that after just three days on PetCubes, pets’ stools become smaller, darker, and less odorous—a clear sign their bodies are absorbing real nutrition instead of passing synthetic fillers.

PetCubes achieves these results through its thoughtfully crafted menu, which features 12 single-protein options ranging from rabbit and venison to crocodile and even insects.

Each meal is “gently cooked” at 75–80°C for at least 45 minutes—a low-and-slow method that eliminates pathogens while preserving delicate nutrients like vitamins, antioxidants, and proteins, which are often destroyed during the high-heat extrusion process used for kibble. The brand also offers raw options for pets that prefer an uncooked diet.

On the other hand, BOM BOM focuses on customised nutrition. Each meal is crafted on demand for individual pets based on age, breed, activity level, and specific health conditions.

Its smart factory rigorously checks portioning, fat content, and ingredient quality, while lab-tested produce and strict farm-to-bowl SOPs ensure freshness and safety.

This precision-led approach means pets often see measurable improvements in digestion, energy, coat health, and even chronic conditions—demonstrating the benefits of nutrition tailored to the individual rather than a one-size-fits-all formula.

Making an impression on the traditional market

As the category grows, so does competition.

New fresh, frozen, and freeze-dried brands are entering the market at an accelerating pace, offering pet owners a wider range of options than ever before. But perhaps the most telling sign of disruption is how traditional players are responding.

According to Dr Francis, major kibble brands have begun adopting language like “raw-inspired” and “ancestral feeding”—a shift he sees as validation rather than competition.

“When billion-dollar companies start mimicking your messaging, it proves that the demand for less processed, natural food has truly made an impression on the traditional market,” he said.

“The disruption is happening because we’ve raised the bar on what a pet’s bowl should look like, and now the rest of the industry is trying to keep pace.”

Jason echoes a similar sentiment but adds that the next phase of growth must go deeper.

Right now, there are no consistent standards defining what “fresh” actually means. As a result, brands can label their products as fresh without ensuring they are truly nutrient-dense or biologically appropriate.

“The industry needs to move beyond using fresh as a marketing term. We need clearer nutritional standards, greater transparency, and better education on long-term health outcomes.”

A market still finding its feet

While both PetCubes and BOM BOM see fresh feeding as still being in its early stages, the opportunities for growth are undeniable.

In Singapore, both brands are actively expanding their presence to reach more mainstream consumers. PetCubes has strengthened its footprint in major retailers like Pet Lovers Centre, while continuing to grow its online and subscription channels.

It has already seen striking growth. “We’ve grown our revenue by over 400%,” said Dr Francis, adding that the business produces “hundreds of thousands of fresh meals” annually.

BOM BOM, on the other hand, is extending beyond its direct-to-consumer model with selective retail partnerships and broader e-commerce availability, ensuring pet owners can access fresh, personalised meals more conveniently.

For both brands, expansion isn’t just about sales—it’s about making science-backed or precision-led fresh nutrition widely accessible.

But challenges remain.

Fresh food comes with higher production costs, including sourcing premium, human-grade ingredients. Cold chain logistics are critical to ensure meals remain safe and nutritious, but add complexity to distribution. Shelf lives are also shorter compared to traditional kibble, which requires careful inventory management and can limit mass adoption.

Additionally, the need for consumer education is ongoing. Many pet owners are still unfamiliar with fresh feeding or hesitant to move away from conventional options.

Still, if current trends are anything to go by, the trajectory is clear: the demand for fresh pet food is rising, and the market is ripe for growth.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: @trufflewhuffle via Instagram/ BOM BOM

With its incredibly expressive and vibrant art direction, there’s a lot to like about extraction shooter Marathon from an aesthetic standpoint. Its own brand of brightly colored science fiction is a sight to behold, and there’s a real sense of wonder in the first few hours as you explore each of the three early maps, soaking it all in.

Developed by Bungie, the original creators of Halo, it should come as no surprise that the gunplay is well-crafted and compelling, with a strong variety of meaningfully distinct weapon types to try out. They’re great-looking, like the rest of the world, too, with striking, blocky, 3D printed designs that really help sell the distant future setting.