Customer service representatives for Trump Mobile told Fortune the shutdown had disrupted shipments of the $499 device, and said while the device would not be shipped this month, “we’ve been told mid to late January.” The company has not publicly provided a revised delivery date.

​​”The T1 has been delayed due to the government shutdown. They had to pause everything on the FCC side of things,” the customer service rep said, adding the $499 price has not changed.

Trump Mobile was unveiled in June as a licensing venture that uses the Trump name to sell mobile service and a branded Android handset, the T1 Phone. The device is marketed as a gold-colored smartphone priced at $499, available via preorder with a $100 down payment. It is designed to run on “The 47 Plan,” a $47.45-per-month offering that bundles 5G service with unlimited talk, text, and data, the pricing a nod to Donald Trump’s status as the 45th and 47th U.S. president.

Trump Mobile

At launch, the Trump Organization and Trump Mobile framed the project as both a business opportunity and a statement about domestic manufacturing. Early marketing materials promised a handset “built in the United States,” aligning with Trump’s public criticism of Apple and his threats of 25% tariffs on Apple and Samsung devices made in China. Supply chain experts quickly questioned whether a fully U.S.-made smartphone at that price point was realistic, noting less than 5% of the components in an iPhone are currently manufactured in the U.S., according to IDC estimates.​​

The shipping schedule has slipped repeatedly. Initial materials indicated the T1 Phone would be available in August, before the date was pushed to October and then to a vague commitment to deliver units by year-end. In recent weeks, Trump Mobile’s website has removed specific release dates and “Made in USA” language, according to NBC News and People, which have been tracking changes to the website. As the flagship device remains unavailable, the company has begun selling refurbished phones like Apple’s iPhone 15 and Samsung’s Galaxy S24, positioning them as lower-cost alternatives to buying directly from the manufacturers.​​

The business itself operates as a virtual mobile network rather than building its own infrastructure. Trump Mobile’s plan is delivered over existing U.S. carriers via Liberty Mobile Wireless, a Florida-based mobile virtual network operator, while customer service is handled by Ensurety Ventures, an insurance company in Missouri. The Trump-branded service is run out of Trump Tower in Miami, and key executives introduced at launch came from real estate, insurance, and pager businesses rather than from major smartphone manufacturers.​​

Trump Mobile has not explained exactly how the federal shutdown is affecting its production or logistics beyond citing it as the reason for the latest slip. Industry groups have previously noted shutdowns can slow regulatory approvals and customs processing for electronics, adding friction to certification and import timelines. Analysts also point out most shutdowns leave private-sector manufacturing and many core supply chains operating, which can limit how much disruption they cause to commercial product launches.​​

As for the customers who have already put down $100 to reserve the gold T1 Phone, some preorder buyers have reported receiving only receipts and generic assurances, with no firm shipping date and difficulty getting detailed updates from support channels.

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s lawsuit against Donald Trump challenges his ability to remove her from office, but only briefly addresses the central accusations that she committed mortgage fraud.

One part of the documents filed in the suit suggests that the issue at hand regarding documents Cook submitted for home loans may have been caused by a “clerical error” on her part and asserts that even if a mistake was made it does not rise to an offense that would justify removing her from office.

The complaint mostly focuses on rules outlined in the Federal Reserve Act that state Fed officials can only be removed for “cause,” a legally nebulous condition that may have to be determined by the Supreme Court.

Cook maintains that the fraud allegations do not meet the standard and instead are subterfuge for Trump’s efforts to stack the Fed Board of Governors in his favor so that he can get the interest rate cuts he has been demanding.

“It is clear from the circumstances surrounding Governor Cook’s purported removal from the Federal Reserve Board that the mortgage allegations against her are pretextual,” the suit states. “This allegation about conduct that predates Governor Cook’s Senate confirmation has never been investigated, much less proven. This allegation is not grounds for removal under the” act.

The document calls the fraud allegation “unsubstantiated and unproven” but does not go into detail about why that is the case.

Whether Cook did in fact lie on the applications will be the focus of establishing the legal standard for cause to remove her.

Trump and other officials, most notably Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have alleged that Cook provided false information about her primary residence when obtaining federally backed mortgages.

The complaint said that even if Cook did make a mistake on the applications, it still wouldn’t rise to cause.

“Even if the President had been more careful in obscuring his real justification for targeting Governor Cook, the President’s concocted basis for removal — the unsubstantiated and unproven allegation that Governor Cook ‘potentially’ erred in filling out a mortgage form prior to her Senate confirmation — does not amount to ’cause’ within the meaning of the FRA and is unsupported by caselaw,” stated the complaint from Cook’s attorney, Abbe Lowell.

Moreover, the suit says that “the President and Director Pulte have not even alleged explicitly that Ms. Cook benefited from any clerical error, or that such an error was intentional. Even if Governor Cook had committed the infractions that the President alleges— which she did not—the President would lack ’cause’ to remove her” under the law.

In a statement to CNBC, Pulte noted that Cook did not attempt to refute the claims against her.

“In her filing, Ms. Cook does not deny that these are her mortgage documents, so one has to wonder why she, or [Fed Chair] Jerome Powell, would want this to be a part of the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to have preeminent integrity and which is critical to the safety and soundness of the U.S. Mortgage Market,” Pulte said in a statement to CNBC’s Scott Wapner.

However, avoiding the specifics in this type of case is far from unusual as doing so would give credence to the allegation, said Robert Hockett, a professor of law and public finance at Cornell Law School.

“You don’t want to play his game, or legitimize his game by playing it,” Hockett said. “‘I’m not surprised at all that the lawsuit wouldn’t include paragraph after paragraph providing the details of her mortgage applications. Because, that would, in effect, be conceding that there’s something legitimate about what Trump is doing.”

Markets have been relatively unbothered by the battle between Cook and Trump, though that could change as the case escalates.

Krishna Guha, head of global policy and central bank strategy at Evercore ISI, said markets are too focused on the conflict between the two and not enough on the bigger picture of what he calls the “Trumpification” of the Fed.

“We have no privileged knowledge of the legal facts, but believe if it were established Cook committed even accidental mortgage misrepresentation, she would have to go,” Guha said in a note earlier this week.

If Trump is successful in removing Cook, it would give him a 4-3 edge on the board in terms of appointees should Stephen Miran get through Senate confirmation to fill an empty seat. That could be extended to 5-2 if Powell chooses not to fill out his term as governor after his run as head of the central bank expires in May 2026.

A new strain of norovirus now makes up a majority of outbreaks nationwide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new strain’s emergence, found spreading throughout the country and on cruise ships, offers a possible explanation for the past month’s steep wave of infections from the stomach bug. 

Scientists call this winter’s dominant norovirus strain GII.17[P17]. Samples from patients in nearly 7 in 10 norovirus outbreaks have tested positive for the new strain so far this season, according to data from a network of public health laboratories called CaliciNet. 

“It is too early to tell if this strain is associated with more severe norovirus disease but likely lower population immunity is the reason for the early surge of an otherwise seasonal increase of this virus,” Jan Vinjé, head of the CDC’s CaliciNet system, told CBS News in an email.

All previous waves of norovirus in the U.S. since 2012 have been dominated by a different strain that scientists call GII.4, said Vinjé. This season, only around 7% of norovirus outbreaks have been linked to that GII.4 strain.

Vinjé said that the GII.17 strain is behind outbreaks “everywhere” across the country this season of the highly contagious virus, including on cruise ship outbreaks.

The CDC tracked at least six norovirus outbreaks on vessels last month, marking the most reported in the month for over a decade. 

Norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the U.S. and almost always climbs around the country starting during the winter months. 

Many cases resolve on their own without needing to be tested or treated by doctors, making it impossible to know exactly how many Americans are sickened. However, virtually all data tracking the virus suggest norovirus is at peak levels throughout the country.

Rates of positive norovirus tests from a different CDC network of laboratories have reached the highest weekly levels on record in years. Norovirus rates in figures from testing company BioFire Diagnostics are also now above previous seasonal peaks. 

In wastewater, samples collected by WastewaterSCAN have been “high” for norovirus across nearly all sites monitored by the firm across the country. 

While versions of GII.17 have been circulating for several decades, only in recent years has the strain driven large waves of infections. Some parts of Europe last year reported a “sudden rise” in GII.17. Japan and China reported their first waves from the strain after 2014.

The CDC reported it had seen a rise in GII.17 cases last season, though it remained a minority of all norovirus outbreaks at the time in the U.S.

Is GII.17 causing more or worse norovirus cases?

Additional studies will also be needed to tease out whether GII.17 is leading to a difference in the severity of norovirus infections. Some previous changes to the virus have emerged without causing new or significantly worse symptoms. 

“What we are seeing has happened before for noroviruses. Noroviruses are very diverse,” said Marion Koopmans, head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience.

Koopmans, who oversees a global consortium of norovirus researchers, cautioned that data tracking norovirus cases still has gaps around the world. More studies are also needed to prove if there is an actual increase in illnesses being driven by the strain.

“There is insufficient surveillance (in my view) to really make the case that this is causing an increase in the number of cases, as we have a lot of norovirus infections each winter and the surveillance is rather patchy,” said Koopmans.

When the latest GII.4 strain, called the Sydney variant, emerged in 2012, initial data suggested it had driven an increase in outbreaks. The CDC later reported data from hospitals suggesting it had not actually led to significantly more or worse norovirus infections.

“Thus, the observed increase in outbreak activity during the 2012–13 season likely represents random seasonal and state variation rather than a direct result of the emergence of GII.4 Sydney,” CDC scientists concluded at the time.

Health officials in Wisconsin said earlier this month that they had seen a record-high number of norovirus outbreaks, but told CBS News they do not believe it is driving a major difference in symptoms or length of illness.

“It does not change any recommendations about prevention or spread. It just means we have a robust outbreak season and therefore an opportunity to really emphasize the importance of handwashing, staying home while sick and until at least 48 hours after recovery,” said Elizabeth Goodsitt, spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, in an email.

CrowdStrike on Sunday said Delta Air Lines had rejected on-site help during last month’s massive outage that sparked thousands of flight cancellations.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week that the mass cancellations following the outage, which occurred at one of the busiest times of the year, cost the company about $500 million, including customer compensation. The airline has “no choice” but to seek damages, he said.

Bastian told staff on Friday that the airline had informed CrowdStrike and Microsoft that the company was “planning to pursue legal claims” to recover its losses stemming from the outage and that it had hired law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

In response, Michael Carlinsky, CrowdStrike’s lawyer and co-managing partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, wrote to Delta’s lawyer David Boies on Sunday that Delta’s litigation threats “contributed to a misleading narrative that CrowdStrike is responsible for Delta’s IT decisions and response to the outage.”

He said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz reached out to Bastian to “offer onsite assistance, but received no response.”

Delta canceled more than 5,000 flights between the July 19 outage, caused by a botched software update, through July 25, more than its rivals.

CrowdStrike shares have lost more than 36% of their value since the outages affected millions of computers running the company’s software atop Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The outage hit industries from banking to health care to air travel.

“Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions—swiftly, transparently, and constructively—while Delta did not,” Carlinsky’s letter said.

He said Delta would have to preserve a series of documents, including those describing its information-technology infrastructure, IT business continuity plans and its handling of outages over the past five years.

CrowdStrike’s contractual liability is capped in the single-digit millions, the letter said. Delta did not comment on the letter on Sunday night. In a separate statement, CrowdStrike said it hopes “Delta will agree to work cooperatively to find a resolution.”

“We did everything we could to take care of our customers over that time frame,” Bastian said in an interview Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “If you’re going to be having access, priority access, to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you’ve got to test this stuff. You can’t come into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug. It doesn’t work.”

CrowdStrike vowed to release future software updates in stages in a preliminary post-incident report.

On July 30, CrowdStrike shareholders filed a suit against the company in a Texas federal court and sought damages for declines in their investments.

CrowdStrike reports fiscal second-quarter results Aug. 28.

A Microsoft spokesperson did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The Ethereum price has fallen by around -25% since its mid-March peak at around $4,100 and is currently trading just above $3,000. While this loss is in line with the broader market trend and in particular Bitcoin’s price drop of about -22% in the same time, there could be another reason for ETH’s price slump, which seems plausible since the German government only sells BTC and not ETH, and Mt. Gox doesn’t own any ETH either. But what if Ethereum has its very own “Mt. Gox“?

Is The Ethereum Price Suppressed By Golem?

Chinese crypto journalist Colin Wu (@WuBlockchain) first reported via X on the significant movements of ETH funds by the Golem project, an Ethereum-based project that conducted a notable Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in 2016. According to Wu, “Golem, a project that raised 820,000 ETH in ICO in 2016, has transferred 36,000 ETH to Binance, Coinbase, Bitfinex, etc. in the past 37 days, worth about $115 million.”

On-chain analysis service Lookonchain further revealed the extent of these transactions via X: “Golem has sold 24,400 ETH ($72M) on Binance, Coinbase and Bitfinex in the past 3 days, and currently holds 127,634 ETH ($372M). Golem raised 820,000 ETH through ICO in November 2016, when the price of ETH was only $10.2.”

Related Reading

The Golem ICO was an early and significant event for the crypto industry which took place in November 2016. Golem aimed to create a decentralized supercomputer by harnessing the combined computing power of users’ machines, from personal laptops to entire data centers. The idea was to allow users to rent out their computing resources to others.

In its ICO, Golem raised approximately 820,000 ETH, which was valued at around $8 million at the time, in just 29 minutes, becoming a symbol of the ICO bubble. This funding was supposed to be used to develop the Golem network. Despite its ambitious goals, Golem’s market relevance has significantly diminished, with its token now trading at just $0.32 (#151 by market cap), a stark decline from its peak price of $1.32 in January 2018.

Harsh Criticism From Crypto Experts

Criticism has been vocal among industry leaders. Adam Cochran, a partner at CEHV, expressed his displeasure via X: “Absolute bastards. Sat on their ETH for ages doing nothing. And here we are in the era of demand for distributed compute and they can’t even be relevant.”

Related Reading

Similarly, Jimmy Ragosa, an advisor at Sismo, sarcastically remarked, “Yes, Golem has been dumping on us. But, at least, they are using these 100s of millions of dollars to build critical scaling infra and widely adopted apps, right?”

Another perspective came from @based16z on X, who speculated on the rationale behind Golem’s actions, “Say what you want about Golem, but they’re not exactly a gambler. For them to dump 700 million dollars in ETH after 7 years, I assume they know something.”

How strong the influence of Golem sales is on the ETH price remains pure speculation. However, it seems clear that the constant selling pressure has probably played at least a certain role in the Ethereum price slump. At press time, ETH traded at $3,049.

Featured image from Shutterstock, chart from TradingView.com

Nabil Haque said he can still remember the moment his wife Sungida Rashid first held their baby daughter in her arms after giving birth at Boston’s St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center last October.

“It was a beautiful moment,” Haque told CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook, in his first television interview. “I wasn’t expecting it to be this blissful.”

The bliss was short-lived. In the hours after delivery, Rashid experienced a cascade of complications at a hospital that was unexpectedly ill-prepared for her urgent need, and was transferred to another hospital, where she died. Her death has triggered a fresh wave of public scrutiny into the mounting patient risks and health care compromises that have surfaced under hospitals owned by private equity-backed companies.

“They’ve taken money away from these hospitals that provide needed care and they’re using that money to line their own pockets.” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey told CBS News. “I’m disgusted. It’s selfish. It’s greed.”

The hospital where Rashid gave birth, St. Elizabeth’s, is one of dozens of hospitals across the U.S. acquired in the past 15 years by a company called Steward Health Care. With hundreds of millions of dollars in backing from private equity giant Cerberus, Steward started buying up Massachusetts hospitals in 2010 and now owns 33 hospitals across 8 states. 

The Dallas-based health care company has been one focus of a year-and-a-half-long CBS News investigation revealing how private equity investors have siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars from community hospitals with devastating public health consequences. Last April, CBS News found Steward redirected money away from hospital operations by selling off the real estate of San Antonio’s Texas Vista Medical Center before closing the facility altogether.

A spokesperson for Steward told CBS News company executives always put patients first and said they “deny that any other considerations were placed ahead of that guiding principle.” In an earlier statement, the spokesperson said Steward “has actively and meaningfully invested” in its hospital system since its formation, including in Massachusetts, where it took over hospitals that were “failing” and “about to close.”

“Steward’s investment has taken the form of facility upgrades, equipment, technology, and other meaningful improvements,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Yet records reviewed by CBS News showed Steward hospitals around the country with a trail of unpaid bills, at times risking a shortage of potentially life-saving supplies. That appears to be what happened at St. Elizabeth’s last October, where medical staff says a device that could have stopped the bleeding in Rashid’s liver was repossessed by the manufacturer weeks earlier. 

After giving birth, Rashid experienced bleeding from her uterus, followed by pain around the back of her rib cage. Doctors sent her for an emergency CT scan and then rushed her to the emergency room where, Haque said, they found bleeding in her liver. Hours later, Rashid died during surgery at a second hospital, a tragedy first reported by the Boston Globe, 

Rashid’s death is now the subject of a state investigation. Haque says doctors told him they wanted to use a device called an embolization coil to stop the bleeding from his wife’s liver. He said when St. Elizabeth’s didn’t have the coil, she was transferred to the second hospital. 

“An hour later, she had another cardiac arrest,” Haque said. “They couldn’t revive her. It was shocking. I said, ‘Well, what exactly happened?'”

In a complaint filed to Massachusetts’ health department obtained by CBS News, health care workers at St. Elizabeth’s said the manufacturer had come to “retrieve any coils at the hospital” weeks before because Steward hadn’t paid its bills. According to a lawsuit filed last October by the manufacturer, Steward owed about $2.5 million in unpaid bills.  

Steward declined to comment on Rashid’s death, citing privacy concerns. The incident has touched off a wave of recriminations in Massachusetts, where Steward owns nine hospitals, including St. Elizabeth’s. Healey called her death “outrageous,” and her administration is looking at whether her death was preventable. 

“It underscores what has been happening out here with Steward,” said Healey. ” If you are about cutting corners in furtherance of making money, people are going to get hurt. That’s wrong. That needs to change.”

Concern about hospitals closing

In December, Steward informed health officials in Massachusetts that it would be closing New England Sinai in Stoughton, another of its hospitals in the state. The announcement has set off statewide fears about the company’s financial situation and whether it would be shuttering more hospitals. 

“It’s a catastrophic situation in our state,” said emergency room nurse Kathy Reardon, an official with the Massachusetts Nurses Association, a union that represents health care workers at Steward’s hospitals in the state.

Reardon said Steward’s hospitals typically serve low-income communities and patients without a primary care doctor who end up using the emergency room for their health needs. 

“If any of these hospitals were to close, it would be an astronomically tragic situation for all the citizens of Massachusetts,” she said. 

In February, a Steward executive sent a message informing staff the company had secured financing “to help stabilize” hospital operations, and, in a statement, a company spokesperson told CBS News it has no plans to close any additional hospitals.

Healey said Steward’s failures have prompted her to install monitors — staff from the state’s health department — inside each of Steward’s hospitals to try to ensure patient safety. She said she believes Steward should no longer be operating in Massachusetts.  “They’ve taken too much from too many,” Healey said “The sooner Steward is out of our state, the better.”

Financial questions — and a $40 million yacht 

In a statement to CBS News, a Steward spokesperson said that the company had invested about $2 billion in the hospitals it has acquired, including propping up the employee pension fund for employees at its Massachusetts hospitals, which was underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars when Steward acquired them.

The company has blamed its current financial woes on the pandemic and low reimbursement rates from Medicare and Medicaid services. 

In a lengthy interview with CBS News, Healey called Steward’s justification “hogwash.” Instead, she accused Steward executives of driving the company deep into debt while enriching themselves — all at the public’s expense. 

“The game was, come to Massachusettts, make some investments and then begin to suck out as much as you can in terms of profits,” she said. 

Cerberus, the private equity firm, shed its stake in Steward by January 2021, after making an $800 million profit in a decade, according to a report from Bloomberg. Financial records show Steward has also sold off more than $1 billion of its hospitals’ land and buildings since 2016 to Medical Properties Trust, which has made a business of buying up hospital real estate from private equity investors. 

Last year, CBS News reported on Prospect Medical, another private equity-backed chain, whose owners sold off the real estate of a group of suburban Pennsylvania hospitals to cover the debt they incurred when they paid themselves hundreds of millions of dollars out of the company’s coffers. 

The financial moves, though legal, ultimately spelled doom for the century-old Delaware County Memorial Hospital, which was forced to shut its doors after Pennsylvania’s health department deemed the facility inadequately staffed.

Angela Neopolitano, who worked at Delaware County Memorial for 41 years, says, before the closure, the hospital was dismantled piece by piece, leading to longer waits in the emergency room and forcing staff to transfer more patients to other hospitals.

“They kept on cutting services,” Neopolitano said. “Things wouldn’t get fixed. Our elevator in  the back of the emergency room had been broken for over a year. When they closed the ICU, that was the knife in my heart.” 

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2021 shows Steward’s owners also paid themselves millions in dividends. Around the same time, Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre acquired a 190-foot yacht estimated to be worth $40 million. 

In an email to CBS News, Steward confirmed de la Torre owned the yacht. Reports about the vessel have been particularly galling to health care workers on the front lines of Steward’s hospitals. 

Respiratory therapist Jessica Carrasco worked at Texas Vista Medical Center, Steward’s San Antonio hospital, for eight years. She said, before the company shut the hospital down last May, there was a shortage of tubing for respiratory masks.

“Coordinators were having to phone a friend to let us borrow, you know, a cup of sugar,” Carrasco said. 

At Steward’s Massachusetts hospitals, CBS News found at least 16 vendors weren’t paid on time, including a dialysis company that provided life-saving services. Reardon said the supply shortages were unlike anything she’s experienced in her 35 years of nursing.

“It’s unacceptable to us,” she said. “They pick and choose who to pay and what supplies to get.” 

A family’s loss: “It’s just still surreal”

Sungida Rashid and Nabil Haque had come to Boston earlier in 2023 for Haque’s postdoctoral program. Haque told us his wife’s smile and sense of humor could light up a room. 

“The laugh was, you know, contagious, and you could hear it from a different apartment, but that’s something I really liked about her,” Haque said. “It’s just still surreal, she’s not here.” 

Haque said he was angry when he first learned from a Globe reporter that the hospital’s embolization coil had been repossessed. Now, he says he is trying to focus on the small milestones in his daughter’s life instead of wondering whether his wife would still be here if the couple didn’t deliver at a Steward hospital.

“I’m looking forward to her starting to walk and eat solid food, and I’m not planning anything about myself,” said Haque, who spoke with CBS News from his parents’ home in Bangladesh. “A lot of my plans are now buried with Sungida.” 

In his ruling, the judge said the phrasing of the various filings raise questions about “what would constitute ‘undue’ focus on attorney involvement,” “what could suggest inappropriately that attorneys had ‘blessed’ a particular course of conduct” and what legal theory would allow evidence that met the first two questions.