US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday aiming to lower crippling drug prices by giving states more leeway to bargain-hunt abroad and improving the process for price negotiations.Americans face the highest prescription drug prices in the world, leaving many people to pay partially out of their own pockets despite already exorbitant insurance premiums.”This (order) will provide meaningful relief to seniors and low income individuals who depend on insulin and many, many more,” a White House official told reporters.”Furthermore, it will foster a more competitive prescription drug market to ensure the prices being charged to patients and the government are more aligned with the value they provide, rather than some quirk in the way that the government pays for them.”The order directs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, to allow more states to import medicines directly from countries with lower prices.The administration of Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden approved Florida’s application to import from Canada last year but no other states were given the green light for their own deals. The order also tweaks the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed under Biden, which allowed the Medicare health insurance plan for seniors to negotiate the prices of certain drugs for the first time.The aim of the changes is to eliminate the difference between price negotiation rules for pills and those for injectable drugs — a disparity that critics argue could harm investment in the orally-administered products.Under the IRA, Medicare could negotiate on prices for “small molecule” drugs that patients swallow, such as ibuprofen, nine years after FDA approval.”Large molecule” biologics such as gene-based therapies and hormonal regulators could only be subject to negotiations after 13 years.The order did not specify how the disparity would be addressed.Officials said the edict also did not make use of a “most favored nation” status that would force pharmaceutical companies to offer their lowest prices in America.Biden’s IRA reforms led to the costs of 10 key medicines being cut in landmark negotiations with pharmaceutical firms.Days before leaving office, the Democrat announced a further 15 drugs for which the government would negotiate lower prices with pharmaceutical companies, with the resulting prices taking effect in 2027.

Nvidia on Tuesday notified regulators that it expects a $5.5 billion hit this quarter due to a new US licensing requirement on the primary chip it can legally sell in China.US officials last week told Nvidia it must obtain licenses to export its H20 chips to China because of concerns they may be used in supercomputers there, the Silicon Valley company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.Shares of Nvidia, which have already seen high volatility since Trump’s April 2 tariffs announcement, were down over six percent in after-market trades.The new licensing rule applies to Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units) with bandwidth similar to that of the H20.The United States had already barred exports to China of Nvidia’s most sophisticated GPUs, tailored for powering top-end artificial intelligence models.Nvidia was told the licensing requirement on H20 chips will last indefinitely, it said in the filing.Nvidia’s current fiscal quarter ends on April 27.”First quarter results are expected to include up to approximately $5.5 billion of charges associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves,” Nvidia said in the filing.

A US jury on Tuesday convicted a Gambian man for torturing opponents of the African country’s former president by burning and beating them, including with molten plastic.Michael Sang Correa, 46, served in an armed unit known as the “Junglers,” which answered to The Gambia’s then-president, Yahya Jammeh. A trial in Denver, Colorado, found that Correa and other members of the death squad had tortured five people because of suspicions they had plotted against Jammeh. “Michael Sang Correa tried to evade responsibility for his crimes in The Gambia by coming to the United States and hiding his past,” Matthew Galeotti, head of the US Justice Department’s Criminal Division said after the trial. “But we found him, we investigated him, and we prosecuted him.”Jurors in Colorado heard how in March 2006, shortly after a failed coup attempt, the Junglers took their victims to The Gambia’s main prison.Over the next two months, they beat, stabbed, burned, and electroshocked their victims, including some on their genitals.One man testified he had his thigh burned by molten plastic; another told of how he was suffocated, while others spoke of being pistol whipped, burned with cigarettes and hit in the face with a hammer.Correa was convicted of five counts of torture and one of conspiracy to commit torture.He faces up to 120 years in prison when he is sentenced at a later date.Correa entered the United States in 2016 to work as a bodyguard for The Gambia’s vice president, who was visiting the United Nations.He stayed in the country and moved to Denver at some point after Jammeh, who ruled the country with an iron fist from 1994 to 2017, was voted out of office.Correa was arrested by US authorities in September 2019, initially for overstaying his visa.According to the indictment, Correa joined the Junglers in 2004.The paramilitary unit operated outside the Gambian army’s chain of command, taking orders directly from Jammeh, and has been accused by watchdog groups of carrying out widespread human rights violations.Another member of the Junglers, Bai Lowe, was sentenced to life in prison in Germany in November 2023 after being convicted of crimes against humanity, murder and attempted murder.A Swiss court in May sentenced Gambian ex-interior minister Ousman Sonko to 20 years in prison for crimes against humanity committed under the Jammeh regime.Victims of the Junglers included an AFP correspondent, Deyda Hydara, who was gunned down in his car on the outskirts of Gambia’s capital Banjul on December 16, 2004.