United States

United States President Donald Trump has unveiled a second deal with a major pharmaceutical company to offer lower-cost prescription drugs direct to American consumers.

This time, the agreement concerned AstraZeneca, a multinational based in the United Kingdom.

Trump hosted the company’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, in the Oval Office on Friday to publicly cement the deal, which he described as “another historic achievement in our quest to lower drug prices for all Americans”.

“Americans can expect discounts, and as I said, it could be, in many cases, way over a hundred percent,” Trump said.

As in previous press appearances, he pledged US consumers would see impossible discounts on popular medications.

Inhalers to treat asthma, for example, would be discounted by 654 percent, Trump said, calling the device a “drug that’s hot, very hot”. He also reiterated past claims that some medications could see “a thousand percent reduction”.

Trump has long pushed to reduce prescription drug costs to what he has billed as “most-favoured nations prices”.

That would bring prices down to the same level as in other developed countries, though Trump, with typical hyperbole, has said the policy would equate to “the  lowest price anywhere in the world”.

AstraZeneca is the second major pharmaceutical company after Pfizer to strike such a bargain. Last month, Pfizer announced a “voluntary agreement” to price its products “at parity with other key developed markets”.

Like AstraZeneca, it also agreed to participate in an online, direct-to-consumer marketplace the Trump administration plans to launch, called TrumpRx.

But in a news release on its website, Pfizer made clear that the agreement would help it dodge the high tariffs that Trump threatened against overseas pharmaceutical manufacturers.

“We now have the certainty and stability we need on two critical fronts, tariffs and pricing, that have suppressed the industry’s valuations to historic lows,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said.

At Friday’s Oval Office ceremony, officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr openly celebrated the power Trump had wielded through his tariff threats.

“ The president saw something that we didn’t see, which is we had leverage, and that came through Howard [Lutnick] and the tariffs,” Kennedy said, giving a nod to Trump’s commerce secretary. “We had extraordinary leverage to craft these deals.”

The deals with both AstraZeneca and Pfizer came after Trump threatened in September to impose a 100-percent tariff on pharmaceutical companies unless they started to build manufacturing plants in the US.

“There will, therefore, be no Tariff on these Pharmaceutical Products if construction has started,” Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social.

Those tariffs were slated to come into effect on October 1. But Pfizer unveiled its deal with the Trump administration on September 30, and the tariffs were subsequently postponed.

In Friday’s Oval Office appearance, Soriot acknowledged that, like Pfizer, he had negotiated a delay for any tariffs against AstraZeneca. In exchange, he pledged to increase US investments to $50bn by 2030.

“I appreciate very much Secretary Lutnick granting us a three-year tariff exemption to localise the remainder of our products,” Soriot said. “Most of our products are locally manufactured, but we need to transfer the remaining part to this country.”

Just one day earlier, AstraZeneca had revealed it would construct a “multi-billion-dollar drug substance manufacturing centre” in Virginia, with a focus on chronic diseases, a top priority for the Trump administration.

Trump himself touted his tariff threat as the impetus for the recent string of drug deals. When asked by a reporter if he could have brought the pharmaceutical companies to the negotiating table any other way, Trump was blunt.

“ I would never have been able to bring him,” he replied, with a gesture to Soriot. “ Now, I’m not sure that Pascal would like to say, but behind the scenes, he did say tariffs were a big reason he came here.”

Since returning for a second term as president, the Republican leader has relied heavily on tariffs – and the threats of tariffs – as a cudgel to bring foreign governments and businesses in line with his administration’s priorities.

He has called the term “tariff” the “most beautiful word” in the dictionary and repeatedly labelled the dates he unveiled such import taxes as “Liberation Day”.

But earlier this year, it was unclear if his sabre-rattling would pay dividends. In May, for instance, Trump issued an executive action calling on his government to take “all necessary and appropriate action” to penalise countries whose policies he understood as driving up US drug costs.

He also called on Secretary Kennedy to lay the groundwork for “direct-to-consumer” purchasing programmes where pharmaceutical companies could sell their products at a discount.

Trump, however, lacked a legal mechanism to force participation in such a programme.

In July, he upped the pressure, sending letters to major pharmaceutical manufacturers. The letters warned the drug-makers to bring down prices, or else the government would “deploy every tool in our arsenal” to end the “abusive drug pricing practices”.

He also openly mused that month about hiking tariffs on imported medications.

“We’ll be announcing something very soon on pharmaceuticals,” Trump told a July cabinet meeting. “We’re going to give people about a year, a year and a half, to come in, and after that, they’re going to be tariffed if they have to bring the pharmaceuticals into the country, the drugs.”

“They’re going to be tariffed at a very, very high rate, like 200 percent,” he added.

The “most-favoured nation” pricing scheme is an idea that Trump tried but failed to initiate during his first term as president, from 2017 to 2021.

How that project might shape up in his second term remains to be seen. The TrumpRx website – which the president insists he did not name himself – has yet to offer any services.

Those are expected in 2026.

The US president told reporters that the bodies of Israelis who died in captivity in Gaza are ‘being unearthed’.

Israelis held in Gaza by Hamas and other armed groups are slated to “come back” on Monday, United States President Donald Trump said, with 20 living captives and the bodies of 28 others who died in captivity due to be handed over as part of the US-backed ceasefire deal.

Speaking to reporters at the White House late on Friday, Trump said Monday will be “big” as Hamas exchanges all 48 Israeli captives, both living and deceased, for roughly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

“Some of those bodies are being unearthed right now, as we speak. They’re working on it right now,” Trump said.

“It’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy,” he said.

Of the living captives still held in Gaza, the US president added, “they’re in some pretty rough places, where only some people know where they are”.

Trump said he plans to travel to Cairo this weekend and separately speak at the Israeli Knesset before returning to the US.

Under the terms of the US-brokered peace deal for Gaza, Hamas agreed to release all captives within 72 hours following the start of a ceasefire.

Israel’s government ratified the ceasefire in the early hours of Friday, and it came into force later in the day. Israeli troops then began to withdraw from areas in Gaza to designated locations, and the countdown began on the 72 hours for Hamas to release captives.

Reports surfaced earlier this week that Hamas may struggle to locate and gather the remains of all the deceased captives, potentially complicating the planned exchange on Monday.

As Palestinians began to return to their war-torn homes on Friday amid the Israeli pullback, key questions about Gaza’s future remain uncertain – including plans for a future Palestinian state.

Trump, however, maintained an optimistic tone about both the first and later phases of his unfolding ceasefire plan.

Both Hamas and Israel, he said, are “all tired of fighting”.

“There is consensus on most of it and some of the details, like anything else, will be worked out,” Trump said.

“Because, you’ll find out that when you’re sitting in a beautiful room in Egypt, you know, it’s easy to work something out,” he said.

“But then sometimes it doesn’t work from a practical standpoint. But for the most part, there’s consensus,” he added.

The US president also appeared to be pleased with support for the deal from the European Union, Iran and Russia, saying that the peace plan will extend “beyond Gaza”.

“This is peace in the Middle East, and it’s a beautiful thing,” he said.

Authorities in the southern US state have called the blast ‘devastating’, with many of the missing presumed dead.

An explosion at a Tennessee military munitions plant has left 19 people missing and feared dead, authorities said.

The blast occurred on Friday at Accurate Energetic Systems, a manufacturer in rural Tennessee, a state in the southern United States. People reported hearing and feeling the explosion miles away.

Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis said it was one of the most devastating scenes he’s ever seen. He did not specify how many people were killed, but referred to the 19 missing as “souls” and said officials were still speaking to family members.

The company’s website says it makes and tests explosives at an eight-building facility that sprawls across wooded hills in the Bucksnort area, about 97 kilometres (60 miles) southwest of Nashville.

The cause of the explosion, which Davis called “devastating”, was not immediately known, and the investigation could take days, the sheriff said.

Aerial footage of the aftermath from the news channel WTVF-TV showed the explosion had apparently obliterated one of the facility’s hilltop buildings, leaving only smoldering wreckage and the burnt-out shells of vehicles.

There’s no further danger of explosions, and the scene was under control by Friday afternoon, according to Grey Collier, a spokesperson for the Humphreys County Emergency Management Agency.

Emergency crews were initially unable to enter the plant because of continuing detonations, Hickman County Advanced EMT David Stewart said by phone. He didn’t have any details on casualties.

Accurate Energetic Systems, based in nearby McEwen, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment Friday morning.

“This is a tragedy for our community,” McEwen Mayor Brad Rachford said in an email. He referred further comment to a county official.

Residents in Lobelville, a 20-minute drive from the scene, said they felt their homes shake and some people captured the loud boom of the explosion on their home cameras.

The blast rattled Gentry Stover from his sleep.

“I thought the house had collapsed with me inside of it,” he said by phone. “I live very close to Accurate, and I realized about 30 seconds after I woke up that it had to have been that.”

State Representative Jody Barrett, a Republican from the neighbouring town of Dickson, was worried about the possible economic impact because the plant is a key employer in the area.

“We live probably 15 miles [24km] as the crow flies, and we absolutely heard it at the house,” Barrett said. “It sounded like something going through the roof of our house.”