Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang boarded a private jet to Beijing shortly after the U.S. Commerce Department announced new export licensing requirements for the company's H20 AI chips for the Chinese market. Once there, Huang met with the head of a Chinese state-backed trade body, where he reaffirmed Nvidia's commitment to the Chinese market despite a deepening trade war.
State broadcaster CCTV reported that Huang met earlier today in Beijing with Ren Hongbin, president of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade — a trade agency under the Ministry of Commerce.
CCTV noted that Huang arrived in Beijing under the invitation of Hongbin's state-backed trade group.
Huang emphasized that China remains an important market for Nvidia and expressed hope for continued cooperation with Beijing.
Another state-backed news agency, China News Service, released footage of Huang and Hongbin speaking.
"We've grown up in China, in fact. And China has watched us grow in the last 30 years. It's a very important market for us," Huang said.
Huang's flight to China comes a little more than a day after the U.S. Commerce Department said Nvidia will need a license to export its H20 chips to China and several other countries. Nvidia revealed that it would be hit with a charge of up to $5.5 billion related to the controls.
So what message does this show? Huang jets off to Beijing. Should the world's largest chip maker be this cozy with America's foreign adversary?
The federal government will facilitate and pay for the self-deportation of those who have entered the country illegally, while operations will continue to target gang members and violent criminals, President Donald Trump told Fox Noticias host Rachel Campos-Duffy in an interview filmed at the White House that aired on April 15.
The president said that stipends, including plane tickets and money, could help incentivize illegal immigrants to leave and pursue legal status.
“We’re going to make it comfortable for people, and we’re going to work with those people to come back into our country legally,” Trump said during the interview. “And then ... if they’re good, if we want them back in, we’re going to work with them to get them back in as quickly as we can.”
He did not provide further details about how much money illegal immigrants could receive or how to apply for such benefits.
The president also announced a plan to work with some industries, including hospitality and agriculture, to help business owners mitigate the effect of mass deportations.
“We’re making it so that if a farmer can give recommendations to people, we’re going to be very soothing,” he said.
“They’re sort of responsible, and we’re going to have the farmer take responsibility. But you know, ultimately, at some point, we want the people to go out, come back as legal.”
Broadcast to a Hispanic audience, the interview was conducted in English and released with Spanish subtitles. Trump successfully courted the Hispanic vote during his 2024 campaign, according to exit polling that showed him garnering a record share for a Republican Party candidate.
While the United States is offering paths to citizenship for many in the workforce, the president said aggressive deportation operations will continue for violent criminals.
“Right now, we’re getting the murderers out,” Trump said. “We have our total aim on the very bad ones, as you can imagine. These are rough, bad people. We want them out, and that’s mostly our focus.”
He thanked Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—who visited the White House on April 14 to discuss migration and national security policies—for housing violent deportees in his country’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
Trump said White House officials are looking into the legality of potentially housing dangerous U.S. citizens in the supermax prison.
“I call them homegrown criminals,” the president said. “We are looking into it, and we want to do it. I would love to do that.”
Regarding tariffs imposed on nations around the world, the president suggested that revenues could grow large enough to replace income taxes.
“We’re making tremendous amounts of money, taking in billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs from other countries that, for many, many decades, just ripped off the United States,” he said.
He also repeated his goals of introducing more lenient mortgage deductions; allowing interest deductions for U.S.-made vehicles; and eliminating taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security. But he cautioned that political winds on Capitol Hill are challenging to overcome.
“I have some strange people I deal with, and we have to get it approved,” Trump said.
The Trump administration could slash roughly one-third of the federal government’s bloated health budget, a leaked White House proposal shows. The plan, first reported by theWashington Postand detailed in documents acquired byCNN, calls for slashing “tens of billions of dollars” annually, targeting a host of programs across multiple agencies.
The proposal, already sent to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), aligns with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative and tech titan Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, sources say.
The proposal, part of President Donald Trump’s broader push to curb government waste, would eliminate billions in annual spending and reign in a sprawling bureaucracy that employs 82,000 workers across 10 regional offices, with average salaries of $100,000 plus generous benefits.
The plan calls for steep cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which would see its budget reduced by more than 40% under the administration’s proposal.
It also eliminates CDC’s global health center and programs focused on chronic disease prevention, and domestic HIV/AIDS prevention. While some of the agency’s work would be moved into new AHA centers, programs on gun violence, injury prevention, youth violence prevention, drowning, minority health and others would be eliminated entirely.
The preliminary plan would slash the National Institutes of Health’s budget by more than 40% and reduce its 27 research institutes and centers down to just eight.
This month, HHS launched its initial wave of layoffs, with 10,000 employees slated for termination in the coming weeks.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago. HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again,” the agency said in a statement at the time of the first cuts.
The annual budget of the HHS is a staggering $1.8 trillion.
As we previously noted, the agency was infamously implicated in funding controversial gain-of-function research through EcoHealth Alliance through Dr. Anthony Fauci's NIAID. These efforts, tied to the Wuhan Level 4 Virology Lab in China - widely considered COVID-19’s ground zero - allegedly produced human-transmissible coronaviruses, sparking a deadly pandemic and draconian lockdowns around the world. How could we forget?
Agilon Health’s stock has seen a notable decline, primarily due to mixed analyst evaluations. While TD Cowen raised its price target, suggesting optimism for future growth, Baird lowered its target and downgraded the stock from Outperform to Neutral, expressing concerns over profitability and conservative revenue projections. These conflicting assessments have led to the stock’s recent volatility, reflecting differing views on the company’s financial health and growth strategy.
Adagio Medical Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADGM), a micro-cap medical device company with a market capitalization of $14.2 million, known for its innovations in catheter ablation technologies, has been granted the Breakthrough Device designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its vCLASTM Cryoablation System. The company maintains a strong liquidity position with more cash than debt on its balance sheet, though it’s currently experiencing rapid cash burn. This system is aimed at treating drug-refractory, recurrent, sustained monomorphic ventricular tachycardia (VT) in patients with ischemic or non-ischemic structural heart disease.
The FDA’s Breakthrough Device Program is designed to expedite the development and review process for medical devices that have the potential to provide more effective treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating diseases. To qualify, a device must either represent new technology, have no approved alternatives, offer significant advantages over existing alternatives, or its availability must be in the best interest of patients.
The vCLASTM Cryoablation System, which leverages Adagio’s proprietary Ultra-Low Temperature Cryoablation (ULTC) technology, is currently undergoing a study under an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) known as FULCRUM-VT. This study enrolls patients with structural heart disease to evaluate the system’s safety and efficacy.
Todd Usen, CEO of Adagio, expressed the company’s excitement about the designation, highlighting that their system is the only technology granted the Breakthrough Device label for endocardial treatment of both ischemic and non-ischemic structural heart disease patients with sustained monomorphic VT.The company faces financial challenges, with a negative EBITDA of $33.57 million in the last twelve months. The stock has shown recent resilience with an 18% gain over the past week, though it remains significantly below its 52-week high.
Proposed transaction will raise $50 million in equity capital and enhance a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company focused on launching Pelthos’ ZELSUVMI™
ZELSUVMI is an FDA-designated novel drug and the first and only prescription medication approved for the treatment of Molluscum contagiosum infections administered at home by parents, patients, and caregivers
Ligand is entitled to a 13% royalty on worldwide sales of ZELSUVMI
Transaction is expected to close in the summer of 2025
Evotec’s cost-cutting drive has reached its pipeline. The biotech has axed around 30% of its asset portfolio and offloaded clinical program EVT 201 as part of a broader, ongoing attempt to correct its course.
Germany-based Evotec has a pipeline of assets that it co-owns with companies including Bristol Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. In addition to its partnered assets, the company has programs that are yet to be paired off with a drug developer. The future of the programs has been in doubt since Evotec unveiled a multi-year plan to get its business back on track.
Having started the second stage of the plan late last year, Evotec disclosed changes to its portfolio and strategy in its fourth quarter results Thursday. Evotec framed its pipeline changes as an attempt to focus on high-quality, high-potential assets. Christian Wojczewski, CEO of Evotec, said on the earnings call that the company stopped projects “which did not anymore meet our high quality, high potential criteria.”
Evotec’s pipeline is still vast. The company has more than 100 assets but around 70% of them are already partnered “with top pharma companies,” Wojczewski said. Evotec has worked on more than 30 assets for BMS alone. Six assets are in the clinic and another six are in preclinical development. Cord Dohrmann, chief scientific officer at Evotec, said on the earnings call that around 15 assets could reach the clinic over the next two years. The company plans to improve the quality of the pipeline over the next two to three years and make more selective bets on internal programs that could be the subject of deals in the future.
“We will continue to do very selective investments in early stage, highly differentiated assets on our own behalf. Those serve as valuable proof points of the effectiveness of our technology and they open the door for strategic collaborations,” Wojczewski said. “We will only advance those assets beyond early stage as part of a strategic partnership.”
The company said it has divested EVT 201. Evotec wrapped up phase 2 trials of the candidate, which is also called dimdazenil, in insomnia and daytime sleepiness in 2007. Zhejiang Jingxin Pharmaceutical won approval for the drug in China in 2023. Evotec disclosed the divestiture in the slide deck for its earnings call without providing further details.
Divesting EVT 201 ends Evotec’s foray into clinical development. Wojczewski said the company’s focus is now “sharply defined from target ID to IND” and confirmed “we will not be in clinical development.” The pipeline pullback could see Evotec’s R&D spending come in as low as 40 million euros this year, versus 51 million euros in 2024.
Evotec is also exiting the equity stakes it acquired in some partners, starting with the divestiture of its 70 million euro holding in Recursion Pharmaceuticals. “Our strategy is not to act as a VC player,” Wojczewski said.
The changes follow earlier decisions to lay off 400 people and exit the gene therapy space. Evotec shared an update on the earlier cuts on its earnings call, revealing that it closed its gene therapy site last year and completed the layoffs in the first quarter of 2025. The shuttering of the gene therapy facility was part of a wider wave of site closures.
