Eli Lilly’s $1 trillion market value highlights its rise as a weight-loss powerhouse and makes it the first drugmaker to enter the exclusive club dominated by tech giants.
The weight-loss drug market’s explosive growth, which added it to the $1 trillion club on Friday, largely contributed to the company’s more than 35 percent increase in stock this year.
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Obesity treatments are now one of the most lucrative medical fields, with steadily rising demand, and were once seen as a niche industry.
Although Novo Nordisk held the early position in the space, Lilly’s products, Mounjaro and Zepbound, have gained a lot in popularity and helped it surpass its closest competitor in terms of prescriptions.
The company’s stock increased by 1.3 percent to close at a record high of $ 1,057.70.
According to LSEG data, Lilly currently trades at one of the richest valuations in big pharma, accounting for about 50 times its anticipated earnings over the next year, reflecting investors’ confidence that the demand for obesity medications will continue to be strong.
The overall US equity market has far outperformed the market for shares. Since the launch of Zepbound in late 2023, Lilly has increased by more than 75%, compared to the S& and P 500’s increase of more than 50% in the same time.
More than half of Lilly’s total revenue, $ 17.6 billion, came from its obesity and diabetes portfolio, which generated more than $ 10.09 billion in the most recent quarter.
Before the milestone, Lilly shareholder Bahl and Gaynor’s CEO Kevin Gade said, “They are doing so many things outside of obesity, but I don’t know if that would be a factual statement.
“Resales phenomenon”
By 2030, according to Wall Street, the weight-loss drug market will be worth $150 billion, with Lilly and Novo jointly accounting for the majority of the global sales.
Orforglipron, a Lilly oral obesity drug, is currently attracting the attention of investors because it is anticipated to be approved in the first quarter of this year.
According to Citi analysts, the most recent generation of GLP-1 drugs have already been a “sales phenomenon” and that orforglipron could benefit from the “injections made by its predecessors” in a note last week.
Lilly’s recent agreement with the White House to lower the cost of its weight-loss medications and make future investments to increase its growth are encouraging.
According to James Shin, director of Biopharma Equity Research at Deutsche Bank, Lilly is starting to resemble the “Magnificent Seven” once more. The seven tech giants, including Microsoft and Nvidia, account for the majority of the market’s returns this year.
Investors once saw it as a member of that elite group, but after some unfavorable headlines and earnings, it lost favor.
However, given recent concerns and weakness in some AI stocks, he continued, it appears poised to circle back and possibly even as an alternative for investors.
Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has visited the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), days after the government and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group signed a framework agreement for a peace deal aimed at ending fighting in the country’s east.
On his first trip to the African country, the Qatari leader was welcomed in the capital Kinshasa on Friday by DRC President Felix Tshisekedi and other officials.
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The frameworkd agreement was the latest in a series of documents signed in recent months as part of efforts, backed by the United States and Qatar, to end decades of fighting in eastern DRC that has been an enduring threat to regional stability.
The framework was described by the US and Qatari officials as an important step towards peace, but one of many that lie ahead.
Sheikh Tamim arrived in the DRC a day after visiting Rwanda, where he met President Paul Kagame.
Rwanda has long denied allegations that it has helped M23, which has seized more territory in the DRC than it has ever previously held.
Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, reporting from Kinshasa, said the emir wrapped his brief state visit to the country after meeting the Congolese president at the airport and then at the presidential palace.
Vall said that Qatar signed a number of protocols on economic and political cooperation with the DRC.
He also said, “The emir of Qatar has made his first stop in Kigali overnight, before he arrived here this morning, and the understanding is that that’s a symbolic move to link the two capitals and show that there is no alternative to rapprochement between the two countries”.
Qatar’s acting charge d’affaires in the capital Kinshasa, Shafi bin Newaimi al-Hajri, said Sheikh Tamim’s visit to the DRC was of special importance for bilateral relations.
Al-Hajri said diplomatic ties between the sides expanded in recent years, noting that a DRC embassy was opened in Doha in 2022 and Qatar opened its mission in Kinshasa in May 2025.
Al-Hajri also stressed that Qatar’s mediation efforts aimed at stabilising eastern DRC played a key role in strengthening dialogue between the two governments.
Trade of barbs
In eastern DRC, violence has continued despite the various diplomatic processes in Washington and Doha, with Congolese authorities and M23 trading blame for violating the principles of earlier agreements and deliberately delaying talks.
And the prolonged negotiations do not address the threat from a multitude of other armed groups operating in the volatile east.
M23 seized Goma, eastern DRC’s largest city, in January and went on to make gains across North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, triggering a spiralling humanitarian crisis.
Although Qatar has hosted numerous direct negotiations between the DRC government and M23 since April, the majority of them have been focused on preconditions and confidence-building measures.
In July, the two parties came to a statement of principles that left a number of pressing problems unresolved, and in October, they reached a resolution requiring the monitoring of an eventual ceasefire.
The former leader of the Welsh-based Reform UK party, who accepted bribes to speak out against Russia in the European Parliament, has been given a sentence of more than 10 years in prison.
On Friday, the London’s Central Criminal Court sentenced Nathan Gill, 52, to 10 years and six months in prison.
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Gill, a former member of the European Parliament and former leader of Reform UK in Wales, admitted accepting thousands of dollars from a pro-Russian politician in Ukraine between 2018 and 2019 and making fabricated statements and appearances on television at his will.
As the sentence was handed down, Judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said, “You abused a position of significant authority and trust,” adding that Gill’s behavior “fundamentally compromised the integrity of a supranational legislative body.”
You orchestrated the involvement of other MEPs, Cheema-Grubb claimed, “You accepted payments from foreigners, made statements on important international issues at their behest, … … you used scripted material presented as your own”
Gill served as the UKIP party’s first elected official to the EU, which was then led by Nigel Farage, the current leader of Reform UK.
Before departing the European Parliament when the United Kingdom left the EU in the early 2020s, he later spoke for the Farage-led Brexit Party.
In a 2016 news conference in Strasbourg, France, Gill, left, and Farage, center [File: Vincent Kessler/Reuters]
He was stopped at Manchester Airport in September 2021 while trying to travel to Russia, and he was charged in February of this year as a result of an investigation.
Oleg Voloshyn, a politician from Ukraine, was later found guilty of accepting bribes and charged with treason in Ukraine after Gill admitted guilt in December 2018.
According to the police, messages between Gill and Voloshyn that contained coded references to their financial dealings were discovered on Gill’s mobile phone.
Additionally, there were mentions of Dutch politicians and British politicians as well as members of other European Parliament.
Farage claims he was unaware of his former coworker’s errors because Reform UK’s party is winning several UK public opinion polls. Gill is no longer a member of the Reform movement.
Farage, who has been accused of being soft on Russia despite the world’s condemnation of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, may find this to be a source of stress.
Washington, DC – Yuli Novak, the executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, has a warning for politicians in the United States and across the world: The situation in Israel-Palestine is “disastrous”.
Despite the US-brokered ceasefire that scaled back the Israeli attacks in Gaza, Novak told Al Jazeera this week that the conditions are more dangerous than ever.
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“Our warning is that we haven’t seen the worst,” she said, stressing that Israel must be held accountable for its abuses in Gaza.
Over the past two years, numerous human rights groups have released reports accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza — a campaign to destroy the Palestinian people.
United Nations investigators, for instance, determined that Israel’s actions in the territory matched the definition of genocide under international law.
But B’Tselem provided another layer of analysis with its landmark report, called Our Genocide, in July.
It dissected the decades-long history of Israeli policies that laid the groundwork for the carnage in Gaza, including the apartheid system, demographic engineering, the systemic dehumanisation of Palestinians, and a culture of impunity for abuses.
Those conditions, Novak said, have been further entrenched since the war began.
“As long as these things are still in place, we are very concerned that the violence that we’ve seen is not over,” she said.
B’Tselem executive director Yuli Novak and field research director Kareem Jubran speak to Al Jazeera in Washington, DC, on November 20 [Ali Harb/Al Jazeera]
Killings continue
Since the ceasefire started, Israel has killed at least 360 Palestinians in Gaza, including 32 in a wave of air strikes across the territory earlier this week.
The Israeli government has also continued to impose restrictions on humanitarian aid to the enclave, including on temporary shelters needed to replace tents for tens of thousands of Palestinians who faced flooding earlier this month.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians and turned most of Gaza into rubble.
In the occupied West Bank, conditions have been worsening, with intensifying settlement expansion and deadly Israeli military raids.
On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting that Israeli forces forcibly displaced 32,000 Palestinians from their homes in Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.
Israeli settlers have also increased their attacks, regularly descending on Palestinian villages to torch homes and vehicles and at times kill civilians — often with the protection of the Israeli military.
Novak stressed that settler attacks are a form of Israeli state violence.
“They are Israeli civilians living in the West Bank being armed by the state. Sometimes, many of them wear [army] uniforms. Sometimes these are soldiers on reserve duty that are on a break,” she said.
Some Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have condemned settler violence, but Novak dismissed the move as a ploy to blame Israel’s policies on a “small group of crazy settlers”.
Novak also highlighted that most of the killing and destruction in the West Bank is carried out by official Israeli forces, not settlers. “So this is another arm of the violence that Israel inflicts on Palestinians,” she said.
Meeting US lawmakers
Novak and her B’Tselem colleague Kareem Jubran have been in Washington, DC, this week, where they met with US lawmakers, including Democratic Senators Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, as well as Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.
Novak said the group wants to stress the need for accountability for the genocide in Gaza.
“We are talking about a governing system, the Israeli system, that conducted genocide for two years — war crimes on a daily basis — and got away with it with no accountability,” she said.
“The current situation is probably the most dangerous that we’ve ever been in because not only this violence and this criminality took place, it was also normalised, and in any moment, it can start again, go back to the same scale.”
US President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that there is peace in the Middle East for the first time in 3,000 years because of the truce he helped broker in Gaza.
And earlier this week, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution backing the US president’s 20-point plan for Gaza, which calls for an end to the fighting, gradual Israeli withdrawal and the deployment of an international force to the territory.
The plan would also see Hamas disarm and Gaza’s governance handed over to an international commission, dubbed “the Board of Peace”.
It has no accountability or compensation mechanism for the horrors that Israel unleashed on Gaza for two years.
Novak said Trump’s plan is disconnected from the reality on the ground.
“It just allows everybody to move on, instead of dealing with the situation and demanding Israel not only to be held accountable but also stop this kind of systematic oppression over the Palestinians,” she said.
Trump’s plan
Since the Security Council embraced the ceasefire deal, Israel has faced less international pressure. Even the push for measures like suspending the country from the Eurovision singing contest and European football have lost momentum.
On Monday, Germany announced it was lifting restrictions on weapons exports to Israel, citing the truce.
“That is probably what scares us the most because we see regression here,” Novak said.
Jubran, B’Tselem’s field research director, also stressed the need for accountability, saying that the previous rounds of wars on Gaza from 2006 onwards enabled the genocide.
“That’s what allowed the genocide system to be more brazen in order to do its crime against the Palestinians in Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera.
Despite the lack of political or legal accountability, Novak hailed the growing international public awareness of Israel’s atrocities, which she said politicians are choosing to ignore.
“If there is something that gives us hope in this really, really terrible moment, it is the fact that many people around the world are able to see through the Israeli propaganda and just to make sense of what their eyes saw, and some of the voices of the victims were able to come out from Gaza and from the West Bank,” she said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he is working on a proposal from the United States to end the Russia-Ukraine war, as Kyiv faces growing pressure from Washington and sustained attacks by Russian forces on the battlefield nearly four years into the conflict.
Zelenskyy said on Friday that he discussed US President Donald Trump’s plan in a call with French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
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“We are working on the document prepared by the American side. This must be a plan that ensures a real and dignified peace”, the Ukrainian leader wrote on X.
“We are coordinating closely to make sure that the principled stances are taken into account. We coordinated the next steps and agreed that our teams will work together at the corresponding levels”.
Zelenskyy’s comments come as media reports indicate that Trump’s 28-point proposal to end the war endorses several of Russia’s top demands, and its war narrative, including that Ukraine cede additional territory, curb the size of its military and be barred from joining NATO.
At the same time, the West would lift sanctions on Russia, and Moscow would be invited back into the Group of Eight (G8), which it was expelled from for seizing and annexing Crimea in 2014, the AFP news agency said.
I held a joint call with President of France @EmmanuelMacron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom @Keir_Starmer, and @bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz. I am grateful for their principled support for Ukraine and for all our people.
We discussed the plan for peace for Ukraine and all… pic. twitter.com/Lz6Tq38QUR
Citing two unnamed people familiar with the matter, the Reuters news agency reported on Friday that the Trump administration has threatened to cut intelligence sharing and weapons supplies for Kyiv to pressure it into accepting the plan.
The sources told the agency that Ukraine “was under greater pressure from Washington than during any previous peace discussions” as the US wants the country to sign “a framework of the deal” by next Thursday.
For their part, Ukraine’s European allies, which were not consulted on the US proposal, have stressed the need to safeguard “vital European and Ukrainian interests”, Germany said after the talks with Zelenskyy.
Merz, Macron and Starmer welcomed the “US efforts” to end the war, which began in February 2022 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour.
But they assured the Ukrainian leader of their “unwavering and full support for Ukraine on the path to a lasting and just peace”.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, also said the EU and Ukraine want peace but will not give in to Russian aggression. “This is a very dangerous moment for all”, Kallas told reporters.
“We all want this war to end, but it matters how it ends,” he said. In the end, Ukraine must decide the terms of any agreement because Russia has no legal right to any concessions from the nation it invaded.
Fighting rages incessantly
Ukrainian forces are also facing significant challenges on the battlefield and deadly bombings by Moscow as the Trump administration pressures Ukraine to accept the deal.
According to Ukrainian officials, more bodies have been extracted from the rubble following a Russian missile attack earlier this week that killed at least 31 people.
The strike, which struck a residential apartment block, left 94 people injured, including 18 children.
On the eastern bank of the Oskil River, in the eastern Kharkiv region of Ukraine, about 5, 000 Ukrainian soldiers were reportedly trapped. The Ukrainian military did not respond right away.
The report comes as Ukrainian forces have been attempting to stop a Russian assault on Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, which are both in exile.
Five people were killed and three others were hurt by a Russian attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, according to emergency services. The Zaporizhia region, which borders the two banks of the Dnipro River and is home to the city in southeast Ukraine, is gaining ground for Russia.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, claimed on Friday that Zelenskyy should be persuaded to “get it now rather than later” by the country’s advances on the battlefield.
