Buyout block, Indian deportees, January jobs report and the Super Bowl
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Today, a federal judge pauses Trump's buyout offer as Musk continues his Doge takeover. India says it's engaging with the U.S. to ensure deportees are not mistreated. Plus, the politics of the Super Bowl. It's Friday, February 7th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday.

I'm Tara Oakes in Liverpool. And I'm Sharon Raish-Garson in New Jersey.

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Available for a limited time at participating restaurants. Tax not included. Prices may vary. Not valid with any other offer, discount or combo. President Donald Trump has authorized economic and travel sanctions targeting people who work on international criminal court investigations of U.S. citizens or allies like Israel. The move coincides with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington. He's wanted by the ICC over the war in Gaza.

And during his visit with Trump, Netanyahu gave him a gift, a golden pager mounted on a wooden stand. It's an apparent reference to Israel's September 2024 operation in Lebanon, when handheld radios and pagers used by Hezbollah were detonated by Israel. And Israel has told the United Nations Human Rights Council that it will stop engaging with the body, alleging that it's biased.

Council members have frequently raised allegations of Israeli human rights violations in the Gaza war. Less than 24 hours after Trump's executive order, the NCAA has fallen in line with his new policy. The Governing Body for Collegiate Sports has banned transgender women from competing in women's sports. Effective immediately. Panama has pulled out of China's Belt and Road Initiative in a win for Washington.

Panama has given the required 90-day notice of its decision not to renew its participation in Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature infrastructure program. A U.S. judge has given federal workers more time to consider a buyout offer from the Trump administration. The ruling pushes the deadline until at least Monday. The buyout effort is part of a far-reaching plan by Trump and his allies to rein in the size of federal bureaucracy. Reporter Tim Reid is in Washington.

It's an across-the-board attempt to cut the number of workers. The unions have been telling them not to take the offer, that it's very suspect. It's not clear that the offer is even legal because Congress, for example, has not appropriated money to pay off government workers. And the backdrop of this effort to slim down government is Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

So far, Musk and his aides, and a lot of them are very, very young, early 20-something software engineers, they have taken over the Office of Personnel Management, which is an obscure-sounding agency, but it's the human resources arm of the entire federal government. And they have taken over a computer system there that has

personal data. They have taken over the computer system at the US Treasury Department, which pays out nearly every payment that the US government makes every year. It's over $6 trillion a year. They've taken over the General Services Administration,

which oversees government contracts and all the government buildings and government infrastructure. So governance experts I've spoken to have said that Musk is basically now in charge of what they call the fundamental plumbing of the US government. He's kind of been given the keys to the kingdom and he is totally unaccountable and no one yet knows exactly what he and his software engineers are actually doing inside these computer systems.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its jobs report for January today, it's expected to show growth and a steady employment picture.

Econ and Markets Editor Dan Burns has been looking at Joe Biden's last report card and what it means for Donald Trump. On balance, we're expecting another month of pretty solid job gains to have occurred in January. Our estimate is around 170,000. Oh, that's a little shy of the run rate we'd seen through most of the Biden years. It's really kind of in line with what we've seen in the last year or so, where job gains have

have moderated, but they've still been pretty healthy. So as far as what we expect for the month of January, it looks like all indicators are that it was a pretty solid month of gains. The survey taken for this month's figures was taken in the week just before Trump took office. So this offers the perch on which Trump takes the job market and the economy from this point forward.

And in this week's Econ World, listen to a deep dive into what Trump wants as economists and policymakers around the world try to get their head around a new era of diplomacy done through trade. It's available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Harvinder Singh was one of 104 Indians deported by US authorities this week in a much-publicized transfer by a military plane. He says their hands and feet were cuffed during the 40-hour journey and were unshackled after reaching India. US Border Patrol Chief Michael W. Banks posted a video showing some men being led into a military plane in handcuffs and legs in chains.

adding that they had successfully returned illegal aliens to India. The transfer fulfills one of Trump's key election pledges, but is an embarrassment for India, a close partner whose Prime Minister Narendra Modi is due to visit Washington next week. It's given the country's opposition parties a chance to hit back at Modi's government, demanding a discussion in Parliament over how the deportees were treated.

India's foreign minister, Subramaniam Jayashankar, had this to say: We are, of course, engaging the US government to ensure that the returning deportees are not mistreated in any manner during the flight. He says that it's standard practice for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities to restrain deportees, but that it was not done with the women and children on the plane to India.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Delhi has said that enforcing immigration laws is critically important to the security and public safety of the United States. As you probably know, Sunday is the Super Bowl. So we caught up with our sports reporter Amy Tenery, who's in New Orleans, to talk politics and pigskin.

Amy, what are the big threads that I need to know about going into the game? Right now, what we have going on is the Kansas City Chiefs chasing history. They want to become the first team to win three Super Bowls in a row. They have their superstar quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, and obviously Andy Reid, who is one of the winningest coaches in all of the league's history. They are favorited against the Philadelphia Eagles, whom they actually beat two years ago. So

While they do have a lot of advantages on their side, Philadelphia is out for revenge, and they don't want to have that happen again this time in New Orleans. This is obviously a huge cultural moment in the U.S., and right now the culture is dominated by political debate, especially over diversity. And this game isn't immune to this debate either, it seems.

Yeah, it's been a fascinating week here in New Orleans. It started out with the commissioner's press conference in which he was asked very pointedly whether the league was going to go along with some of what the Trump administration is calling for with regard to diversity, equity and inclusion. The NFL for decades now has been the subject of criticism for its overwhelmingly white coaching and ownership ranks and even just for

personnel within the team and the league level. And here was Roger Goodell saying diversity makes the NFL better and that they're not going to abandon these programs. And then, of course, it was only a day or two later we found out that President Trump himself was going to come to attend the game. There's also been a lot of attention on the end zone slogan. The last few years it was end racism, but this year they've selected choose love instead. Which they said was to

to honor the victims of a New Year's Day attack here in New Orleans that left 14 dead. There are a lot of people who are skeptical about the timing of that decision. You know, now you have Donald Trump coming to town and you're not using that slogan anymore. But the NFL told us bluntly that the president's plan to attend the Super Bowl had nothing to do with the slogan that they selected. And finally, the halftime show.

Kendrick Lamar is going to be performing, and he's known to be political, and he'll have the president in the audience. Yeah, I think Kendrick Lamar was a fascinating choice. His work touches on racial and social justice, poverty, and he's very left-leaning politically. And I think that it would be reasonable to expect that he will take every advantage of having that audience with the Republican president of the United States.

And before we leave you, a recommended listen for your weekend. In this week's special episode of Reuters World News, we take a look at arms shipments to Ukraine and how they were stormed during Joe Biden's final year in the White House, right up until his term was nearly over. That pod drops on Saturday morning. For more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player.

We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show.