Gaza body, Trump's grip, Kenya workers and quantum computing
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Today, Trump tightens his grip on independent agencies. Which came first, the inflation or the A? Kenya's plan to send a million workers abroad annually. Plus, a possible leap forward in quantum computing. It's Friday, February 21st.

This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the frontlines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. And I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago.

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Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying Hamas will pay for failing to release the body of hostage Shiri Bibas as agreed. Israeli specialists say that one of the bodies handed over yesterday was an unidentified woman and not Bibas, whose two sons, Kfir and Ariel, were handed over and identified.

Hamas says her remains appear to have been mixed with other human remains from the rubble after an Israeli airstrike hit the place she was held in. Netanyahu's also instructed the military to carry out an intensive operation in the West Bank after explosions on buses close to Tel Aviv. The U.S. is refusing to co-sponsor a draft U.N. resolution that backs Ukraine's territorial integrity and again demands Russia withdraw its troops.

That's according to three diplomatic sources. The resolution comes on the three-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A source tells Reuters that about 6,000 IRS employees are being fired in the midst of tax season. Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that Trump's administration can continue its mass firing of federal employees, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions.

It's only been a few short weeks since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. But a common theme has emerged, and that's Trump testing the limits of presidential power. An executive order this week has tightened his grip on independent U.S. government agencies that oversee elections, stock markets, and labor unrest. The White House says the oversight provides much-needed accountability. Trevor Honeycutt has more.

So President Trump is basically telling these agencies that everything that they do needs to conform with his policy priorities, his view of the world, and perhaps more importantly, his view of what the law is.

And in order to do that, he has made it so that these organizations will have to report in any substantive changes that they are making in regulation to the White House for a preliminary review. And within their agencies, they're also going to have to install

a political appointee called a White House liaison, who in theory is going to be coordinating the activities of that particular agency with the White House. So what are some of the concerns from his opponents?

Their concern is that this is illegal. That's their contention, that Congress has made certain agencies, including the Federal Election Commission, but also the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, independent for a reason.

And so they feel like this is a huge power grab and that the president just simply does not have the legal authority to do this. Why does the White House say these changes are needed, though? So the White House contends that these agencies are actually completely unaccountable to the American people, right? They have set their own standards. Some of them, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, they have their own judges.

And so the sense that the White House has is that these agencies, they need to be doing what the democratically elected president of the country wants them to do rather than acting of their own free will and volition. U.S. consumers are up in arms over soaring prices and shortages of eggs due to bird flu. And while inflation remains sticky, higher prices are boosting Walmart's grocery revenue.

Our global industry editor, Vanessa O'Connell, has been looking into how the high price of eggs at the world's largest retailer might be a signal of what lies ahead for consumers. The rising price of eggs has become a little bit symbolic in terms of inflation and how, you know, many Americans are very concerned about the prices of everyday items. Eggs are a special circumstance. It's the avian flu, bird flu.

that is causing an egg shortage and causing prices to shoot up. But Walmart's earnings call, we heard the CFO talk about it a little bit. And Walmart disclosed today that a small percentage of its revenue

increase came from higher egg prices. Groceries are a huge segment of Walmart sales. When he took office, President Trump did vow to do something about the price of eggs. Donald Trump, having imposed already tariffs on some goods from China, those moves could turn out to be quite inflationary for a provider like Walmart, which sources its merchandise from all over the world.

And Walmart is sort of ground zero for that because it is the world's biggest retailer and it represents the average American in many ways. And it prides itself on having the lowest prices. So we're closely watching how big retailers are going to manage the tariffs that Trump imposes. They're lining up by the hundreds at schools in provincial towns and convention halls in big cities.

They all want the same thing, and that's to land one of the million jobs that the Kenyan government aims to fill over the next year, and one of its most ambitious employment initiatives ever. But there's a catch. The jobs aren't in Kenya. Aaron Ross is our Deputy East Africa Bureau Chief.

Kenya, like a lot of other African countries, has a young and rapidly growing population. It has about a million people who are entering the workforce each year, but it's only able to secure around 200,000 jobs in the formal economy. So what Kenya is looking to do is to

export a lot of that labor to richer countries, which have very much the opposite situation, where they have either slowing population growth or outright declining populations. In Germany, for example, which signed a labor agreement with Kenya last year, economists there estimate that there's an annual skilled labor shortage of up to 400,000 people. So they really need labor, you know, especially in IT, they need nurses, engineers, hospitality workers, and those demographic trends are only going to accelerate. But there's

Political backlash at both ends of the process, right?

Yeah, so in receiving countries, we're seeing a backlash. And even in Germany, which signed this deal with Kenya last year and has been a country that has really looked to boost legal skilled migration. The snap election this month is likely to see gains for the center-right party and for the far-right party, both of which were opposed to the 2023 law. Kenyans also pose the question of why can't the government create these jobs here at home?

Why are we potentially losing people who could really help us grow our economy and instead sending them to richer countries? And if you want to hear more about how migration is playing into Germany's upcoming election this weekend, tune in to our special episode. It's available now wherever you get your podcasts. In case you've been preoccupied with political news this week, you might have missed what's being touted as a major breakthrough in quantum computing.

Microsoft says it's developed a new chip that shows quantum computers could be available in just years instead of decades, as some have predicted. The company says its Majorana 1 chip is less prone to errors and could overcome one of the biggest challenges to making quantum technology useful.

Tech reporter Stephen Nellis is here to break down what exactly the advancement means. What the debate's really about is how far are we from using quantum computers to solve problems that we care about and can make money off of.

Quantum computers are interesting because they have these things called qubits. Making one qubit is fairly easy. Making a whole bunch of them where you don't have errors that compound throughout the chip and then make it useless is really, really hard. That's basically the name of the game. So what Microsoft has done is use a hybrid technique between some very exotic stuff called a superconductor and some not very exotic stuff from the chip industry.

and put it together in a way that they say is less prone to these errors than competing chips.

So what sorts of things might we see this chip and quantum computers actually tackle? At this point, the process of making something like a new battery that can make electric cars more affordable is kind of like groping around in the dark. The big thing that quantum computers can do is they can model all this stuff out digitally in a very short time. And instead of having, you know, 10,000 possibilities where you'll never get the chance to test

all of them and find out what the right one for a super cheap, easy to make, sustainable electric car battery might be, you ask the computer to do it and it will spit out two, five, ten possibilities and you'll actually have time to test them.

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And for today's recommended read, recommended listen, actually, to this weekend's special episode of Reuters World News.

Check back tomorrow for a conversation on Saudi Arabia's rise to diplomatic prominence on Ukraine, Gaza, and much more. 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, and we'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show.