A US federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to bring more than 1,000 Voice of America employees back to work and resume broadcasts by the government-funded media outlet.

District Judge Royce Lamberth’s order comes 10 days after he ruled that President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee mass layoffs at VOA was unlawfully appointed, rendering the job cuts invalid.

Kari Lake, a former TV anchor, slashed jobs and funding after she was appointed by Trump to head the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which runs VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and other stations.

Lamberth, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, ordered the reinstatement by March 23 of 1,042 VOA employees who have been on paid administrative leave for the past year.

The judge also ordered USAGM to come up with a plan by next week to resume international broadcasts.

VOA was created in the wake of World War II as a key instrument of American soft power worldwide.

Trump frequently attacks media outlets and denounced the editorial firewall at VOA that prevents the government from intervening in its coverage.

Three VOA employees who filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse Lake’s moves welcomed the judge’s ruling.

“We are eager to begin repairing the damage Kari Lake has inflicted on our agency and our colleagues, to return to our congressional mandate, and to rebuild the trust of the global audience we have been unable to serve for the past year,” they said in a statement.

The Trump administration has said it plans to appeal the judge’s previous ruling that Lake’s appointment was unlawful.

Israel has said that Iran has repeatedly used cluster warheads, which disperse into ​multiple smaller explosives mid-air and spread over a wide area, making them difficult to intercept.

The attack on densely populated Tel Aviv overnight on Tuesday killed two people, bringing the death toll in ‌Israel from the war to at least 14.

In Iran, a projectile hit an area near the Bushehr nuclear power plant on Tuesday evening, however it caused no damage or injuries, Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency.

IAEA chief Rafael Grossi reiterated his call for maximum restraint during the conflict to avoid the risk of a nuclear accident.

Israel and the US have said preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapons programme was one of the goals of the attacks they launched more than two weeks ago, which killed the country’s supreme leader and ​many other top officials.

The Iranian government on Tuesday confirmed the killing of Larijani, the most senior figure targeted since the US-Israeli war’s first day, when an Israeli strike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s ​Supreme National Security Council, which Larijani led as secretary, said Larijani’s son and his deputy, Alireza Bayat, were also killed in an Israeli attack on Monday night.

The targeted killings ⁠took place as the US.Israeli war, on Iran shows no signs of de-escalation.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has rejected proposals conveyed to Iran’s Foreign Ministry for “reducing tensions or ceasefire with the United States,” according to a senior Iranian official ​who asked not to be identified.

Khamenei, attending his first foreign-policy meeting since his appointment, said it was not “the right time for peace until the United States and Israel are brought to their knees, accept defeat, and pay compensation,” according to ​the official.

The official did not clarify whether the younger Khamenei, who has not yet appeared in photos or on TV since being named last week to replace his slain father, had attended the meeting in person or remotely.

TRUMP SAYS HELP FROM ALLIES TO SECURE STRAIT NOT NEEDED

US-based Iran human rights group HRANA said on Monday that an estimated 3,000-plus people have been killed in Iran since the US-Israeli attacks began at the end of February.

Iranian attacks have killed people in Iraq and across the Gulf states, as well as ​Israel.

More than 900 people have died since Israel began attacks on Lebanon on March 2, the Lebanese Health Ministry said on Tuesday.

The Strait of Hormuz, a transit point for a fifth of the global oil trade, remains largely ​closed as Iran threatens to attack tankers linked to the US and Israel.

Oil prices have soared

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly castigated allied countries in recent days for their cool response to his requests for military help to restore the passage of ‌oil tankers ⁠through the strait.

Most U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have told Trump they don’t want to get involved in the conflict, he said on Tuesday, describing their position as “a very foolish mistake.”

“Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID!” Trump wrote on social media, also singling out Japan, Australia and South Korea.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in an interview that nobody was ready to risk the lives of their people in protecting the strait.

“We have to find diplomatic ways to keep this open so that we don’t have a food crisis, fertilizers crisis, energy crisis as well,” Kallas said.

The U.S. has given ​shifting rationales for joining Israel to attack Iran and ​struggled to explain the legal basis for starting a ⁠new war, underscored by the Tuesday resignation of the head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joseph Kent.

Kent wrote in his resignation letter to Trump that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

US TARGETS IRAN COASTLINE

Iran has responded to the Israeli-US attacks with wide-ranging strikes on its Gulf neighbours, some of which host US bases.

Gulf Arab states have faced more ​than 2,000 missile and drone attacks on US diplomatic missions and military bases as well as oil infrastructure, ports, airports, ships and residential and commercial buildings, and most ​of them aimed at the ⁠United Arab Emirates.

Saudi Arabia will host a consultative meeting of foreign ministers from a number of Arab and Islamic countries in Riyadh on Wednesday evening to discuss ways to support regional security and stability, the kingdom’s foreign ministry said.

The United States military said on Tuesday it had targeted sites along Iran’s coastline near the Strait of Hormuz because Iranian anti-ship missiles posed a risk to international shipping there.

Oil prices rose about 3% on Tuesday as Iran renewed its strikes on oil facilities in the United ⁠Arab Emirates, and ​are up around 45% since the start of the war on February 28, raising concerns of a renewed spike in global inflation.

The World ​Food Programme said tens of millions of people will face acute hunger if the war continues through June.

Global airlines sounded the alarm on Tuesday over soaring jet fuel prices, warning of hundreds of millions of extra costs, higher fares and cuts to some routes.

Global aviation has been ​thrown into turmoil, with flights cancelled, rescheduled or rerouted as most Middle East airspace remains closed amid fears of missile and drone attacks.

• Top adviser to Khamenei, shaping Iran’s security and foreign policy.
• Chief nuclear negotiator, advancing Iran’s programme diplomatically.
• Parliament speaker for 12 years, bridging hardline, moderate factions.

Veteran Iranian politician Ali Larijani was one of the most powerful figures in the Islamic Republic, an architect of its security policy, and a close adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei until the supreme leader died in an airstrike last month.

He was martyred at the age of 67, Iranian media said on Tuesday. Israel’s Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said earlier on Tuesday that he had been assassinated in an Israeli strike.

The scion of a leading clerical family with brothers who rose to high positions after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Larijani was seen as canny and pragmatic but always fiercely determined to uphold Iran’s theocratic system of government.

A Revolutionary Guards commander during the Iran-Iraq war, he became head of Iran’s national broadcaster before stints running the Supreme National Security Council on either side of his membership of parliament, where he was speaker for 12 years.

His role as the ultimate insider in Khamenei’s Iran gave him responsibilities across a wide portfolio that included critical nuclear negotiations with the West, managing Tehran’s regional ties and the suppression of internal unrest.

After the US-Israeli strikes began on February 28, he was one of the first major Iranian figures to speak, accusing Iran’s attackers of seeking to disintegrate and plunder the country. He also issued stern warnings against any would-be protesters.

The strikes represented the ultimate failure of a nuclear policy he had helped design, which attempted to build atomic capability at the boundary of international rules without provoking an attack.

In pursuing that policy, he projected the voice of the supreme leader, using his abilities as a communicator to build a rapport with Western negotiators and lay out Khamenei’s vision in frequent television interviews.

Even if he had survived the current war, that role may have been curtailed. In the jostling for control after Khamenei’s death, it was the Guards who took an ever greater part, leaving fewer decisions to political powerbrokers like Larijani.

Rise after revolution

Ali Larijani was born in 1958 in Iraq’s great Shi’ite Muslim shrine city of Najaf, the home of many major Iranian clerics like his father who had fled what they saw as the oppressive rule of the shah.

He moved to Iran as a child, later focusing on his studies and earning a philosophy PhD. But the clerical milieu of his family would have made him keenly aware of the revolutionary religious currents surging through his homeland in the 1970s.

When Larijani was 20 years old, the Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah and installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the supreme leader.

When Iraq invaded Iran along a 500-mile (800 km) front months after the revolution, Larijani joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a new, ideologically driven military unit devoted to Khomeini.

As the war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq became the great crucible testing the mettle of a new generation of Iranian leaders, Larijani rose to become a staff officer, a commander focused on the organisational duties behind the front that dictated the war effort.

His success in that role, alongside his family connections, helped spur his rise in the new Islamic Republic. They also ensured his close ties to the Guards, a military institution whose importance would continue growing throughout his life.

After the war, Larijani became culture minister and then head of Iran’s state broadcaster, IRIB, a critical role in a country where ideological messaging has always been central to the exercise of internal power.

Larijani was appointed to the cabinet by the mercurial president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in office from 1989 to 1997. Khamenei, meanwhile, became the supreme leader in 1989, upon the death of Khomeini.

Larijani would have a ringside seat for the years-long power struggle between Rafsanjani and Khamenei – an unrivalled lesson in high Iranian politics.

His time at IRIB was followed by a stint as head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top foreign and security policy body. A failed presidential bid followed in 2005, before his election to parliament two years later.

Two of his brothers were enjoying high office, too – the signs of a family on the make.

His eldest brother, Mohammad-Javad, was a member of parliament before becoming a senior adviser to Khamenei. A younger brother, Sadiq, had become a cleric and risen to head the judiciary.

Chief nuclear negotiator

As chief nuclear negotiator from 2005 to 2007, Larijani was responsible for defending what Tehran says is its right to enrich uranium – a process required to make fuel for a nuclear power plant but which can also yield material for a warhead.

Pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme had ratcheted up after the discovery in 2003 that the country had enrichment facilities it had not disclosed to international inspectors, prompting fears it was seeking a bomb and leading to sanctions.

It has always denied wanting a bomb.

Larijani likened European incentives to abandon nuclear fuel production to “exchanging a pearl for a candy bar”. Though he was widely regarded as a pragmatist, he said that Iran’s nuclear programme “can never be destroyed”.

“Because once you have discovered a technology, they can’t take the discovery away,” he told PBS’s Frontline programme in September 2025. “It’s as if you are the inventor of some machine, and the machine is stolen from you. You can still make it again.”

Larijani made repeated visits to Moscow and met President Vladimir Putin, helping Khamenei manage a key ally and world power that acted as a counterweight to pressure from the first and second administrations of U.S. President Donald Trump.

He was also tasked with advancing negotiations with China, which led to a 25-year cooperation agreement in 2021.

As parliament speaker from 2008 to 2020, he had a role in ensuring that a nuclear deal with six world powers in 2015 would meet the requirements of Iranian leaders. Trump withdrew the US from the hard-negotiated agreement during his first term in 2018.

Larijani was again appointed head of the Supreme National Security Council last year, after a 12-day air war launched by Israel. He was working to avert an attack on Iran until shortly before the war began.

“In my view, this issue is resolvable,” Larijani told Oman state television early this year, referring to the talks with the US. “If the Americans’ concern is that Iran should not move toward acquiring a nuclear weapon, that can be addressed.”

But Washington also denounced him for the council’s role in dealing with mass anti-government protests in January, even after he and other senior politicians had initially said that demonstrations over the economy were permissible.