A federal judge on Tuesday ordered that the near shutdown of Voice of America was illegal and has ordered the government to reinstate more than 1,000 people who were placed on leave from the media organization.
The order by District Judge Royce Lamberth amounted to a sharp rebuke to the administration, which has aggressively sought to shrink and remake VOA through Kari Lake, the ally of President Donald Trump who has served as CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
Lamberth said in a pair of rulings that Lake’s moves to close the agency violated federal administrative law and directed that the employees return to work by March 23. He also ordered a resumption of international broadcasting, which the U.S. has used for decades to promote press freedom around the world.
Beginning in early 2025, hundreds of journalists were placed on administrative leave and then targeted for layoffs, with more than 600 cuts announced by summer and ultimately roughly 85 percent of staff eliminated across the agency. The reductions were so deep that VOA, which once broadcast in nearly 50 languages to hundreds of millions of people, was pared down to a skeleton operation with only a handful of language services still running.
Lamberth issued a scathing review of the government’s “flagrant and nearly year-long refusal” to uphold statutory requirements set by Congress, adding that Lake “thumbed her nose” at the requirements.
Britain was an active participant in some Israeli war crimes in Gaza, a tribunal chaired by Your Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and two international law specialists has found.
Israel is set to keep Al-Aqsa Mosque closed through the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr and beyond, Middle East Eye has learnt.
Ukrainian forces struck a major Russian microelectronics factory in Bryansk with Storm Shadow cruise missile air-launched missiles, damaging a facility that produces critical components for Russia’s missile systems, Ukraine’s military said.
Officials in Cuba reported an island-wide blackout Monday in the country of some 11 million people as its energy and economic crises deepen and its power grid continues to crumble.
Three Tennessee teenagers have filed a class action lawsuit against Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, alleging its large language model powered an app that was used to make nonconsensual nude and sexually explicit images and videos of them when they were girls.
Israel’s announcement on Monday of a ground campaign in new areas of southern Lebanon is fuelling fears of a prolonged occupation among hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese.
At least 200 US troops have been injured in the US-Israeli war on Iran, a US military spokesperson said on Monday.
