• White House press secretary confirms development.
• US visa pause will begin on January 21, says report.
• Memo directs US embassies to refuse visas under existing law.

The Trump administration is suspending all visa processing for applicants from 75 countries, a State Department spokesperson said on Wednesday.

The spokesperson did not elaborate on the plan, first reported by Fox News, which cited a State Department memo.

The pause will begin on January 21, Fox News said.

Pakistan, Somalia, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Brazil, Nigeria, and Thailand are among the affected countries, according to the report.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X that the countries affected would include Somalia — whose people Trump has attacked in heated terms after immigrants were involved in a funding scandal in Minnesota — as well as Russia and Iran.

Leavitt posted to a Fox News article that said other countries affected would include a number of countries with friendly relations with the United States, including Brazil, Egypt and Thailand.

The memo directs US embassies to refuse visas under existing law while the department reassesses its procedures. No time frame was provided.

The reported pause comes amid the sweeping immigration crackdown pursued by Republican U.S. President Donald Trump since taking office last January.

In November, Trump had vowed to “permanently pause” migration from all “Third World Countries” following a shooting near the White House by an Afghan national that killed a National Guard member.

• Diplomats say personnel advised to leave US air base in Qatar.
• Tehran calls US warnings “pretext for military intervention”.
• Iran chief justice fast trials against those involved in violence.
  

Tehran has warned neighbouring countries hosting US troops that it would retaliate against American bases if Washington carries out threats to intervene in protests in Iran, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Wednesday.

Three diplomats said some personnel had been advised to leave the main US air base in the region, although there were no immediate signs of a large-scale evacuation of troops as took place in the hours before an Iranian missile attack last year.

US President Donald Trump has threatened to intervene in support of protesters in Iran, where a rights group claims hundreds have been killed in recent days in a crackdown on the protest movements.

According to an Israeli assessment, Trump has decided to intervene, although the scope and timing of this action remain unclear, an Israeli official said.

The three diplomats told Reuters that some personnel had been advised to leave the US military’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar by Wednesday evening.

One of the diplomats described the move as a “posture change” rather than an “ordered evacuation”. There was no sign of a large-scale movement of troops off the base to a nearby soccer stadium and shopping mall, as took place last year in the hours before Iran targeted the base with missiles in retaliation for US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear targets.

The US embassy in Doha had no immediate comment and Qatar’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump vows ‘very strong action’

Trump has been openly threatening to intervene in Iran for days, though without giving specifics.

In an interview with CBS News on Tuesday, Trump vowed “very strong action” if Iran executes protesters. “If they hang them, you’re going to see some things,” he said. He also urged Iranians on Tuesday to keep protesting and take over institutions, declaring “help is on the way”.

The Iranian official, a senior figure speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tehran had asked US allies in the region to “prevent Washington from attacking Iran”.

“Tehran has told regional countries, from Saudi Arabia and UAE to Turkiye, that US bases in those countries will be attacked” if the US targets Iran, the official said.

The official added that direct contacts between Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff had been suspended, reflecting mounting tensions.

A second Israeli source, a government official, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet was briefed late on Tuesday about the chances of government or US intervention in Iran. Israel fought a 12-day war against Tehran last year, which the United States joined at the end.

The United States has forces across the region, including the forward headquarters of its Central Command at Al Udeid in Qatar and the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

Iran holds contacts with Turkiye, UAE, Qatar

Iranian state media reported that the head of Iran’s top security body, Ali Larijani, had spoken to the foreign minister of Qatar, and Araqchi had spoken to his Emirati and Turkish counterparts.

Araqchi told UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed that “calm has prevailed” and Iranians were determined to defend their sovereignty and security from any foreign interference, state media reported.

Meanwhile, the flow of information from inside Iran has been hampered by an internet blackout, with internet monitor Netblocks saying on Wednesday that the blackout had lasted 132 hours.

“Metrics show #Iran remains offline as the country wakes to another day of digital darkness,” it said in a post on X.

Some information has trickled out of Iran however. New videos on social media, with locations verified by AFP, showed bodies lined up in the Kahrizak morgue just south of the Iranian capital, with the corpses wrapped in black bags and distraught relatives searching for loved ones.

Iranian authorities have accused the United States and Israel of fomenting the unrest, carried out by people it calls terrorists.

Iran’s chief justice urges swift actions

Visiting a Tehran prison where arrested protesters are being held, Iran’s chief justice said speed in judging and penalising those involved in violence was critical to ensuring such events do not happen again.

Judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said that “if a person burned someone, beheaded someone and set them on fire then we must do our work quickly”, in comments broadcast by state television.

Iranian news agencies also quoted him as saying the trials should be held in public and said he had spent five hours in a prison in Tehran to examine the cases.

State TV said that a funeral procession would take place on Wednesday in Tehran for more than 100 civilians and security personnel killed in the unrest.

Pro-government rallies were held in Iran on Monday, a show of loyalist support for the current Iranian rulers. So far, there have been no signs of fracture in the security forces that have quelled other bouts of protest over the years.

While Iranian authorities have weathered previous protests, the latest unrest is taking place with Tehran still recovering from last year’s war against Israel.

Trump told reporters on Tuesday that military action was among the options he was weighing to “punish Iran”.

“The killing looks like it’s significant, but we don’t know yet for certain,” said Trump upon returning to the Washington area from Detroit, adding he would know more after receiving a report on Tuesday evening.

Trump on Monday announced 25% import tariffs on products from any country doing business with Iran — a major oil exporter. The US State Department on Tuesday urged American citizens to leave Iran now.

Tehran called the American warnings a “pretext for military intervention”.

Iran’s UN mission posted a statement on X, vowing that Washington’s “playbook” would “fail again”.

“US fantasies and policy toward Iran are rooted in regime change, with sanctions, threats, engineered unrest, and chaos serving as the modus operandi to manufacture a pretext for military intervention,” the post said.

BRUSSELS: The planet logged its third hottest year on record in 2025, extending a run of unprecedented heat, with no relief expected in 2026, US researchers and EU climate monitors said on Wednesday.

The last 11 years have now been the warmest ever recorded, with 2024 topping the podium and 2023 in second place, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organisation.

For the first time, global temperatures exceeded 1.5C relative to pre-industrial times on average over the last three years, Copernicus said in its annual report.

“The warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration in the rate of the Earth’s warming,” Berkeley Earth said in a separate report.

The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement commits the world to limiting warming to well below 2C and pursuing efforts to hold it at 1.5C — a long-term target scientists say would help avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

UN chief Antonio Guterres warned in October that breaching 1.5C was “inevitable” but the world could limit this period of overshoot by cutting greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible.

Copernicus said the 1.5C limit “could be reached by the end of this decade — over a decade earlier than predicted”.

But efforts to contain global warming were dealt another setback last week as President Donald Trump said he would pull the United States — the world’s second-biggest polluter after China — out of the bedrock UN climate treaty.

Temperatures were 1.47C above pre-industrial times in 2025 — just a fraction cooler than in 2023 — following 1.6C in 2024, according to the EU climate monitor.

Some 770 million people experienced record-warm annual conditions where they live, while no record-cold annual average was logged anywhere, according to Berkeley Earth.

The Antarctic experienced its warmest year on record, while it was the second hottest in the Arctic, Copernicus said.

An AFP analysis of Copernicus data last month found that Central Asia, the Sahel region, and northern Europe experienced their hottest year on record in 2025.

2026: Fourth-warmest?

Berkeley and Copernicus both warned that 2026 would not break the trend.

If the warming El Nino weather phenomenon appears this year, “this could make 2026 another record-breaking year”, Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, told AFP.

“Temperatures are going up. So we are bound to see new records. Whether it will be 2026, 2027, or 2028 doesn’t matter too much. The direction of travel is very, very clear,” Buontempo said.

Berkeley Earth said it expected this year to be similar to 2025, “with the most likely outcome being approximately the fourth-warmest year since 1850”.

Emissions fight

The reports come as efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions — the main driver of climate change — are stalling in developed countries.

Emissions rose in the United States last year, snapping a two-year streak of declines, as bitter winters and the AI boom fuelled demand for energy, the Rhodium Group think tank said Tuesday.

The pace of reductions of greenhouse gas emissions slowed in Germany and France.

“While greenhouse gas emissions remain the dominant driver of global warming, the magnitude of this recent spike suggests additional factors have amplified recent warming beyond what we would expect from greenhouse gases and natural variability alone,” said Berkeley Earth chief scientist Robert Rohde.

The organisation said international rules cutting sulfur in ship fuel since 2020 may have actually added to warming by reducing sulfur dioxide emissions, which form aerosols that reflect sunlight away from Earth.