In South Kordofan, Sudan, clashes between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces have intensified, including a recent drone strike on Dilling General Hospital that killed at least four patients and injured civilians. Violence has also escalated in North Kordofan, with continued drone attacks reported in the city of El Obeid over the past five days. Humanitarian access is increasingly constrained, and threats to critical infrastructure and supply routes, such as the road between Kosti and El Obeid, raise serious concerns for both humanitarian aid and commercial supply chains. The UN has called on all parties to adhere to international law, protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, and ensure safe and sustained humanitarian access.
The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, has warned that global economic inequality is deepening, leaving billions without adequate protections and threatening development goals. Over half of the world’s workers are employed in the informal economy, often without basic rights, and nearly 60 percent of working women fall into this category. He highlighted that the richest one percent of people captured 41 percent of all new wealth in the past two decades, while the poorest half received just one percent. Türk stressed that poverty, lack of social protection, and inequality are fueling exploitation and human trafficking, and called for global reforms, including restructuring debt, expanding social protections, and measuring progress through wellbeing rather than economic growth.
HIV treatment continues to be a major public health success, according to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. AIDS-related deaths have fallen by 70 percent in the past 20 years due to effective treatment. Recent advances include lenacapavir, a new medicine approved for HIV prevention that is taken once every six months and has been shown to prevent nearly all cases of HIV in at-risk individuals. The WHO has prequalified lenacapavir and is supporting its rollout in nine countries, including Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The phenomenon of “domicide,” or the mass destruction of homes due to conflict, is on the rise globally, exacerbated by the use of AI in warfare. Special Rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal highlighted widespread housing destruction in Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and other regions. He also noted the use of AI to target over 1,000 locations in Iran within 48 hours and stressed the urgent need for negotiations to prevent further destruction. Following a visit to Guatemala in 2025, Rajagopal also reported forced evictions and the criminalization of Indigenous and peasant communities, often driven by private developers with limited protection for affected populations.
