UN News Today 22 June 2026 |

Millions suffering in Myanmar amid ongoing foreign meddling in conflict, says UN’s Türk 

We start in Myanmar, where the situation is getting worse for millions of people still suffering repression by the military junta that seized power in 2021.

In a warning on Monday that comes amid an ongoing civil war, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, condemned “continuous attacks by the military” on civilians in Myanmar.

Citing a new report by his Office, the UN human rights chief also said that “foreign actors” continue to fuel the conflict by transferring weapons, ammunition and jet fuel to the Myanmar military.

Declining international assistance has compounded the suffering in Myanmar and resulted in “deep programme cuts” for localized protection efforts, explained Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the High Commissioner: 

“Humanitarian and community-based programs, including assistance to displaced people, education initiatives, psychosocial support, have been curtailed or halted, thereby increasing community vulnerability. We are urging the international community to step up to ensure consistent, sustained support for local protection efforts.”

The UN report covers elections in Myanmar from August 2025 to January 2026; it highlights a minimum of 702 civilians killed over that period, mostly in the central regions and Rakhine state, and includes 476 deaths attributed to airstrikes.

Generative AI’s discriminatory algorithms need to be stopped: UN Women

As Artificial Intelligence continues to play an ever-bigger role in our lives, gender equality agency UN Women said on Monday that the revolutionary tech has “sexist and misogynistic” tendencies – which need to be reversed.

The claim is based on a survey of 133 AI systems which found that more than four in 10 demonstrated gender bias.

AI platforms also revealed a significant percentage of both gender and racial bias, UN Women said, noting that the Large Language Models the technology relies upon portrayed women “as sex objects and property of their husbands” in one in five responses generated.

With more, here’s the agency’s Jayathma Wickramanayake, UN Women Lead on Digital Technologies:

“We talk about bias in AI like it’s a bug waiting to be fixed in the next update, but the reality is that it isn’t. It’s a choice. It’s a choice that we make over and over in training data, in design rooms, in policy documents that stay silent on half of the population.”

Of 138 countries with a national AI strategy, UN Women found that only 24 mentioned gender, while just 18 are taking “meaningful” steps on the issue. 

“That means most of the world is building the future of artificial intelligence without writing women into the blueprint at all,” UN Women’s Ms. Wickramanayake said, in a call to the upcoming UN Dialogue on AI and the AI For Good Summit to ensure that manufacturers “embed gender equality and the rights and experiences of women and girls at every stage of AI lifecycle”.

Afghanistan in Crisis: Drought, Malnutrition, and a Worsening Humanitarian Situation

Imagine being one of a family of nine and sitting down to a meal of potato peelings and other scraps, boiled up into a soup. 

This is the harsh reality for many of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable families, forced on them by climate change and drought, acute malnutrition and growing restrictions on women, since the Taliban overran Kabul in 2021.

Aid agencies are doing what they can to help, including by identifying dangerously malnourished children in sparsely populated “ghost villages” where those who can leave do so, according to the UN aid coordination office, OCHA.

But with nearly 22 million people in need across Afghanistan and the UN’s $1.7 billion appeal only 14 per cent funded, life is “becoming impossible” in remote areas, the agency warns.

Here’s OCHA worker Olga Cherevko, describing the situation in Bamyan province:

“This particular village that I went to, they told me that around half of the population had left, actually, because there’s, there’s simply no water to irrigate the lands, and so all the crops that they were growing, they dried up. And people who could leave, they left.”

Across Afghanistan today, 3.7 million children facing acute malnutrition in 2026. 

Many cases go unrecognized and some children die in UN-supported clinics “because parents simply didn’t know what was happening; by the time they brought the child in, it was already too late”, Ms. Cherevko said.

To help, the UN provides screening and medical support, but teams also visit remote communities to raise awareness.

The issue of women’s and girls’ rights in Afghanistan remains dire, amid Taliban-imposed restrictions on education for girls. 

Ms. Cherevko described how the women she met were all “deeply worried about their daughters, who can no longer attend school” and will struggle to get a job.

Daniel Johnson, UN News