BBC News with Nick Kelly
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned world leaders not to use the economic downturn as an excuse for missing targets on reducing poverty. At a summit in New York to review the Millennium Development Goals, he said they could still be achieved by the target date of 2015, but the progress was
fragile
. Our diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall reports.
The mood here is both positive and anxious. The top goal to cut by half the number of people living in hunger and abject poverty by 2015 does look as though it will be met
partly
due to
extraordinary
growth rates in China, India and Brazil. There has been encouraging progress on getting all children access to primary schooling, and in tackling diseases like HIV, Aids infection and malaria, but other goals are way
off track
, especially reducing infant and maternal deaths, and progress has been uneven. In places, the very poorest have got poorer still, as aid has failed to reach them.
An influential separatist leader in Indian-administered Kashmir says protests against Indian rule, in which more than 100 people have died, will continue unless the government meets his core demands. Speaking to the BBC, the leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who's viewed as a hardliner,
outline
d the separatists' terms.
"India should accept the disputed nature of Jammu and Kashmir as it is internationally accepted as a dispute, and then to start the withdrawal of the occupying forces, and then the