UN / USA: UK's Prime minister Gordon Brown calls for emergency action on millenium development goals

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged governments, businesses and volunteer groups to unite and take action to slash extreme poverty by 2015. He said that the millennium development goals are still a "million miles away from success." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's call for a new drive to meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals was endorsed by 12 world leaders and 20 top businessmen and women. His speech at U.N. headquarters on Tuesday (July 31) followed a closed door meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. In his speech, Brown described what he calls a "development emergency" as the world falls behind the U.N. targets for transforming the lives of billions of people in poor countries. "If thirty thousand children died needlessly and avoidably every day in America or Britain, we would call it an emergency and an emergency is what it is," Brown said. He also emphasized that meeting millennium development goals on climate change were just as important as the other goals, and go hand in hand. The goals, adopted at a U.N. summit in 2000, include halving the number of people living on less than $1 a day by 2015, achieving universal primary education, reducing child and maternal mortality, stopping the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and halving the number of people without access to clean water and sanitation. Brown was also seen earlier on NBC's Today Show, a breakfast television program in the United States, discussing intelligence failures made in the Iraq war.

ITN Source | July 31, 2007

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