Published on the eve of the United Nations summit in New York this week, the UN's 2005 Human Development Report finds that progress on human development, public health, and education is slowing or stagnating in many parts of the world.

The report predicts that the UN's millennium development goals—a commitment made by 189 nations to reduce infant mortality and extreme poverty and to improve maternal health, primary education, and sex equality—are in many cases further from realisation today than they were in 1990.

“Almost all of the goals will be missed by most countries, some of them by epic margins,” the UN concludes, …