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Columnist Walden Bello met an old contact from the World Bank during the World Bank-IMF joint annual meetings in Prague, Czech Republic, on Sept. 26 to 28. The following is his account of the events that unfolded around him during that fateful conference. Antonio Andrade is not his real name.

As part of a protest movement that has brought Ecuador to a virtual standstill, a growing number of activists from environmental and human rights organizations have occupied the offices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Quito to protest the IMF's role in Ecuador's current social crisis.

We want to firmly and unequivocally state our intention not to participate in the World Bank Development Gateway project. That while the Development Gateway purports to promote local community organisations and their information initiatives, its true intention is to control the development information discourse to promote its own particular perpectives.

In April 2000, some 30,000 activists came to Washington to protest the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank. The fall meetings are an even more important target for protests: instead of a few hundred bankers and bureaucrats, about 20,000 usually descend on Washington for the annual meetings.

As activists target the spring meetings of the IMF/World Bank with demands for 100% debt cancellation, the World Bank Bonds Boycott marks its one-year anniversary with an announcement that 25 institutions throughout the U.S. including city governments, trade unions, churches and investment firms have committed not to buy World Bank bonds.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) will hold their next semi-annual meeting in late September... under siege. Social and economic justice activists, environmentalists, and people of conscience from around the world will be confronting these neo-colonial institutions in the belly of the beast -- Washington DC.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank will hold their Joint Annual General Meetings in Washington, DC from September 28 to October 4, 2001. We call on people from all over the world to come to Washington to expose the illegitimacy of these institutions, to stand in solidarity with peoples in the global south, and to claim our right to determine our future and the course of the world economy.

The economic crisis that emerged out the collapse of securities based on shaky U.S. mortgages poses challenges for the Davos World Economic Forum, an arena that has championed market-driven approaches.

September 29-30 the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will meet with each other in Washington DC... and meet tens of thousands of people from around the country and world opposing them in streets.

International Rivers Network strongly condemns today's majority ruling by the Indian Supreme Court allowing construction to resume on the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River.

WASHINGTON, DC -- A coalition of development and environmental advocates today said a new report by a Congressionally appointed commission is a welcome acknowledgement that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group are largely failing in their mission to address world poverty and economic stability, and need major overhaul.

On the occasion of the first meetings of the governing bodies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 21st century, we call for the immediate suspension of the policies and practices that have caused widespread poverty, inequality, and suffering among the world's peoples and damage to the world's environment.

The cholera outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal, which has claimed 31 lives, could be related to the government's growth, employment and redistribution (GEAR) strategy, the National Health and Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu) said on Monday.

Race has become such a scary word to the World Bank that its officials found themselves referring to it as the 'R-word' while responding to charges that the institution had skirted race in its recent World Development Report.

Bush, the Republican candidate for the Nov. 7 US presidential elections, is more leery of the current role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, analysts say.

Over a thousand environmental protesters today stormed police barricades in New Delhi, and marched up to the offices of the World Bank, demanding they be allowed to meet with visiting Bank president James Wolfensohn.

Famed anti-Narmada dam campaigner, Medha Patkar, Friday entered the third day of her hunger protest, in the city of Bhopal, the capital of central Madhya Pradesh state. The state is the home of most of the quarter million, mainly indigenous people to be displaced by the four billion-U.S. dollar Sardar Sarovar dam.

The leader of one of India's largest technology outsourcing companies, Satyam Computer Services, on Wednesday admitted cooking its books and committing other grave financial wrongdoing to inflate profits over several years. The revelation shook India's stock market and sent shockwaves across the country's booming software industry.

Every year the World Bank and its regional counterparts such as the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, collectively known as Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), lend $45 billion to the so-called ''developing'' world.