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US business and financial organizations yesterday added their weight to a campaign to secure finance from Congress for a debt relief initiative for the world's poorest countries, reports the Financial Times. The groups, which include Goldman Sachs, Motorola, Bechtel, Caterpillar, and Merck, signed an open statement calling for full US funding for the initiative for the most heavily indebted poor countries.

International debt relief campaigners took to the streets of Prague on Sunday angrily demanding that the world's creditors finally make good on promises to write off large swathes of poor countries' debts.

Czech President Vaclav Havel brought leaders of the IMF and the World Bank together with their critics on Saturday in the hope dialogue would replace demonstrations as the keynote of this week's gatherings.

Non-governmental organisations and academics are alarmed over the Global Gateway, a portal website project which the Bank says will be the ''the premier web entry point for information about poverty and sustainable development'' but which the NGOs say is flawed and non-participatory.

Some 5,000 demonstrators marched towards Prague's Congress Centre on Tuesday in a bid to besiege the annual International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings.

The front line was a scene of confrontation, with riot police three-deep stopping protesters, occasionally by leaking tear gas in their direction and by truncheon blows, from advancing toward the Congress Center on the other side of the several-hundred-meter(-yard)-long bridge, where delegates from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are holding their annual plenary meeting.

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Police arrested 32 protesters who sat down and linked arms to obstruct the 1900 block of L Street NW during rush hour this morning. The demonstrators were part of a group of 200 who marched and chanted for "global justice" and for the rights of local parking attendants to join a union.

One of the leading partners in a controversial hydroelectric dam project in southeastern Turkey pulled out of the scheme this week.

Betty Kavila is one of the 25,783 civil servants who are to be retrenched in October as a condition set by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to resume lending to Kenya.

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.