Not so long ago, the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank might have gone unnoticed by the general public - just a bunch of champagne-drunk economists prattling on about arcane currency theories and deciding the financial fate of the developing world.

  But that was before Seattle, when the anti-globalization movement was born among angry sea turtles and clouds of tear gas. The raucous events at the World Trade Organization meeting last November set off a wave of protests from Argentina to

A woman carries a puppet of World Bank President James Wolfensohn at the April 16 protests against the IMF

Taiwan to Washington. Now the IMF/World Bank annual meeting, set for September 21 to 28 in Prague, is being billed by some protest organizers as "the next Seattle.

   The Internet is buzzing with exhortations for mass protests in Prague, drawing the participation of a sprawling galaxy of groups, including labor unions, Zapatistas, Tibetan monks and Maori tribes. Several Eastern European organizations, including INPEG, a coalition of Earth First!ers and peaceful anarchists, and Central and Eastern European Bankwatch, a watchdog group against global usury, are spearheading the coalition.

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