![U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers a greeting from President Barack Obama during a meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh on November 4, 2013. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]](https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif?f0ee9e)
Though Saudi King Abdullah was a repressive leader at home who contributed to political and sectarian violence across the Middle East, his death is mourned by Western leaders who were dependent on his vast ocean of oil and his vaults full of money, as Sam Husseini explains.
Exclusive: A battle between Argentina and U.S. hedge funds, which gambled on the country’s defaulted bonds, is raising questions about how far U.S. courts can go in requiring governments to pay and whether developing nations can defy the U.S.-dominated financial system, reports Andrés Cala.
Ukraine’s Western-backed coup regime in Kiev has launched an offensive against ethnic Russians in the east while a pro-regime mob used fire to kill some 31 anti-regime protesters in Odessa. Virtually all U.S. pundits favor the coup regime, but Daniel Patrick Welch offers a different view of the conflict
Exclusive: Though lacking legitimacy from national elections, Ukraine’s coup regime has approved a harsh IMF austerity plan that hits Ukraine’s “99 percent” the hardest and asks little from the country’s “1 percent,” including the corrupt “oligarchs,” reports Robert Parry.
The popular protests across Spain gave voice to national indignation over the political/economic system, but the result of regional elections was only to shift power from the Socialists to the center-right Partido Popular. Spanish writer Pablo Ouziel says that outcome should prompt some self-reflection among radical groups that seized control of the uprising.