WORLD

Russia has been able to reroute its oil exports away from Europe without serious disruptions, JPMorgan has said, adding that the expected drop in output "never happened."

Better-than-expected Russian production, along with the release of oil from global strategic reserves, helps explain the recent drop in crude prices, the bank's head of commodities research Natasha Kaneva said in a note to clients.

Russia's oil exports to Europe — its biggest market — have fallen relatively sharply in 2022, as companies have "self-sanctioned" in the wake of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in late February.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and former finance minister Rishi Sunak held their first clash in front of Tory members on Thursday.

Rather than squaring off at lecterns from opposite ends of a TV studio, the candidates went on stage one after the other and faced plenty of hard-nosed questioning from Conservatives.

Both contenders visited their individual seats as they wage a bitter duel to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Three Chinese astronauts aboard the country's space station, currently under construction, have successfully entered the lab module on Monday, a day after the space laboratory was launched, the official media reported. China launched its space laboratory called Wentian on Sunday, sending the country's largest-ever spacecraft into Earth's orbit to become part of the space station named Tiangong which is currently under construction. The Wentian module docked with the front port of the space station in the early hours of Monday after it entered the planned orbit.

Saudi Arabia is planning to build the world's largest structure: two buildings reaching up to 1,600 feet in height and running parallel for 75 miles, documents accessed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The skyscrapers, expected to cost a whopping $1 trillion, will be made of mirrored glass,  The Wall Street Journal claims, and are part of the project named 'Mirror Line'.

Mirror Line has been envisioned as the epicentre of the new desert city called Neom, which is being constructed as per Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plans to set up a zero-carbon city in a 170-km line. Neom will be around the size of Massachusetts.

Indian-origin Conservative leadership contender Rishi Sunak has penned a piece in the UK’s Daily Telegraph pledging to be the next Margaret Thatcher if made UK prime minister. In the article titled “I will be the heir to Margaret Thatcher”, Sunak writes: “My values are Thatcherite. I believe in hard work, family and integrity. I am a Thatcherite, I am running as a Thatcherite and I will govern as a Thatcherite. ”

The Daily Telegraph is a broadsheet popular with Conservative party members and could wield considerable influence over which candidate they vote for in the postal ballot.

Thatcher was a Conservative PM of the UK from 1979 to 1990 who turned around a socialist moribund economy into a successful one. Known as the Iron Lady for her uncompromising approach, she believed in limited government, cracking down on crime, deregulation, privatisation, limiting the power of the unions and a free market economy.