I arrived in Samarkand 🇺🇿 late at night on Tuesday for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization leaders' summit. Had to take a plane from Moscow and then a high-speed train across Uzbekistan from Tashkent to Samarkand. A very warm welcome and lots of attention to details from the organizers: they accompanied 🚘 journalists in Tashkent, taking me on tour of the city by car. I'm staying in a newly-built boutique hotel 🏘 in Samarkand, which looks like a museum, with local crafts 🗿and 200-year-old carpets on display in the hallways. Now I'm about to go on a city tour in Samarkand, to hopefully take a sneak peek behind the facade of the SCO venue, where 🇷🇺 Russia's Vladimir Putin, 🇨🇳 China's Xi Jinping and other world leaders will meet on Thursday and Friday.

🇱🇧💵 In Beirut, Lebanon, a female customer took bank employees hostage, demanding that she be given money from her dollar deposit, a source has told Sputnik.

❗️This is the second time in little more than a month that a bank's employees have been taken hostage by a desperate customer, and is the result of the country's dire economic crisis.

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🏙The future is coming

▪️Architects in Dubai plan to build a massive space-age ring to encircle the Burj Khalifa.

▪️Architecture firm ZNera Space has created a futuristic design concept called Downtown Circle that would radically alter Dubai's iconic skyline.

▪️According to the building’s concept, it proposes end-to-end transportation options, including an electric tram reaching speeds of up to 100 km/h, as well as infrastructure to cover sky taxis

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😲 More concept art showing the ambitious Downtown Circle

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