Our daily voyage around the world

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia announced plans to double the size of its capital city of Riyadh with a new multi-billion dollar development. The main attraction of the new project is a massive cubic skyscraper, called the Mukaab, that’ll measure a quarter-mile long on each side (large enough to fit 20 Empire State Buildings). Saudi officials said the Mukaab will feature nearly 22 million square feet of total floor space – focused mainly on hospitality – when it opens to the public sometime before 2030.

🇷🇺 Russia is suspending its participation in the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between Moscow and the US. In his state-of-the-nation address yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow will step back from the 2011 New START treaty that limits the number of nuclear warheads, bombers, and launchers the US and Russia are allowed to possess. Though hours after Putin’s speech, Russia’s Foreign Ministry clarified that Moscow hasn’t officially withdrawn from the treaty, and called the government’s decision to suspend its participation “reversible.”

🥖 Food additives that are present in American food – but banned in Europe – are “almost certainly” contributing to higher rates of US cancer. That’s according to Professor Erik Millstone, an expert on food additives at England's University of Sussex, who told CBS News on Monday that European regulators take a far more cautious approach to food safety than their American counterparts. Millstone cited several potentially cancer-causing substances that are currently banned in Europe for health reasons but permitted in the US, including potassium bromate, titanium dioxide, azodicarbonamide, and propylparaben.