In the coming week, an Asian Pacific Economic Summit opens in San Francisco.

France hosts a humanitarian conference for Gaza, and the Arab League holds an emergency summit in Riyadh.

It's November 9, 2023 in time for the world next week. I'm Bob McMahon.

And I'm Carl Ann Robbins.

So Bob, yesterday, the National Zoo's three giant pandas,

Meishong, Tian, and they're born in captivity son, Shao Shi Ji, had to look that one up.

He took a FedEx cargo fight from Delis Airport to Chengdu, China.

Beijing has already recalled pandas from zoos in San Diego and Memphis, and there's only

four left in Atlanta, and they're scheduled to return home next year.

Like, the Chinese never gifted these pandas. They leased them, but the fact that they're scheduled to return home next year. Like the Chinese never gifted these

pandas. They leased them. But the fact that they're pulling them all home, sort of the way you pull back

diplomats, is seen as one more sign of a deteriorating U.S.-China relationship. So President Biden

and President Shear are supposed to meet on the sidelines of this APEC conference in San Francisco.

I assume pandas aren't going to be at the

top of the agenda. So what are you going to be looking for at that meeting? Well, I will be

looking for some reference of pandas and maybe some future new generation of panda proliferation,

shall we say. But in terms of these conversations, you know, in an expression that Andre

Grameko used to like to say in the old Soviet days, perhaps they'll be fruitful. In that, I think just the fact of them getting together only the second time in Biden's presidency is a very big deal. It feels like it took a lot to get to this point in terms of just U.S. officials, actually officials going in both directions,

high-level officials from China and high-level U.S. officials going to China. And I mean, all the

top cabinet officials have been there to talk about getting to a place where the two sides can be

in regular communication over the many, many issues that they have tensions over and that they should be

talking about in any event. And so I think we should be looking at this as an important sideline

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