Our daily hop, skip, and a jump around the world

🇨🇳🐼 China is set to reclaim its pandas from the National Zoo in Washington, DC. The zoo is hosting a “Panda Palooza” event to celebrate its three pandas before their return to China on December 7, which will leave DC’s main zoo without any such animals for the first time since President Nixon formalized diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1972. Fun fact: Almost every panda in the world is technically owned by the Chinese government, which has been loaning some of them out to zoos around the world since the 1940s as part of a program dubbed “panda diplomacy.”

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia agreed to grant the UN full oversight of its nuclear activities. The move is aimed at reassuring the international community that any nuclear facility Saudi Arabia opens in the future would be purely for energy purposes, and not an attempt to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb. Last week, the WSJ reported that Israel is working with the Biden administration to set up a US-run uranium-enrichment plant in Saudi Arabia, as part of a three-way deal to establish official diplomatic relations between the two Middle Eastern nations.

🇩🇰🧱 Denmark’s Lego is moving away from using recycled plastic bottles to make its bricks. After two-plus years of internal testing, Lego concluded a company-wide transition to bricks made from recycled plastic bottles wouldn’t end up reducing its carbon emissions, since the process to create those bricks produces more emissions than the potential savings. The Danish company has invested $1.2 billion in reducing carbon emissions by 37% over the next decade, with an emphasis on developing an environmentally-friendly material that’s functionally identical to current oil-based plastic bricks.