Today’s Big Story

Dockworkers Suspend the Strike

Workers reach tentative deal after ports shut down earlier this week in a major strike over wages and automation

Here’s some good news for that supply chain everyone’s been worried about. I don’t know if you were seeing this on social media, but people have uploaded videos of grocery stores across the country—lamenting the massive lines and product shortages as people panic buy staples like toilet paper. And it was all around the strikes that begun impacting some of the busiest ports in the U.S., including in New York, Texas and Georgia.

The International Longshoremen’s Association union went on strike early Tuesday after its contract expired in a dispute over pay and the automation of tasks at 36 ports across much of the country. The strike came at the peak of the holiday shopping season at the ports, which handle about half the cargo from ships coming into and out of the United States.

But dockworkers agreed to return to work after port operators sweetened their contract offer, ending a three-day strike that was already threatening to disrupt the American economy. The breakthrough Thursday came after port employers offered a 62% increase in wages over six years.

The new offer, up from an earlier proposed raise of 50%, came after the White House privately and publicly pressed the large shipping lines and cargo terminal operators who employ the longshore workers to make a new offer to the union. President Biden applauded the agreement, saying in a statement, “Collective bargaining works, and it is critical to building a stronger economy from the middle out and the bottom up.” Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Thursday evening: “We’ve been working hard on it. With the grace of God, it’s going to hold.”

Still, the United States Maritime Alliance and the union will still need to come to terms on the question of automation, which has emerged as a more existential issue. Ports around the world have embraced technology that can make shipping faster, cheaper and safer, with U.S. ports now regularly lagging international ports in efficiency. According to NBC News, a Government Accountability Office report from 2024 found that U.S. ports had embraced some automation, but that labor opposition as well as cost were hindering the adoption of automation technology.

Blasts in Beirut

Massive blasts in Lebanon after renewed Israeli air strikes

Israeli bombing caused large explosions in Beirut, including one close to the international airport during a further night of air strikes targeting Hezbollah. The BBC reports that the airport borders Dahieh, Hezbollah's stronghold in the capital. Plumes of smoke could be seen over the city on Friday morning.

The strike took place in a suburb south of Beirut, where many Hezbollah compounds are located, and targeted the head of Hezbollah’s executive committee Hashim Safi al-Din, three Israeli officials told Axios. Safi al-Din is the leading figure to succeed Hassan Nasrallah as Hezbollah's leader. An Israeli official said Safi al-Din was in a bunker deep underground and it isn’t yet clear whether he was killed in the strike.

Across the country, where some 1.2 million people have been displaced since Israel ramped up its military offensive, families described sleepless nights filled with terror. Israel’s aerial campaign in Lebanon is being conducted at an intensity comparable only to the first weeks of its bombardment in Gaza last year, an air warfare expert told CNN. According to their tally, the escalated offensive in Lebanon has killed over 1,300 people since it began on September 17.

NASA’s New Horizons Mission Continues to Surprise

The spacecraft has roamed billions of miles, but hasn't reached the ‘edge’

Space is so fascinating, isn’t it? Zooming through the outer reaches of the solar system, NASA’s New Horizon probe just clocked a distance 60 times farther from the sun than Earth. The extraordinary benchmark announced this week means the spacecraft has doubled its 2015 distance, when it was snapping pictures of Pluto and its moons.

Perhaps more surprising than this intangible deep-space milestone is the one this intrepid spacecraft hasn't reached yet: the outer edge of the solar system's Kuiper Belt, a disk beyond Neptune of countless comets and thousands of tiny ice worlds. The far-flung region is littered with leftover rubble from the time when primitive planets were forming. According to Mashable, scientists had expected the spacecraft to arrive at the proverbial edge about 1 billion miles ago. But it just keeps going.

So just how dark is deep space? Last year, New Horizons was given a new mission: to analyze the Sun’s environment from the deepest reaches of the solar system. The spacecraft is now some 5.4 billion miles from Earth, giving it an unprecedented view of the darkest regions of the universe. You may not be surprised to find that things are pretty dark. Once you get away from galaxies and their billions of stars, there’s really not much to see. The calculations, published in The Astrophysical Journal, “show that the great majority of visible light we receive from the universe was generated in galaxies. Importantly, we also found that there is no evidence for significant levels of light produced by sources not presently known to astronomers.” It’s nice to know that despite being in a fairly dark part of space, the spaceship is still helping cast a little light on cosmic mysteries.

Baseball Helmets Now Have Ads

MLB makes a noticeable change for 2024 playoffs

The baseball playoffs have arrived and if you look closely, you’ll notice the teams now have advertising … on their helmets. Anywhere to make a buck, right? As the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay puts it: “It’s a small addition that probably won’t alienate many fans, but I fear it continues a stylish sport’s slow, soul-crushing slide toward sartorial irrelevance, and in no way is that me being alliterative or hyperbolic.”

The ads are 5-by-1 inches, and are slapped on each side of every helmet featuring the name of Strauss, a German company that manufactures high-performance work clothes, in capital letters in white alongside the company's ostrich logo silhouetted by a red square. Strauss also will appear on the helmets of the 120 affiliated minor league teams from 2025 to 2027, reports ESPN.

MLB's willingness to include ads to its batting helmets should come as little surprise. On-uniform advertising has long been popular in international sports leagues, and American leagues have started to catch up as a means of tapping into an additional revenue stream. MLB itself has permitted teams to wear individual advertisement patches on their uniforms since Opening Day 2023. According to SportsLogo's Chris Creamer, 23 of the 30 teams had an advertisement patch as of Aug. 1, 2024.

A Weekend Pairing

‘Heartstopper’ + a Booze-Free G&T

Remember Heartstopper, the charming British coming-of-age story about boys falling in love amidst all the other drama surrounding growing up? Well, it's back on Netflix for its third season. And the gang is clearly growing up: Sex, mental health and higher eduction complicate things further as they all inch closer to adulthood.

According to Empire, just as the story Alice Oseman created in her graphic novels continues to mature, so too does Netflix's adaptation, in ways that might surprise regular viewers. Alcohol and even F-bombs feature now, silencing critics who felt the show has previously been too unrealistic or sickly sweet. If there's one downside, it's that Olivia Colman wasn't able to make her usual cameo this season.

Have some fun this weekend.