Business

The state is moving closer to awarding a lucrative 20-year contract to run the concessions operations at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport — a year and a half after Gov. Wes Moore (D) pulled the plug on the initial procurement process, which was laden with controversy. Maryland Matters has learned that an evaluation committee at the Maryland Department of Transportation has recommended granting the contract to URW/Harbor Bankshare, a partnership between the international development company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield SE and Harbor Bank of Maryland.

The Savannah Bananas, a team with a fun approach to baseball that includes singing, dancing and gimmicks, are coming to Camden Yards next year. The Bananas will play at Camden Yards as part of their 2025 world tour on Aug. 1 and 2, they announced. The team was founded in 2016 as a collegiate baseball team in the Coastal Plain League, and Orioles starter Cade Povich pitched for them in the 2020 season.

The Everytown Community Safety Fund (CSF), part of Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, Friday announced $100,000 in funding for LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope to advance its work of ending gun violence in Baltimore and better position the organization to access federal funding. This grant is part of the CSF’s more than $2 million investment in 20 gun violence intervention organizations nationwide.

The Port of Baltimore is expected to recover quickly and could even see a temporary spike in vessel traffic rerouting from larger ports as dockworkers at East and Gulf coast ports returned to work Friday after their union reached a deal to pause their strike. The International Longshoremen’s Association suspended its three-day strike until Jan. 15 to provide time to negotiate a new contract.

I moved to Hampden on the promise of jump scares. Like all snoopy reporters I know, I was curious about where I would be living and soon learned the residence once belonged to an undertaker. The man was said to have installed one of the village’s first telephones into a funeral parlor. I figured his commitment to communication and familiarity with death all but guaranteed me a haunted living arrangement.

A. Duie Pyle, a privately-owned transportation and logistics provider headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania, has acquired a 29-acre site within North East Commerce Center, a 100-acre business community in Cecil County, owned and developed by Stewart Properties and St. John Properties Inc. The purchase price was $2.195 million.

More than a decade ago, Starbucks bought its first coffee farm, in Costa Rica. Now the coffee giant has added two more to its portfolio. The Seattle-based company said Thursday that it’s invested in another farm in Costa Rica and its first in Guatemala in the hopes of getting closer to its goal of protecting its coffee supply from climate change.

When longshoremen walked off the job in Baltimore nearly 50 years ago, their target was clear: the shipping container. For centuries, workers went on ships and hauled out a mishmash of goods and packages, a backbreaking job that required many hands. The standardized container revolutionized the shipping industry, putting many longshoremen out of work.