A deal has reportedly been reached to avoid a paralyzing dockworker strike at East Coast ports

The Chicago teacher's strike is over. It worked. The Verizon strike is over. It worked. Strikes work. Workers should have them more often.

The 45,000 or so unionized Verizon workers who have been on strike since August 7 will go back to work on Tuesday under an extension to their existing contract, while negotiators for both sides are still trying to agree on a new and not necessarily improved contract.

Today is an exciting day, because we've discovered that there is a silver lining to these excruciating debt ceiling negotiations that can serve as a palliative for our fatalist misery and depression.

Today AMC announced that season five of its hit show Mad Men will start in 2012 even though the network still doesn't have a contract with the show's creator, Matt Weiner. So now AMC is taking negotiations to the gossip pages.

Top-level Taliban commanders are being transported from Pakistan to Afghanistan for face-to-face talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government that could end to the War in Afghanistan. So, I guess, start preparing an unsatisfying, vaguely-defined celebration.

"One good tactic for speeding up a deal is to show lack of interest in it," writes Donald Trump in Trump: How to Get Rich. Trump ignored our offer Friday to buy his silence. The appropriate response? Press ahead, clearly.

If News Corp. and Time Warner can't resolve their spat by tomorrow, Fox is pulling all of its channels from the cable system. Hmm... Is losing American Idol worth never having to see Glenn Beck again?

Local review repository Yelp walked away from Google's $550 million acquisition offer this weekend. [TechCrunch]

Barack Obama backing off (or maybe not?) the public option is either the death of health care reform or yet another of this month's distractions from what is actually still a very viable bill. We lay out both cases, below.

Did the New York Times want to keep reporter David Rohde's kidnapping in Afghanistan quiet because they feared for his safety, or because they didn't want to drive up his ransom price? Rohde himself has suggested the latter.

Yes, the newsroom union of the Boston Globe rejected a contract proposal yesterday, causing the NYT Co. to say it will cut their pay by 23%. But then the reporters called Pinch Sulzberger a "mensch," so now it's all good!

Have you guys been able to enjoy the news at all with this big AP byline strike? Been going on since Sunday? Anybody? Hello?