With the sun gleaming off the Manhattan skyline in the distance, the massive ship passed slowly underneath the Bayonne Bridge on the morning of May 20, tooting its horn to the delight of about two dozen onlookers on the bridge deck hundreds of feet up.

Unilever Plc and other big retail brands are among consumer giants adopting a toolkit to audit their shipping supply chains in an effort to help bring seafarers stuck on commercial vessels back home and eliminate human rights risks.

The Suez Canal may be open again, but the battle over damages from the waterway’s longest closure in almost half a century is just beginning.

Ship congestion outside the biggest U.S. gateway for Asian imports worsened from a week ago, highlighting a headwind facing American companies just as a pileup around the Suez Canal had threatened to tangle Europe’s supply chains.

SUEZ, Egypt — Workers have successfully set free a colossal containership that for nearly a week has been stuck sideways across the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most crucial arteries for trade, a canal service provider said.

Dislodging the container vessel blocking the Suez Canal will take until at least March 31, a longer effort than initially feared that will amplify the disruption to global supply chains for everything from oil to grains to cars.

A giant containership remains stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking one of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes that’s vital for the movement of everything from oil to consumer goods.

A global shortage of shipping containers that has sent ocean freight rates skyrocketing shows signs of easing, according to an index that tracks the steel boxes used to transport 90% of the global trade in goods.

A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, the world’s largest container carrier, is working at full capacity and can’t yet see a peak in freight rates that have already been propelled to record highs by pandemic consumer spending.

Container shipping, the backbone of the global trading system, is showing signs of fatigue as the pandemic descends into its darkest days.