A Golden Opportunity

Public charging for electric trucks — including the largest semi-trailers — is on the way in Illinois. The state has landed a $100 million federal grant for the construction of 14 public charging stations for medium- and heavy-duty trucks. Located at strategic points along major truck routes, the charging stations will have a total of 345 ports — enough to charge up to 3,500 trucks a day, according to Illinois electric vehicle officer Megha Lakhchaura. “Illinois can be a critical connecting node for (electric) trucks going across the county,” said Lakhchaura, noting there is already some charging infrastructure on the East Coast and in the West. “This would be that critical node that helps trucks actually go across the country, north to south and east to west,” she said. Charging station locations will include the Chicago area, Springfield, and the Metro East and Quad Cities regions. Medium- and heavy-duty trucks are responsible for 21% of the country’s transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, although they account for just 5% of vehicles on the road. In addition, most of these trucks run on diesel fuel, a growing health concern in neighborhoods such as Little Village, which experience heavy truck traffic. Exposure to diesel exhaust can lead to asthma and respiratory illnesses and worsen existing heart and lung disease, especially in children and the elderly, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Hemp business owners sent a flurry of campaign contributions to key Illinois lawmakers this fall to ward off a feared shutdown of their industry, though it paled in comparison to the money that licensed cannabis companies have given over the years, state records show. Hemp advocates gave more than $30,000 to oppose a bill they said would have shut them down, and instead favored a bill to tax and regulate hemp but let them stay in business.

Marshall Douthard Jr., 19, can picture himself on the expansive balcony of the single-family home that looks out over the Garfield Park neighborhood, a house that he helped build. “Just walking out in a robe, with a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said. “Even in the winter?” I asked. “That’s the best time,” he said. It won’t be his house, but Douthard was envisioning himself living on West 5th Avenue, a street filled with at least a dozen vacant lots and rows of existing houses, where three new homes were recently constructed with the help of about 10 graduates, including Douthard, of the Collins Academy High School in North Lawndale. The guys worked with their onetime football coach, computer science teacher and mentor, Lawon Williams, and architect Bryan Hudson, to design the homes and watch them come together from start to finish — while also occasionally being put to work removing fences and putting up drywall. The project started in early 2020, with Williams recruiting students from the Collins football team. Williams bought vacant lots and fundraised through a nonprofit he started called TechCo Savvy Inc., an after-school program that aims to expose youths age 13 to 20 to jobs in STEM fields.

Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Jan. 18, according to the Tribune’s archives. Is an important event missing from this date? Email us. Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago) High temperature: 61 degrees (1996) Low temperature: Minus 21 degrees (1994) Precipitation: 1.51 inches (1876) Snowfall: 5.3 inches (1943) 1896: The first game of five-on-five college basketball was played between the University of Iowa and University of Chicago at Iowa City Armory in Iowa City, Iowa. Chicago won 15-12. 1993: A Chicago, South Shore & South Bend Railroad commuter train raced by a red signal and crashed head-on into another train crossing a single-track gantlet bridge in Gary, killing seven. Two Chicago, South Shore & South Bend trains sideswiped each other — peeling away the metal sheaths of the lead cars, leaving the trains mangled, and killing seven passengers and injuring more than 60 on Jan.

Two in-form teams vying for European qualification meet at St. James' Park.

If you’re like any other AI aficionado, you’ve probably been testing all the latest image generators on the market. You may have noticed a perceptible change over the past few months, particularly in how hyper-realistic these images have become—almost eerily so. While major tech firms like OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft face multiple lawsuits over the use of written content, including cases brought by authors and organizations like The New York Times, less attention has been given to the use of images of actual people. AI image generators are artificial intelligence tools that can whip up images in seconds based on just a few words.