‘Stranger Things’ inspired hamburger wins annual competition

A hamburger inspired by the sci-fi series “Strangers Things” was named the best burger in the second annual competition for Elgin High School School culinary students held Dec. 5 at the Chicago Street Pour House in downtown Elgin.

Senior Sofia Dekarske called her creation an “Upside Down” burger. The Upside Down is a sinister, predator-laden alternate dimension on the 1980s-set “Stranger Things.” Dekaske served her cheeseburger on a toasted bun with the bun’s typical inside the outside.

The burger’s condiment was a garlic aioli. Dekarske said a garlic bacon butter burger from Sonic influenced what she made for the contest.

Dekarske cooked alone and competed against four two-person teams that were judged by a panel of four adults. For her efforts, she received $100 and her burger will be on the menu at Chicago Street Pour House.

Dundee, Elgin libraries holding New Year’s parties for kids

Registration is underway for a New Year’s Eve parties for children at the Dundee Library in East Dundee and the Gail Borden Public Library in downtown Elgin.

Dundee’s Noon Year’s Eve party will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 30, at the 555 Barrington Ave. library. A Happy Noon Year party at the Gail Borden library, 270 N. Grove Ave., is set for 11:30 a.m. to 13:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 31.

Dundee Library’s party is designed for children ages 2 to 12 while the Gail Borden party is meant for ages 2 to 6.

To register, go to frvpld.info/event/noon-years-eve-83326 or attend.gailborden.info/event/14418505.

Bartlett Park District will open its winter sports programming at the Villa Olivia Country Club on Dec. 19. (The Courier-News)

Opening date for Villa Olivia’s winter sports programs is Dec. 19

Bartlett Park District will open its winter sports programming at the Villa Olivia Country Club, 1401 W. Lake St., on Friday, Dec. 19.

The Villa Olivia property has a large hill for tubing, two ski runs, a chair lift and a terrain park with ramps and rails for advanced skiers and snowboarders. Four more runs and a mini-terrain park, all set up for beginners, are on a smaller hill, according to the facility’s website.

There are also four tow ropes for the smaller hill and two for the bigger hill.

For more information, including rates, equipment and lessons, go to bartlettparks.org/villa-olivia/winter-sports.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/12/elgin-hamburger-villa-olivia-bartlett-new-years/ 

Angel Reese is staying in Chicago — at least for the foreseeable future.

The star’s tenure with the Sky has been stuck in limbo for three months after a contentious end to the season that resulted in a half-game suspension for the two-time WNBA All-Star. Reese still is not overly effusive about her future with the team. But during media availability at Team USA camp Friday, she did not feed any speculation about leaving the Sky for the 2026 season.

“I’m under contract so, yes, I plan on returning to the Sky,” Reese said Friday in Durham, N.C. “(I’m) continuing to talk to (coach) Tyler (Marsh) and building that relationship with (GM) Jeff (Pagliocca) and Tyler.”

The Sky’s second season with Reese unraveled in September when the forward criticized her teammates, coaching staff and team ownership in an interview with the Tribune. The team waited three days before announcing a half-game suspension for Reese, who ultimately sat out the final 3½ games of the season with a back injury. Reese also opted out of end-of-season exit interviews with the media.

Reese has never voiced a desire to leave Chicago before the end of her rookie contract. The forward is entering the third year of that deal, with a team option the Sky are expected to pick up in 2027. But the end-of-season fallout sparked speculation that Reese might attempt to force her way out. Internally, the Sky were never seriously concerned about her asking for a trade — a request the front office would have honored had it been made.

Still, Reese has been blunt about her disappointment with the lack of success and organizational dysfunction that have defined her first two years in Chicago.

“I am very vocal about what we need and what I want,” Reese told the Tribune in September. “I only have a guaranteed four years here. And I’d like to be here for my career, but if things don’t pan out, obviously I might have to move in a different direction and do what’s best for me. But while I am here, I’m going to try to stay open minded about what I have here and maximize that as much as I can.”

Pagliocca and Marsh have been at the forefront of the Sky’s attempts to smooth over the conflict with Reese. But for the Sky, improving the relationship is an issue that extends all the way to the top of the organization.

Ownership made the decision to suspend Reese, a disciplinary action that undermined the star’s trust of the organization, according to a source. The team already spent last winter attempting to bridge trust with Reese after the September 2024 firing of coach Teresa Weatherspoon, who remains a trusted mentor to the forward.

Trust and investment are key pieces to maintaining a relationship with Reese. But if the Sky want to retain her beyond 2027, they have to make one key change — start winning.

Sky coach Tyler Marsh sends forward Angel Reese into the game against the Sun on Sept. 3, 2025, at Wintrust Arena. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)

Reese has been vocal about changes she wants to see within the organization, including improvements to the existing plans for the training facility in Bedford Park and requests for expansions to the training and medical staff. But she also has made it clear that her main source for frustration is the team’s lack of success.

The Sky went a combined 23-61 in the two seasons since Reese was drafted with the No. 7 pick in 2024, missing the playoffs both years. And they took a step back in 2025, finishing 10-34 (.227), the second-worst winning percentage in franchise history.

If the Sky don’t alter this pattern, they will struggle to retain Reese past her rookie contract — even if they succeed in repairing the rift in the relationship.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/12/angel-reese-chicago-sky-return/ 

AI Is A “Supersonic Tsunami”; Musk Bullish On Global Trajectory

Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/12/2025 – 18:50

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/ai-supersonic-tsunami-musk-bullish-global-trajectory 

It may soon be easier for Illinois residents to find therapists who accept their insurance, after Gov. JB Pritzker signed a bill into law Friday taking aim at insurance reimbursement rates for behavioral health services.

The new law, which will take full effect in January 2027, creates a formula outlining how much insurers must pay therapists for their services. It also aims to cut red tape that many therapists say has put them off working with insurers.

In recent years, many therapists have stopped taking private insurance because of what they describe as low and stagnant reimbursement rates from insurers. That’s made it difficult for patients to find therapists who take their insurance, leading many patients to either skip therapy or pay entirely out-of-pocket.

“This means that patients will have more choices on where to use their private insurance for the full spectrum of behavioral health, and they won’t be put in situations where they’ll either have to pay out-of-pocket or forgo care all together,” said bill sponsor Rep. Lindsey LaPointe, D-Chicago.

Not only will the new law address reimbursement rates, but it will also bar insurers from requiring therapists to submit more documentation for 60-minute sessions versus shortage ones; it will require insurers to cover multiple behavioral health services for an individual patient in one day; and it will require insurers to cover services provided by therapists in training who are supervised by licensed professionals. The new law also aims to shorten the time it takes for therapists to become in-network with insurers.

The bill passed the legislature in October over the objections of insurance industry representatives who expressed concern about the precedent of setting reimbursement rates in statute, and who said higher reimbursement rates could mean higher costs for other consumers.

Insurance industry group AHIP said in a statement in recent weeks that it would continue to work with policymakers “to advance solutions that improve affordability and access to mental health and substance abuse care.”

The new law will apply to about 2.5 million people in Illinois who have state-regulated health insurance plans, LaPointe said. Large companies typically have self-funded plans, which are regulated by the federal government, not the state.

The law also will not apply to people with HMOs. And it will not apply to state employees, who were carved out of the bill over concerns that it could raise costs for the state — an argument that LaPointe disputes.

LaPointe and advocates from Thresholds began working on the measure several years ago. Thresholds serves people with serious mental health and substance use disorders in Illinois.

Under previous versions of the bill, insurers would have had to pay in-network therapists 141% of what Medicare pays for therapy and substance use disorder services. The version of the bill that passed this fall does not include that 141% figure, but instead has a formula that should get reimbursements to the “ballpark” of 141% of Medicare reimbursements, LaPointe said.

“After three years of work it’s validating that Illinois is finally taking this step which is so fundamental to access to care, to bringing more behavioral health providers into networks,” LaPointe said. “This bill is a very concrete thing to do to make health care more affordable to people, and we’re doing it at a time when Medicaid is under threat and affordability through the (Affordable Care Act) marketplace is under threat, so this bill couldn’t come soon enough.”

Allison Staiger, a licensed clinical social worker who has a solo practice in Ravenswood, said the bill “will really be helpful for the day-to-day sustainability of therapists’ livelihood.”

Staiger noted that there’s more work to be done when it comes to making it easier for therapists and other health care providers to work with insurers.

“I think this is a step in the right direction for fair pay for therapists and our field being valued more than it is,” Staiger said.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/12/therapists-insurance-prizker-bill/ 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors — too complicated, capital-intensive and “boring, honestly,” says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui.

But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do.

Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will take to accelerate a nascent industry.

Alaoui says many researchers now believe humanoids or some other kind of physical embodiment of AI are “going to become the norm.”

“The question is really just how long it will take,” he said.

Disney’s contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of “Frozen” character Olaf, will be roaming on its own through Disneyland theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining and highly complex robots that resemble a human — or a snowman — are already here, but the timeline for “general purpose” robots that are a productive member of a workplace or household is farther away.

Even at a conference designed to build enthusiasm for the technology, held at a Computer History Museum that’s a temple to Silicon Valley’s previous breakthroughs, skepticism remained high that truly humanlike robots will take root anytime soon.

“The humanoid space has a very, very big hill to climb,” said Cosima du Pasquier, founder and CEO of Haptica Robotics, which works to give robots a sense of touch. “There’s a lot of research that still needs to be solved.”

The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher came to the conference in Mountain View, California, just a week after incorporating her startup.

“The first customers are really the people here,” she said.

Researchers at the consultancy McKinsey & Company have counted about 50 companies around the world that have raised at least $100 million to develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America.

China is leading in part due to government incentives for component production and robot adoption and a mandate last year “to have a humanoid ecosystem established by 2025,” said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Displays by Chinese firms dominated the expo section of this week’s summit, held Thursday and Friday. The conference’s most prevalent humanoids were those made by China’s Unitree, in part because researchers in the U.S. buy the relatively cheap model to test their own software.

In the U.S., the advent of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in different ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious startups aiming to build hardware that will bring a physical presence to the latest AI.

But it’s not just crossover hype — the same technical advances that made AI chatbots so good at language have played a role in teaching robots how to get better at performing tasks. Paired with computer vision, robots powered by “visual-language” models are trained to learn about their surroundings.

One of the most prominent skeptics is robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot who wrote in September that “today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.” Brooks didn’t attend but his essay was frequently mentioned.

Also missing was anyone speaking for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s development of a humanoid called Optimus, a project that the billionaire is designing to be “extremely capable” and sold in high volumes. Musk said three years ago that people can probably buy an Optimus “within three to five years.”

The conference’s organizer, Alaoui, founder and general partner of ALM Ventures, previously worked on driver attention systems for the automotive industry and sees parallels between humanoids and the early years of self-driving cars.

Near the entrance to the summit venue, just blocks from Google’s headquarters, is a museum exhibit showing Google’s bubble-shaped 2014 prototype of a self-driving car. Eleven years later, robotaxis operated by Google affiliate Waymo are constantly plying the streets nearby.

Some robots with human elements are already being tested in workplaces. Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced shortly before the conference that it is bringing its tote-carrying warehouse robot Digit to a Texas distribution facility run by Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce giant. Much like the Olaf robot, it has inverted legs that are more birdlike than human.

Industrial robots performing single tasks are already commonplace in car assembly and other manufacturing. They work with a level of speed and precision that’s difficult for today’s humanoids — or humans themselves — to match.

The head of a robotics trade group founded in 1974 is now lobbying the U.S. government to develop a stronger national strategy to advance the development of homegrown robots, be they humanoids or otherwise.

“We have a lot of strong technology, we have the AI expertise here in the U.S.,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, after touring the expo. “So I think it remains to be seen who is the ultimate leader in this. But right now, China has certainly a lot more momentum on humanoids.”

Associated Press journalist Terry Chea contributed to this report.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/12/humanoid-robots-silicon-valley-summit/ 

Associated Press

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Un juez ordenó el viernes la prisión preventiva por cinco meses para el expresidente Luis Arce quien es investigado por un caso de supuesta corrupción cuando era ministro de Evo Morales entre 2006 y 2017.

Tras una audiencia virtual el juez Elmer Laura ordenó que el exmandatario de 62 años cumpla detención preventiva en un penal de La Paz desde donde debe defenderse por los supuestos delitos que le imputa la fiscalía de incumplimiento de deberes y conducta antieconómica, que se castigan en el país con penas de hasta seis años de cárcel.

El exgobernante socialista fue conducido por la noche al penal de San Pedro, una de las mayores cárceles del país andino.

Según la fiscalía, Arce autorizó en 2015 —cuando fungía como ministro de Economía— el depósito en cuentas particulares de dinero del Fondo Indígena creado para financiar proyectos productivos en zonas rurales y comunidades indígenas pobres.

El caso estalló en 2017 cuando se denunció que millones de dólares fueron a parar a cuentas particulares. A pesar que se le consideró el mayor escándalo de corrupción en la gestión de Morales (2006-2019), las investigaciones no avanzaron.

Arce dijo en la audiencia desde dependencias policiales donde se halla detenido desde el miércoles que su aprehensión “fue irregular e ilegal”.

“No me mostraron una orden, los agentes llevaban pasamontañas como en los gobiernos fascistas. Soy inocente de las acusaciones que son políticas. Es una persecución, soy un chivo expiatorio”, declaró ante el juez.

El exmandatario aseguró que no tuvo una vinculación personal directa con el Fondo Indígena y que delegó responsabilidades a un representante.

El juez Laura fue más allá del pedido de la fiscalía que requirió tres meses de detención preventiva en un centro correccional para adolescentes para Arce. La defensa alegó en la audiencia que el exmandatario padece de cáncer y que su vida corre riesgo en prisión. Laura dijo que Arce debe recibir la “atención médica que requiere” y que las autoridades deben garantizar su seguridad.

Arce fue diagnosticado con cáncer de riñón en 2017 y superó el mal tras un tratamiento médico en Brasil, pero debe someterse a controles anuales en ese país.

La investigación de las presuntas irregularidades cometidas con el Fondo Indígena se reabrió tras la asunción del centroderechista Rodrigo Paz, quien dijo que en los casi 20 años de gestión de Morales y Arce “hubo un saqueo” de los fondos públicos.

Aunque no ha sido cuantificado el daño económico, en el caso de Arce el “desfalco” sería de más de 51 millones de dólares, dijo el ministro de Gobierno, Marco Antonio Oviedo.

El dinero se habría desviado para “comprar lealtades” de dirigentes sindicales e indígenas afines al partido de gobierno en momentos de campaña electoral, explicó el exsenador Oscar Ortiz, quien investigó las denuncias en 2015.

Los sindicatos y organizaciones sociales fueron el principal sostén del gobierno del Movimientos al Socialismo (MAS) de Morales y Arce que gobernó por casi dos décadas. La fiscalía no ha descartado la posibilidad de convocar a declarar a Morales, lo que ha puesto en alerta a los cocaleros del Chapare, en el centro del país, donde el exmandatario está atrincherado. Tiene una orden de detención desde el año pasado por el presunto abuso de una menor cuando era mandatario en 2016.

La detención de Arce se da en momentos en que Paz comienza a afrontar las primeras protestas por la crónica escasez de combustible y mientras el mandatario aún no define si levantará o mantendrá la subvención a los carburantes, que según los críticos provoca un derrame de los fondos públicos en medio de la peor crisis económica en 40 años.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/12/bolivia-expresidente-arce-es-enviado-a-prisin-preventiva-tras-acusaciones-por-presunta-corrupcin/ 

Snow Threat For Mid-Atlantic I-90 Corridor This Weekend

Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/12/2025 – 18:00

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/snow-threat-mid-atlantic-i-90-corridor-weekend