AUBURN | An Auburn man accused of assaulting an officer after an alleged road rage incident may receive psychiatric treatment.

James Knight, of 9 Perry St., Apt. 1, appeared Tuesday morning in Cayuga County Court to face an an 11-count indictment charging him with striking an Auburn police officer in the face with a five-gallon bucket and threatening a couple with a collapsible baton.

The 28-year-old defendant sat quietly during his arraignment and when a veterans outreach worker met with Judge Mark Fandrich on his behalf.

After a short conference, Fandrich remanded Knight to the Cayuga County Jail without bail explaining that Knight is seeking to be admitted for psychiatric care at a secure Veterans Affairs' treatment facility near Saranac Lake. If Knight makes it through the admission process, Fandrich said he would consider releasing Knight for treatment.

Quietly nodding after hearing Fandrich's decision, Knight was escorted out of the courtroom.

The alleged incident that ended in Knight's arrest occurred around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 6.

According to police, Knight followed another vehicle to Generations Bank on North Seward Avenue. Reportedly angry about a traffic-related incident, Knight allegedly pulled up next to the vehicle and started to shout at the passengers.

Police said Knight then got out of his car armed with a baton and hit the hood of the couple's car with the baton and his fists.

When police arrived on scene, Knight was reportedly driving away from the bank.

Knight was pulled over near his Perry Street home, where police said he refused to stay in his vehicle. A struggle ensued outside the vehicle escalating when Knight allegedly hit the officer in the face with a bucket.

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Auburn man accused of striking officer with bucket seeks treatment from VA

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Odessa Tx.Tree Trimming Services #432-653-1729 - Video

A prohibited fire season has been declared in Selwyn District, effective from 10am Wednesday 7 January 2015.

Under the restrictions no outdoor fires can be lit in the district. The burning of crop stubble is also not allowed. Gas barbeques with a high pressure water source at hand are allowed but not charcoal barbeques. Fires are also not permitted in Council reserves. During a prohibited fire season all fire permits previously issued by the Council are also cancelled.

The districts Deputy Principal Rural Fire Officer Douglas Marshall says that vegetation in Selwyn District is now very dry and a prohibited fire season has been introduced to help ensure that the risk of fires breaking out is minimised.

"Selwyn has been experiencing hot, dry weather along with strong winds and this provides ideal conditions for fires to spread quickly," he says.

Mr Marshall says that people need to be very vigilant in this weather to avoid any activities that could start a fire. "We would discourage people from mowing the lawn or operating machinery during the heat of the day as sparks can easily ignite in the heat, and instead carry out these activities when it is cooler. Letting off fireworks is also not allowed in the current conditions."

Mr Marshall says the Council will be reviewing the prohibited fire season status regularly and will lift restrictions as soon as it is considered safe to do so.

Reducing fire risk

You can help to reduce the fire risk, and make sure that fire services can quickly access your property to put out a fire if one does start, by:

- avoiding operating lawn mowers or other machinery during hot weather as sparks can easily ignite in these conditions, and waiting until the weather is cooler to mow laws or operate machinery. If you do need to use machinery or a lawn mower, having a source of water nearby for fire firefighting is advisable as a precaution

- regularly checking and maintaining machinery and equipment so it is safe to operate

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Prohibited fire season declared in Selwyn

The University of Chicago is proposing that the Obama presidential library be built on about 20 acres of South Side parkland, either in Washington or Jackson parks, according to the university.

The information, released Tuesday, was privately submitted last month to the president and first lady. Since then, pressure has built from library planners who are hoping to avoid any real estate or legal challenges associated with building a library in a public park.

The two sites are:

21 acres in western Jackson Park, bounded by South Stony Island Avenue to the west, South Cornell Avenue to the east, East 60th Street to the north and East 63rd Street to the south.

22 acres in western Washington Park and 11 acres outside of it, stretching as far west as South Prairie Avenue, and encompassing the Garfield Green Line stop. The park acreage is bounded by South Martin Luther King Drive to the west, Ellsworth Drive to the east, East Garfield Boulevard to the south and East 51st Street to the north.

The parcels outside of Washington Park are controlled by a combination of owners, including the U. of C., the city of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority and private individuals or companies.

The museum is expected to occupy only a fraction of the land. As a comparison, if the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas were to be spread out on one floor, it would take up about 5 acres. The entire campus measures 23 acres.

"In the first place, there's a long tradition of museums in the parks in Chicago," said Susan Sher, who is leading the U. of C.'s library bid, about the use of parkland. "When you look at the possibilities and the criteria of having enough space for the legacy of a major historical figure, you can't just plop it in the middle of a shopping center."

She said that in her discussions, residents of neighborhoods surrounding the university have jockeyed for the library. Sher has not found any "not-in-my-backyard" resentment, she said.

Residents will get a chance to publicly weigh in at two community hearings, Jan. 13 and Jan. 14, at Hyde Park Academy High School and the Washington Park Fieldhouse, respectively. The Park District is weighing whether to transfer the parcels to City Hall control. Such control was stipulated by library planners, led by Chicago private equity executive Martin Nesbitt.

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U. of C. unveils targeted parkland proposed to Obama library officials

Home holidays: Homes with resort-style features, such as 3 Callemonda Rise in O'Malley are great for holidays at home. Photo: Supplied

The annual summer trip to the South Coast has become a Canberra tradition and at this time of year you will see more ACT licence plates on Batemans Bay streets than NSW ones.

But for some, that getaway is not always possible and a resort-inspired lifestyle at home is an attractive option.

The swimming pool is the obvious summer solution, but there are a range of other features that will allow your home to become your own personal oasis.

Home holidays: 3 Callemonda Rise, O'Malley. Photo: Supplied

Maria Selleck Properties principal Maria Selleck says outside amenities have become just as important as indoor spaces because the outdoors becomes the centre of entertainment during the warmer months.

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"Under cover alfresco dining areas to accommodate a crowd is a must," Ms Selleck says.

"A barbecue grill is only one component. An outdoor kitchen, pizza oven, full bar, refrigerator, burners and other kitchen features are some of the features that buyers desire for alfresco entertaining areas."

Property consultant Maureen Dwyer agrees that the outdoor entertaining area is one of the most important features of any resort-style property.

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Canberra's resort style houses a holiday at home with bar, pool and spa

Experts are starting to see a real trend toward cloud convergence over the next 12 months. This prompts an important question for MSPs: When mobile, social, cloud and big data are all under the same umbrella, what happens to consumer expectations?

Unified Technology Landscape

As noted by a Dec. 23 article from Business 2 Community, these four "critical streams of technology are gradually converging into one powerful force that is making way for a huge shift in the current business landscape." This is no surprise, since mobile, cloud, big data and social media share many of the same feature sets and overlap when it comes to both form and function. A more unified technology landscape can therefore be seen as inevitable, but why is this transition happening now? In large part the move is thanks to maturing cloud technologies, since it is now possible to support social, data analytics and mobile offerings on a single cloud backbone or distribute their functions across multiple public and private clouds without impacting efficacy.

This results in a kind of ubiquity that opens up new avenues to reach consumers, gain customer insight, provide fertile ground for innovation and improve collaboration. But for MSPs serving midsize businesses, this cloud convergence also comes with a caveat: Companies will quickly start to expect more than single-channel service from providers, especially as they come to terms with a mobile-enabled, cloud-savvy workforce. So how do MSPs manage expectations in a converged world?

Already Happening

One option is to wait it out by continuing to deliver solid service in existing areas but without building in new functionality. The problem? This will not work for long. Just as consumers want simplified cloud access and real-time analytics, they expect desktop and mobile devices to work interchangeably. As a result, waiting for cloud convergence to "finish" puts MSPs behind the curve.

Managing midsize expectations requires a two-pronged approach. First, MSPs must recognize that midsize business needs can both meet and exceed enterprise requirements since many smaller companies cannot afford to pay multiple full-time IT staffs. Next, service providers must be willing to adapt in anticipation, rather than on demand. Converged cloud services provide instant access to a pool of ubiquitous functions, and scaling up in anticipation gives MSPs breathing room for the growth of midsize expectations.

Convergence is coming. Increased ease of use, however, means increasing expectations: MSPs cannot be unprepared for ubiquity.

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Cloud Convergence Coming in 2015: How do MSPs Manage Expectations?

As Congress opens its session on Tuesday, several Maryland interests including chicken farmers, environmentalists and federal employees will be watching for signs of how the new political landscape on Capitol Hill will affect issues they say are critical to the state's economy.

With Republicans in control of both the House and Senate for the first time in nearly a decade, Washington is bracing for more battles over health care, immigration and government spending. But there are indications that agreements might be possible on overhauling the nation's tax code, funding for infrastructure and finalizing trade agreements with Asia and Europe.

All of those issues could have implications for Maryland.

Meat and poultry groups, including those that represent the Eastern Shore's poultry industry, are hoping trade agreements include stronger enforcement mechanisms to limit overseas markets from blocking imports. Federal employee unions want lawmakers to increase or at least not cut compensation for their members. Environmentalists worry about the potential rollback of regulations and funding.

"As was shown in the 1990s, there are areas like trade, tax reform, and support for biomedical research that Republicans and Democrats can jointly support," said Rep. Andy Harris, a Baltimore County Republican, referring to deals between Democratic President Bill Clinton and the GOP-led Congress at the time.

But Harris said President Barack Obama has jeopardized the possibility of finding common ground with what he called his "unconstitutional executive overreaching" on immigration and other issues.

Obama and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have signaled a willingness to work together on trade, including deals pending with Asia and Europe. Free trade agreements are often more popular among Republicans than Democrats, who worry they lead to a loss of U.S. jobs.

"Global trade is extremely important to the future of manufacturing," said Michael Galiazzo, president of the Regional Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit association that represents Maryland manufacturers. "Manufacturing in Maryland benefits greatly by doors of opportunity that get opened for us to sell our products overseas."

Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said the group would like to see a trade agreement pending with Pacific Rim countries to loosen Canada's restrictions on poultry imports, for instance. And the group has long raised concerns about safety standards it believes other countries sometimes impose as a form or protectionism.

Other groups are waiting to see if previous GOP proposals will remain priorities now that the party is in control of Congress.

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Md. groups closely watching new Congress, political landscape

DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT Gray-green plateaus and rock formations in a palette of fiery oranges and browns take up much of the landscape on the 400-mile drive from St. George, Utah, to Dinosaur National Monument. Arid and sprawling, it's not the subtropical terrain that made up the late Mesozoic era, but that didn't stop the 5-year-old aspiring paleontologist in the back seat from imagining a hungry allosaurus or herd of sauropods pounding across the land in search of dinner.

"We're in dinosaur land," Theo chanted repeatedly.

Indeed, we had gone to Utah on the trail of dinosaurs. My son's fascination with the giant reptiles began at age 2; three years later, his bedtime stories still feature triceratops and stegosaurus, and the majority of his toy collection can be split into two categories: carnivores and herbivores.

So it seemed like a good time to expose him and his 9-year-old brother, Jack, to the real land of the allosaurus and brachiosaurus. Last spring, the kids, their dad, John, and I set out from Los Angeles to Utah on a seven-day road trip across a craggy, ever-changing landscape to Dinosaur National Monument, the mother ship for any enthusiast of the prehistoric beasts.

Home of the 30-foot-long meat-eating allosaurus (it's the state fossil), Utah has some of the country's richest fossil deposits and what scientists believe is the world's largest concentration of bones of carnivorous dinosaurs. No one knows why they're there, says Ken Carpenter, director of the Utah State University's Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Price. "There's something odd that attracted predators to that site, and then they died," he said.

We managed to squeeze in a few modern-day attractions along our route, but ultimately we all ended up embracing the dinosaur culture right along with Theo. We learned about Andrew Carnegie's role in the Gold Rush-like search for fossils that swept the country in the late 19th century, and found dinosaur links in such unexpected places as Pipe Spring National Monument near the Arizona border and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On a lighter note, we picked up pterodactyl-hunting licenses at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum and snapped photos of the giant pink brachiosaurus statue and other Flintstonesesque kitsch that marks Vernal, the town closest to Dinosaur National Monument.

All in all, it was a vacation full of unexpected discoveries you get only on a road trip that doesn't always follow the map.

St. George, two hours north of Las Vegas, was our first stop. Home to a small museum, the town is known more as the gateway to Zion National Park than as rich dinosaur territory. Yet the Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm is a jackpot for anyone with even a passing interest in the prehistoric world. Built atop a sandstone slab that holds some of the oldest and best preserved dinosaur tracks in the world, it opened in 2008 after a local optometrist, Sheldon Johnson, discovered tracks as he was leveling a hill on his property. Research revealed an early Jurassic lakeside environment with hundreds of tracks left by meat eaters and swimmers, including the footprints and foreleg marks of a crouching dinosaur, one of only five such impressions ever found.

The on-site laboratory makes up the museum's main room; to date, 3,500 tracks have been documented within a 10-acre area surrounding the museum and the beehive of fossil research activity, even on weekends, indicates there are many more discoveries to come.

From St. George, it's a swivelly hour-long drive to Pipe Spring National Monument, once a polygamy outpost for breakaway groups of the Mormon church. Millions of years earlier, the barren landscape also apparently attracted at least a few large theropods, and rangers are happy to guide visitors to their tracks, discovered in 1995, on the half-mile trail that loops behind the 1870s fortified ranch house.

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Hunting Utahraptor and his kin in modern-day Utah

Highway 162 Land
Before land clearing.

By: Nathaniel Cabell

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Highway 162 Land - Video

The Manchester Land Conservation Trust continues to make improvements to the 1-mile portion of the historic Cheney Rail Trail that it owns.

The most recent change came in November, when the group used a grant from the Manchester Road Race committee to buy 260 tons of stone dust to apply to the trail to make running, walking and biking it easier.

Built in 1869, the 2 1/4-mile Cheney Railroad was important to the success of the family's silk mills. Not only did the railroad transport raw materials into and finished goods out of town, it also served as a commuter train for workers living in the north end of Manchester.

The railroad ceased its passenger service in 1933 but continued a freight service into the 1980s.

"It's unique to Manchester," said Susan Barlow, a member of the Manchester Land Conservation Trust and the Manchester Historical Society.

On Jan. 31 at 1 p.m., Barlow will lead a free hike of the rail trail, which takes her imagination back to the time when workers would leave their north end homes and hop on the train to work at the silk mills.

"The fact that the Cheneys had their silk empire and needed this transportation and shelled out the money themselves, it's hard to imagine," Barlow said. "And it's right here in the center of town. It's really quite convenient. We know people use it."

The trail is now used by walkers, runners, hikers, parents with strollers, bikers and others, Barlow said. She even knows of a few people who use the trail to walk to work.

Doug MacGillvary, the land trust's stewardship chairman, managed the installation of the trail's stone dust. The trust acquired its portion of the trail in 2005 and immediately recognized its potential, MacGillvary said.

"When I first got on this board, we were looking at what potential there was for some of these pieces of property that we weren't [being realized]," MacGillvary said. "This was obviously one of them. It was two or three years of nothing happening. It didn't happen overnight. We've been working hard on this."

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Land Trust Continuing To Improve The Cheney Rail Trail