An innocent man says he was visited by sheriff's deputies who pointed guns in his face and told him he was lucky they didn't kill him.

Connor Guerrero, a recent college graduate, says he was disturbed in his home recently when strange men began sneaking around his yard and pointing flashlights in his windows, giving him cause for alarm.

Guerrero assumed he was being scoped out by burglars and that this could be a "dangerous situation" for him. He attempted to deter the prowlers by banging on the door to declare his presence.

He then peeked out the door to survey his yard.

As drivers prove their innocence at warrantless police checkpoints this New Year, they will not only be scrutinized over their potential consumption of alcohol. A new technology will enable the police to detect and arrest drivers for having marijuana, narcotics, and "other drugs" in their bloodstreams.

The recently unveiled device is a portable saliva swab analyzer, capable of immediately sampling body fluids for the presence of foreign intoxicants. The machines were paid for by grants from the state.

"Traditionally, our office has focused on drunken driving cases," Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said."We're expanding drug collection and aggressively enforcing all impaired-driving laws."

An Israeli human rights organisation has accused the government of torturing Palestinian children after it emerged some were kept for months in outdoor cages during winter.

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) published a report which said children suspected of minor crimes were subjected to "public caging", threats and acts of sexual violence and military trials without representation.

It came as the government's Public Petitions Committee held a hearing to discuss the issue, which the PCATI said must be addressed with a change to the law.

The country's Public Defender's Office (PDO) recently released details of one particularly shocking visit by its lawyers to a detention facility.

"During our visit, held during a fierce storm that hit the state, attorneys met detainees who described to them a shocking picture: in the middle of the night dozens of detainees were transferred to the external iron cages built outside the IPS transition facility in Ramla," the PDO wrote on its website.

"It turns out that this procedure, under which prisoners waited outside in cages, lasted for several months, and was verified by other officials."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1

In Harold Ramis' classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, TV weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is forced to live the same day over and over again until he not only gains some insight into his life but changes his priorities. Similarly, as I illustrate in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we in the emerging American police state find ourselves reliving the same set of circumstances over and over again - egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc. - although with far fewer moments of comic hilarity.

What remains to be seen is whether 2014 will bring more of the same or whether "we the people" will wake up from our somnambulant states. Indeed, when it comes to civil liberties and freedom, 2013 was far from a banner year. The following is just a sampling of what we can look forward to repeating if we don't find some way to push back against the menace of an overreaching, aggressive, invasive, militarized government and restore our freedoms.

Government spying

It's hard to understand how anyone could be surprised by the news that the National Security Agency has been systematically collecting information on all telephone calls placed in the United States, and yet the news media have treated it as a complete revelation. Nevertheless, such outlandish government spying been going on domestically since the 1970s, when Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA's breaches, warned the public against allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers "at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide." Recent reports indicate that the NSA, in conjunction with the CIA and FBI, has actually gone so far as to intercept laptop computers ordered online in order to install spyware on them.

On December 31st of 2011, I wrote a short article predicting that the world was not going to end in 2012 as so many people wanted it to. I pointed out that there had been a lot of "Ends of the World" predicted throughout history and the 2012 bouhaha wasn't much different. In fact, you can almost take it to the bank that if somebody is predicting it, it isn't going to happen because once a prediction is made, people begin to act differently and that changes the outcome. Just think about Jonah prophesying destruction on the city of Nineveh and how upset he was when God supposedly changed his mind because the people got their act together and repented of their evil-doing, whatever it was.

On the other hand, there does seem to be something to this predicting business, but not many people get it right. Just think about the Fundie cult that was predicting the end of the world to happen in mid-March of 2011. The world, as a whole, didn't end, of course, but life as they knew it did end for a whole lot of people in Japan thanks to an impressive earthquake and tsunami.

So, we made it through 2012 and now, we've got another year notched on our belt in addition: we made it through 2013 and the world still hasn't ended. Or has it?

A Pennsylvania State Trooper has been placed on unpaid leave after being charged for using pepper spray to punish his girlfriend's 13-year-old son for sleeping instead of going to school.

WTAE first reported that Trooper Ernest Boatright found the teen in bed earlier this year when he was supposed to be in school and discharged pepper spray into his eyes, according to court papers.

The boy told police that he began to cough and knew that it was pepper spray because Boatright had used the spray on him before.

Court records indicated that Boatright had admitted using pepper spray on two cats on an enclosed porch, but his attorney said that the trooper "vehemently denies the charges that have been filed against him."

The shooting deaths of four family members at a Fontana home is being investigated as an apparent murder-suicide, police said Tuesday.

A relative discovered the bodies Monday night after family members failed to hear from the victims and thought something might be wrong, according to Martha Guzman-Hurtado, a Fontana police spokeswoman. Inside the home were the bodies of a man and a woman, both believed to be between 30 and 35, as well as the bodies of a 12-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy. Coroner's officials have not yet released their names.

Police said the woman and children each died of multiple gunshot wounds, while the man had a single gunshot wound to the head, suggesting that he shot himself. One handgun was found inside the home, authorities said.

Guzman-Hurtado said there was no record of domestic dispute calls to the residence, although police did visit the property on a code enforcement call in 2010.

A Chinese doctor has admitted in court that she stole babies from the hospital where she worked and sold them to human traffickers, state media and a court said.

Zhang Shuxia, a locally respected and soon-to-retire obstetrician, stood trial on Monday in northern Shaanxi province's Fuping county, according to online postings from the court.

Zhang told parents their newborns had congenital problems and persuaded them to "sign and give the babies up," the court postings said. Calls to the Weinan Intermediate People's Court and the local Communist Party propaganda department went unanswered.

The case exposed the operations of a baby trafficking ring that operated across several provinces centering on Zhang, who delivered babies at the Fuping County Maternal and Child Hospital.

Child trafficking is a big problem in China, despite severe legal punishments that include the death penalty. Families who buy trafficked children are driven partly by the traditional preference for male heirs, a strict one-child policy and ignorance of the law.

A flute virtuoso was returning to New York via John F. Kennedy Airport when Customs officials confiscated and destroyed the instruments he was carrying with him.

According to Boujemaa Razgui, the officials told him that his 11 flutes - each of which he had constructed, by hand, himself - "were agricultural products and had to be destroyed."

Razgui, who is a Canadian citizen, frequently travels with a variety of flutes, each of which is designed to be played with a specific ancient or modern genre in mind.

A Pittsburgh woman is suing authorities after she had to have her arm amputated because police officers used 'excessive force' while they arrested her and refused to give her access to a doctor.

The mother-of-three, Amy Needham, 35, of Ross, says the officers entered her home to execute an arrest warrant for failing to show up to a preliminary hearing.

When sheriff's office employees arrived, Needham said she was using the bathroom, but they broke down the bathroom door.

They shocked her with a Taser, applied arm bars and wrist locks, and put on handcuffs 'that were too tight' before taking her to Allegheny County Jail, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

According to her attorney, Marvin Leibowitz, the tight handcuffs caused her to suffer compartment syndrome, a limb- and life-threatening condition that occurs after an injury.