Paper

WASHINGTON - The massive leaks about U.S. spying systems caused sharp political and legal aftershocks Tuesday as the Justice Department prepared to file criminal charges against Edward Snowden, a government contractor who has publicly admitted disclosing highly classified telephone and Internet data-gathering operations. The vast scope of the government surveillance sparked the first federal lawsuit challenging its legality, a bipartisan effort in the Senate to declassify secret court orders that authorize the operations, and requests from Google and Facebook for permission to disclose more about National Security Agency requests for users' emails and other online communications.

Where there's smoke arising from a free-speech matter, you're likely to find the fiery attorney Floyd Abrams. He's blazed a trail for freedom of the press from the Pentagon Papers case to protecting reporters' sources. He's just as incendiary when he's fighting forced warning labels on cigarettes and championing the Citizens United court decision. Abrams' memoir, " Friend of the Court ," arrives as news media and government are again at loggerheads over reporters' phone records and revelations-by-leak of widespread domestic surveillance - all burning issues for him. What do you think about the NSA leaks?

Nearly 1.5 miles beneath Earth's surface in Canada, scientists have found pockets of water that have been isolated from the outside world for more than 1 billion years. The ancient water, trapped in thin fissures in granite-like rock, has been bubbling up from a zinc and copper mine for decades in Timmins, Ontario. Only recently have scientists been able to calculate the age of this water and determine that it is the oldest ever discovered - possibly as old as 2.6 billion years, when Earth was less than half its current age. And it may harbor life.

The Los Angeles Police Department investigates incidents involving the use of force by officers in a way that makes it difficult in most cases for the city's police watchdog to evaluate the thoroughness of those investigations, according to a recent report. Alex Bustamante, the inspector general for the L.A. Police Commission, presented the oversight board with a detailed report Tuesday examining how LAPD officials deal with incidents involving less serious uses of force by officers.

An Ohio court has said that starting Monday, it will accept new case filings only from people who bring their own paper. Judge Lee McClelland of Morrow County Municipal Court in north-central Ohio said that the court has just enough paper to handle hearing notices and other documents for pending cases and cannot afford to order any more. The county, McClelland said, still hasn't paid the bill for basic supplies the court ordered in November.

LAREDO, Texas -- A recent wave of kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo was prominently featured in a recent Sunday edition of El Mañana, one of the largest and most long-standing Spanish-language newspapers on the border. But the story carried no byline, and no residents were quoted or pictured. "People don't want to go out for interviews - they say, 'No, we may get kidnapped,'" said Ninfa Cantú Deándar, who runs the paper with her siblings. Because of threats from Mexican cartels, the paper - published in the twin cities of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas - is operating very differently these days.

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Paper has gone far beyond its original use as a writing material since being invented in China in 105 A.D. With each person in the United States using about 700 pounds of paper a year, paper is used in thousands of products ranging from books and newspapers to money, construction materials and, of course, election ballots in the United States.

Germs that reside on doctors' lab coats, nurses' uniforms and hospital bed curtains are known to contribute to an unacceptably high rate of hospital-acquired infections. And that's just for starters. It turns out that papers passed around hospital offices, labs and patient rooms are potent transmitters of germs too. The fact that paper can carry bacteria is not a surprise. Other studies have demonstrated how filthy paper money is. The new study , however, makes clear that hospitals need to treat paper-transmitted bacteria seriously because the germs transfer from hand to paper so easily.

A few years ago, I corresponded with a young Chinese American man who complained that his grandparents didn't treat his father and him like the rest of the family. I asked if his father might have been a "paper son" -- someone who had come to this country from China using papers claiming false U.S. citizenship and often false blood ties. My correspondent had never heard the term, but he asked his father, and it turned out I was right. I met the young man a few days later, and he was devastated.

Henry Bouldin could not bear to watch the Angels, not after the team was swept by the lowly Houston Astros. So, as he sat behind home plate for Tuesday's game against the Chicago Cubs, the Angels fan wore a paper bag over his head. Until the seventh inning, that is, when the Angels ordered him to take it off. "Security just showed up out of nowhere," Bouldin said Wednesday. "They said you can't wear anything over your head. " That indeed is the Angels' policy, team spokesman Tim Mead said.

Ruth "Uncle Ruthie" Buell, who lives in L.A.'s Pico-Robertson neighborhood, had a thought one day. Actually, the thoughts are always bubbling over with her, but this one was particularly inspired. Why not replace the rotting tree stumps in her frontyard with benches as a way of inviting neighbors to take a breather, talk and get to know one another? That was Part One of the idea, which took shape about two months ago. Part Two was a note to visitors from Uncle Ruthie - who has graced the planet for 82 years - encouraging them to take pen and paper from pouches pinned to the tree and share their thoughts.

At age 59, Rita Kowalski decided she wanted to use the computer for more than emailing her kids and looking up salmon recipes. Forty-two years after she dropped out of high school to start a family, Kowalski, now a grandmother of 12, is using it to get her high school equivalency credential. "I perked up because I can look straight at the computer," Kowalski said. "My attention span is shorter with books for some reason, but I can look at the screen for hours and it doesn't seem to bother me. " After decades of pencil-to-paper test sheets, California this year became the latest state to launch the General Educational Development test, known as the GED, in a computer format.

LAREDO, Texas -- A recent wave of kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo was prominently featured in a recent Sunday edition of El Mañana, one of the largest and most long-standing Spanish-language newspapers on the border. But the story carried no byline, and no residents were quoted or pictured. "People don't want to go out for interviews - they say, 'No, we may get kidnapped,'" said Ninfa Cantú Deándar, who runs the paper with her siblings. Because of threats from Mexican cartels, the paper - published in the twin cities of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas - is operating very differently these days.

Marco Breuer practices photography in a sculptural, performative sense, redefining the medium as physical and primal through embossing, scratching and scraping, burning, scoring and sanding. Diane Rosenstein included the New York-based artist in the gallery's inaugural group show earlier this year, and follows up now with a stunning career survey of nearly 50 works from the mid-'90s to the present. Breuer uses many of the raw ingredients of conventional photography (light-sensitive paper, time, light itself)

California unions are increasing their opposition to any sale of the Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Co. newspapers to the Koch brothers, urging the City Council to oppose such a deal and planning a protest for Tuesday. Charles and David Koch, wealthy siblings who fund conservative causes, are said to be interested in buying the newspapers. Two union leaders sent a letter to members of the Los Angeles City Council on Monday night, urging members to speak out against the Koch brothers and to consider divesting pension funds from firms that own The Times if the newspaper is sold to the men. “The Koch Brothers' America is one not consistent with the policies and values of the city of Los Angeles,” said the letter, signed by Art Pulaski of the California Labor Federation and Maria Elena Durazo of the Los Angeles Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.

It's rare to look at a drawing and think you're looking at a painting. It's even rarer to look at a work on paper and think you're in the presence of a sculpture. That's what happens at L.A. Louver, where British artist Richard Deacon is having his fifth solo show in Los Angeles. Among the most talented sculptors working today, the protean artist uses materials in such unexpected ways that his works make you shed expectations and see the world with fresh eyes. In Deacon's last four exhibitions, he has used clay, titanium and rubber, as well as wood, bronze and aluminum, to make wonderfully puzzling, sensually satisfying and intellectually invigorating sculptures.

It's the day after Christmas and all through the house, so much wrapping paper is spilling and suffocating my spouse. Here in Los Angeles, as in much of the rest of the United States, we recycle. Today our blue bins overflow with the paper and cardboard memory of our Christmas of abundance and good cheer. Across our city, and in many other distant cities, the bins of many book buyers overflow with the ubiquitous boxes and plastic cushions with which Amazon.com ships its products.

Records from the estate in Cuba where Ernest Hemingway wrote many of his most famous books have been digitized and brought to the United States, the Associated Press reports . The materials will be held at Boston's John F. Kennedy Library, which holds a Hemingway collection of over 100,000 pages. The Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation -- named after the estate near Havana where Hemingway lived from 1939 to 1960 -- has been working in Cuba to preserve the papers, books, and belongings that have remained at the house since the Nobel Prize-winner died in 1961.  The foundation was started by Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Hemingway's editor Maxwell Perkins.

This is a work on paper: on studio white seamless paper, normally a backdrop used in film shoots. There's a black frame painted with latex house paint, then inside is this citron-tinted low-luster enamel paint. I'm the ultimate film nerd, so I saw the yellow shape as a film screen right away because it's exact same ratio as a 16- or 35-millimeter film projection. Someone else might just see as a yellow rectangle. INTERACTIVE: It Speaks to Me series   But the other thing that connects it to film is a sense of duration.