Book publishers and authors in most countries outside the US won a significant concession late on Friday as Google and American book industry representatives agreed to make changes to their landmark digital books settlement.

The amendments, disclosed in a legal filing in New York close to midnight on Friday, were made after strong objections from the governments of Germany and France, as well as complaints from book industry representatives from a number of other countries, including China.

Other revisions disclosed on Friday reflected complaints from the US Department of Justice, which had warned that the original plan raised "significant legal concerns". Its fears included the risk that the deal would give Google an effective monopoly in the emerging digital books business.

The new plan was immediately criticised as a "sleight of hand" by the Open Book Alliance, a consortium of Google's opponents including Microsoft and Amazon.

"None of the proposed changes appear to address the fundamental flaws illuminated by the Department of Justice and other critics that impact public interest," said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, which is creating its own online digital archive.

If the revised deal wins court approval, it will make millions of out-of-print works that could previously only be found in a handful of university research libraries available online. While objecting to some aspects of the original plan, which was reached a year ago, the US justice department had applauded the settlement's aim, since it had "the potential to breathe life into millions of works that are now effectively off limits to the public".

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan -- The mullahs stared silently at the screen. They shifted in their chairs and fiddled with pencils. Koranic verses flashed above them, but the topic was something that made everybody a little uncomfortable.

"A baby should be breast-fed for at least 21 months," said the instructor. "Milk is safe inside the breast. Dust and germs can't get inside."

It was a seminar on birth control, a likely subject for a nation whose fertility rate of 6 children per woman is the highest in Asia. But the audience was unusual: 10 Islamic religious leaders from this city and its suburbs, wearing turbans and sipping tea.

The message was simple. Babies are good, but not too many; wait two years before having another to give your wife's body a chance to recover. Nothing in Islam expressly forbids birth control. But it does emphasize procreation, and mullahs, like leaders of other faiths, consider children to be blessings from God, and are usually the most determined opponents of having fewer of them.

[...]

The mullahs were reluctant participants. Truth be told, they were paid to show up. But surprisingly, they seemed to emerge from the session invigorated.

SAN DIEGO -- A long-running legal battle over whether to evict a colony of harbor seals that inexplicably took over a popular beach here like a gaggle of tourists overstaying their welcome appeared closer than ever to ending Friday when a judge ruled that they can stay put.

For more than a decade, the seals, dozens of them lounging and lollygagging on a La Jolla beach, have delighted tourists and animal lovers. But they have also irked swimmers and others who are concerned about the waste they produce contaminating the azure waters and their potential for drawing sharks.

People on both sides of the issue battled in state and federal court, winning at one point conflicting rulings, over whether the city should be forced to shoo them away because their chosen spot, a cove known as Children's Pool, was set aside in 1931 for young beachgoers under the terms of a trust that deeded the land to the city.

But a state law that takes effect on Jan. 1 gives the city broad discretion to maintain the beach as it sees fit, and the City Council has indicated that it favors keeping the seals. The state law was drafted at the urging of the city attorney's office.

Judge Timothy B. Taylor of Superior Court, overruling a previous order by a predecessor in the case to disperse the seals, ruled Friday that given the new law, there was no point in kicking the seals out now.

Swastika Christmas tree ornaments, "Germanic" cookies and made-up traditions: A new exhibition highlights how the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas. But their attempts to hijack a festival that began with the birth of a Jewish child weren't entirely successful.

It all started innocently enough. Back in the mid-1970s, Rita Breuer began collecting old German Christmas ornaments after her husband expressed the desire for a good old-fashioned Christmas tree like his grandmother used to have. Breuer, who hails from the small town of Olpe, 60 kilometers from Cologne, scoured flea markets and raided friends' attics in the search for baubles and came to accumulate quite a collection which included not only tree ornaments, but also Advent calendars, cribs and Christmas cards.

But then something strange happened. Breuer, who was now being helped in her quest by her daughter Judith, came across more and more objects that didn't fit with the usual peaceful image of Christmas, such as World War I-era miniature soldiers, bombs and hand grenades designed to hang on the tree. The Breuers started to get interested in how Christmas had been abused for propaganda purposes over the years, most blatantly by the Nazis. Their hobby turned into a full-fledged amateur research project.

10  Photos Photo Gallery: How the Third Reich Celebrated Christmas

Now, more than 30 years after Rita Breuer first began collecting Christmas knickknacks, selected objects from the family collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Center in Cologne. The exhibition, which looks at the history of Christmas and propaganda from the 19th century until the present day, focuses on how the Nazis misused Christmas for their own foul purposes and tried to turn it into a "Germanic" winter solstice festival.

"Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis -- after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child," Judith Breuer, who helped prepare the exhibition and co-authored the accompanying book with her mother, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian."

Interestingly enough, my wife and I went along to see this exhibition yesterday. The scope is even broader than the Spiegel indicates, ranging from the imperial era to the 70s. Although - understandably, given the venue - the Nazi era makes up the greatest part.

Perhaps the most unexpected piece on exhibit is an actual CARE package that was found, unopened(!), in 1999. The 2 lb can of coffee alone would have been a windfall for postwar Germany.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman