Norway

LONDON - After Norway's terrorist attack, the European police agency Europol is setting up a task force of more than 50 experts to help investigate non-Islamist threats in Scandinavian countries, its spokesman said Saturday. Soeren Pedersen said the group, based in the Hague, hoped to help Norway in the coming weeks and to aid Denmark, Finland, and Sweden in assessing non-Islamist threats. Norway has not requested forensic experts but Europol stands ready to assist, Pedersen said. "There is no doubt that the threat from Islamist terrorism is still valid," he said, adding that the task force could be expanded to include other European nations.

Round-trip APEX air fares to Oslo from New York are currently $775 mid-week and $825 weekends; they drop to $649 across the board on Oct. 1. As part of the air fare, you can get a small-car rental for free when two or more are traveling, or a $50 single supplement, tax and insurance extra. Cars otherwise rent for weekly rates that begin at $119 for the tiniest car and go up to $287 for a large sedan. First-time visitors may want to consider a group-tour package, which might include air fare, bus and boat transportation with escorted sightseeing, lodging and at least some of the meals.

In real life, unfriendly fire from automatic weapons may be just another day at the post office as yet another disgruntled employee goes postal. On the screen, Kevin Costner's ludicrous The Postman may have done even more harm to the mail carrier's public image than all the flying bullets. Now from Norway comes Junk Mail, and while it may not go over big with the postmasters of the world, it's a sharp little black comedy that will please adventurous moviegoers. Roy, the Oslo mailman who tramps along his route blithely discarding whole sacks of letters in railway tunnels and anywhere else that's convenient, is a lost soul.

OSLO, Norway - Norway casts it as the isolated act of a lone-wolf terrorist whose boasts of a far-flung network of anti-Muslim warriors were the fantasies of a deranged mind. European officials at an emergency counterterror meeting see a continent-wide threat from right-wing extremists amid mounting Islamophobia and warn of possible copycats. Two visions of the Norway atrocity emerged Thursday as Europe gropes for answers following the massacre that claimed 78 lives. The twin attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik have stirred questions in Europe about whether authorities have neglected the threat of right-wing extremists in their push to crack down on Islamist terror groups after 9/11.

Clive James once said, "A luxury liner is just a bad play surrounded by water. " Boy, was he right. "The Today cruise," now at its midpoint, will do its third shipboard show today (7 a.m., Channel 3), anchored off the coast of Savannah, Ga. Still ahead are two Florida stops, in Jacksonville and in Miami; left behind, in the Norway's wake, are four days of bad plays. Here, in the third report from The Innocent Aboard, are some of the characters, events and behind-the-scenes scenes from this blatantly atypical excursion.

OSLO, NORWAY - When Anders Behring Breivik launched his assault on the youth campers of Utoya Island, he expected Norway's special forces to swoop down and stop him at any minute. Instead, Delta Force police officers made the 25-mile journey by car - they have no helicopter - then had to be rescued by a civilian craft when their boat broke down as it tried to navigate a one-minute hop to the island. It took police more than 90 minutes to reach the gunman, who by then had mortally wounded 68 people.

OSLO, Norway - When Anders Behring Breivik goes on trial next week, both the prosecution and the defense will say he killed 77 people in a bomb-and-shooting massacre that jolted the world's image of terrorism. The only question now is whether the self-styled anti-Muslim militant was sane when he did it - and after a new psychiatric assessment Tuesday, even that may no longer be in dispute. "Our conclusion is that he [was] not psychotic at the time of the actions of terrorism and he is not psychotic now," Terje Toerrissen, one of the psychiatrists who examined Breivik in prison, told the Associated Press.

Most Americans' knowledge of Norwegian pop music probably starts and ends with A-ha. The gifted singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche, an unabashed A-ha fan, may be the highest profile artist from Norway since that band, which produced "Take on Me" in the mid-'80s. But judging by the turnout of a couple hundred mainly teenage fans at Thursday's Theatre of Living Arts show, he unfortunately hasn't achieved the status of his forebears. With boyish features and tousled hair, Lerche, who has two albums and a handful of EP's under his belt at age 21, appears even younger than his years.

Norway has all kinds of respect for the U.S. women's soccer team. What the Norwegians do not have is fear. Nor should they. After all, only one nation holds an all-time winning record against the United States, and it's Norway, at 18-16-2. So the second-ranked Norwegians enter tonight's quarterfinals of the Women's World Cup in Foxboro, Mass., with confidence that they can beat the top-seeded Americans, just as they did in the 2000 Olympics final. "We've beaten them before, so of course we believe we can," Norway's star forward, Dagny Mellgren, said yesterday.

OSLO, Norway - Anders Behring Breivik hoped to trigger a nationalist revolution in Norway. But his double act of mass murder and destruction seems to have stirred only dignified defiance in this wealthy, idealistic nation renowned for its commitment to peace. The capital's heart remains shattered and cordoned off after Friday's car-bomb blast. Communities up and down this sparsely populated land of fir forests and mist-shrouded fjords have yet to bury their 76 loved ones, most slain as Breivik gunned down defenseless teens and young adults at an island retreat of the governing Labor Party.

Rory McIlroy made five straight birdies down the stretch to overtake Justin Rose and win the Dubai World Championship on Sunday, ending a historic year in which the 23-year-old Northern Irishman won the PGA Championship and the European and PGA tour money titles. The top-ranked McIlroy recovered from early putting woes to finish at 6-under 66 for a total 23-under 265 at the season-ending tournament in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Rose, who was tied for seventh after three rounds, surged down the stretch into contention after shooting a course-record 62 that included an eagle and eight birdies.

Sentencing due in Norway killings OSLO, Norway - The first chapter of a terror case that has haunted Norway for 13 months will end Friday as Anders Behring Breivik receives his judgment for attacks that left 77 people dead and more than 200 injured. After deliberating for two months, a five-judge panel in Oslo's district court will decide whether to send the right-wing extremist to prison or a mental hospital. Breivik, a 33-year-old Norwegian on a mission to expel Muslims from Europe, set off a car bomb that killed eight people outside government headquarters in Oslo and then killed 69 others in a shooting rampage on Utoya island, where young members of the governing Labor Party had gathered for their annual summer camp.

Batman held on to his lofty box-office perch over the weekend, as The Dark Knight Rises clocked in with a gate of a little more than $64 million. Still, that was a 60 percent decline from the film's opening weekend receipts of $160.9 mil. Total take in the first 10 days of release for the final installment in Christopher Nolan 's trilogy now stands at $289 million. That's well behind the initial 10-day total of $313.8 million of its 2008 predecessor, The Dark Knight . Second place in the box-office sweeps went to Ice Age: Continental Drift , with $13.3 million in its third week.

OSLO, Norway - Prosecutors on Thursday asked a court to send confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik to a mental institution instead of prison for his massacre of 77 people in a bomb and shooting rampage. If the court comes to the same conclusion when it issues its ruling, expected next month, it would mean Breivik would avoid criminal responsibility for Norway's worst peacetime massacre. While he could spend the rest of his life in psychiatric care, the attacks at Norway's government headquarters and a youth summer camp would then not be considered acts of political terrorism, but the work of a blood-thirsty madman.

OK, this Justin Bieber thing, it's out of hand. Wednesday night, he was to perform outside the Oslo Opera House, part of his All Around the World TV thing. The result: crowd-control issues that made Beatlemania look like a Quaker meeting, young ladies by the thousands, running amok, arms akimbo, hair awry. Mulling a state of emergency, police begged J-Bieb, huddled in a secluded location, to sing early and calm the feminine vehemence. He did tweet that "u must all listen to the police," which, we're sure, did a lot of good.

OSLO, Norway - An Iraqi man whose brother was killed in Norway's worst peacetime massacre hurled a shoe at the confessed killer and urged him to "go to hell" in a rare outburst Friday that briefly interrupted the terror trial of Anders Behring Breivik. The incident was the first display of anger inside the normally subdued courtroom where the far-right fanatic is being tried for the bomb-and-shooting attacks that left 77 people dead on July 22. Hayder Mustafa Qasim, 20, traveled to Norway from Baghdad to attend the proceedings against Breivik in Oslo's district court, his attorney, Kari Nessa Nordtun, told the Associated Press.

OSLO, Norway - Survivors of a shooting massacre at a youth camp that left 69 people dead in Norway testified Wednesday about their panicked attempts to hide during the rampage, as the court turned down confessed gunman Anders Behring Breivik's request to question them on the stand. Tonje Brenna, a leading member of the Labor Party's youth wing, described how she sought shelter behind rocks on the shore of Utoya island July 22 as her colleagues were shot around her. "I smelled gunpowder," Brenna, 24, told the court.

OSLO, Norway - Witnesses in Norway recounted Thursday how mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik - armed and in police uniform - tricked his way onto a ferry to Utoya island, where he massacred 69 people in a shooting rampage just hours after killing eight people in a bomb attack. Jon Olson, captain of the MS Thorbjoern ferry, told the Oslo District Court about his "angst and full panic" as he frantically tried to contact police about the island attack after his ferry had docked at Utoya.

OSLO, Norway - Norwegians who lost loved ones on Utoya island relived the horror Friday as far-right fanatic Anders Behring Breivik described in harrowing detail how he gunned down teenagers as they fled in panic or froze before him, paralyzed with fear. Survivors and victims' relatives hugged and sobbed during the graphic testimony. "I'm going back to my hometown tonight. My husband, he's going to drive me out to the sea, and I'm going to take a walk there and I'm going to scream my head off," said Christin Bjelland, whose teenage son survived the attack.