Norway

OSLO, Norway - The right-wing extremist who has admitted killing 77 people in Norway's worst peacetime massacre told a court Monday that he deserves a medal of honor for the bloodshed and demanded to be set free. Anders Behring Breivik, 32, smirked as he was led in to the Oslo district court, handcuffed and dressed in a dark suit, for his last scheduled detention hearing before the trial starts in April. He stretched out his arms in what his lawyer Geir Lippestad called "some kind of right-wing extremist greeting.

OSLO, Norway - The man behind the Norway attacks that killed 77 people last month hung up twice on authorities after calling to surrender during the shooting at a youth camp on Utoya island, police said Thursday. The first phone call came 26 minutes before officers arrested Anders Behring Breivik, who identified himself as the commander in an anticommunist resistance movement, police said. "I am at Utoya at the moment. I want to surrender," he said, according to a transcript distributed at a news conference.

OSLO, Norway - Prison psychiatrists monitoring confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik say he is not psychotic and has not been put on medication, a prosecutor said in a court filing Wednesday, adding fuel to calls to reassess whether he is legally insane. The original finding of insanity by two court-appointed psychiatrists has been fiercely debated by mental-health experts, and several lawyers representing the victims of the massacre that rocked Norway have demanded the Oslo District Court order a second evaluation.

OSLO, Norway - It is unlikely that the right-wing extremist who admitted killing dozens in Norway last week will be declared legally insane, because he appears to have been in control of his actions, the head of the panel that will review his psychiatric evaluation said. The decision on Anders Behring Breivik's mental state will determine whether he can be held criminally liable and punished with a prison sentence or sent to a psychiatric ward for treatment. The July 22 attacks were so carefully planned and executed that it would be difficult to argue they were the work of a delusional madman, said Tarjei Rygnestad, who heads the Norwegian Board of Forensic Medicine.

OSLO, Norway - When Anders Behring Breivik began his assault on the campers of Utoya island, he expected Norway's special forces to swoop down and stop him 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.

Question: We plan to visit Norway, land of my husband's ancestors. Are railpasses available there? T.H., Woodstown, N.J. Answer: Visitors to Norway - including those headed for the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer in February - should consider railpasses if they plan to be moving around the country to any extent. Several kinds are available: Nordturist Pass. Good for 21 days of unlimited travel by train throughout Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Also valid on ferries between Oslo- Copenhagen and Stockholm-Helsinki.

Per Schreiner has worked in the planning department of the Ministry of Finance since oil was discovered in the depths of the North Sea in the mid- 1970s, and Norway's golden economic era began. He and a few other economic analysts warned then that the good times would not last, and that steps ought to be taken to guarantee Norway's economic health should oil production falter or the price of oil go down. But the government and ordinary folks alike went on a spending spree, anyway, with houses, cars and foreign imports for the people, and expanded public budgets for the politicians.

OSLO, Norway - Exactly 100 people were shot, some up to eight times, before the gunman surrendered to police. Of the 69 killed, 56 were shot in the head. One drowned; another fell off a cliff in desperate attempts to flee the mayhem. The indictment unveiled Wednesday against confessed killer and rightist extremist Anders Behring Breivik describes the horror unleashed on a political youth camp July 22 with gruesome detail. "Panic and mortal fear in children, youth, and adults arose during the shooting, further intensified by the fact that there were limited possibilities of escape or hiding," prosecutors said in a 19-page document charging Breivik with terrorism and premeditated murder.

Danes and Swedes, Norway's friendly-neighbor rivals for the tourist dollar, like to tell a story about an airline pilot readying his passengers for arrival in Oslo: "Prepare for landing. Please fasten your seat belts, extinguish cigarettes, return seats to an upright position - and set your watches back 20 years. " Quite naturally, the type of visitor most likely to love this rugged land of the Vikings will appreciate not only what Norway has, but what it has not. Among affluent nations, Norway has some of the lowest rates of crime, unemployment, suicide and drug abuse.

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.