Norway

VANCOUVER - It might be a bit soon to think about USA vs. Canada hockey, but, hey, Team USA started early. Right about the second period yesterday, in fact. "I think our guys were guilty, at times, of looking past Norway and thinking about our big game Sunday against Canada," said U.S. coach Ron Wilson. He couldn't blame them. He didn't blame them. His boys, young and fast, were battering the Norwegians, a pre-marquee, 6-1 victim, a team of players without a current NHL stick among them.

OSLO, Norway - Anders Behring Breivik knew it would take practice to be able to slaughter dozens of people before being shot by police. In a chilling account, the far-right fanatic claimed Thursday that he sharpened his aim by playing the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for hours on end. Breivik told an Oslo court that he also took steroids to build physical strength and meditated to "de-emotionalize" himself before the bombing and...

Despite showing no improvement in its defensive game and, at times, appearing as ragged as it had at any time during this tournament, the U.S. Olympic hockey team is still alive. It took a lot longer to settle the issue than expected, but Team USA eventually beat Norway last night, 6-3. As a result, the Americans' hopes of advancing to the medal round will come down to tomorrow night's game at the Saddledome against West Germany. But if they play the way they played last night, against a team that had been outscored by 22-4 and that is 0-4, the Americans are going to have a very difficult task.

If hockey were a department store, the U.S. Olympic Team would have been shopping last night in the bargain basement. Goals appear to be going out of style, at least in these defense-conscious Olympics. But Norway, which proved to be a 6-3 loser, was marked down for quick sale. This American team has a charge card and a Yuppie's gleam in its eye. And if at times it has overextended its credit, its philosophy is, why wait. Truth was, last night the U.S. team had good reason to live for today, or else there wouldn't have been a tomorrow and an all-or-nothing game with West Germany to decide who advances to the medal round.

An American soccer player in Norway was subjected to racial taunts and spit on by fans during a game in Oslo. Robbie Russel, 24, who is black and was born in Amherst, Mass., plays for the Norwegian club Sogndal. "I've experienced racism, but never anything like this," Russel told the state radio network NRK. He said four or five Brann fans on Sunday grabbed his jersey through the fence about 27 minutes into the game. "A woman spit in my face," he said. "The entire time a group of supporters were yelling racist things at me. " Russel was not injured and declined to file a police complaint, choosing to let soccer organizations deal with the matter.

Tiffeny Milbrett accomplished a rare trifecta, hitting the left goal post, the right post and the crossbar. Most important, she also put one in the back of the net. Milbrett scored in the 18th minute and led a dominating performance yesterday as the U.S. women's soccer team opened the defense of its Olympic gold medal with a 2-0 victory over Norway. "That won't happen ever again, I promise," Milbrett said of the trio of near-misses that might someday make a good training drill.

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.

Why has European social democracy been unable to advance further than the welfare state of Scandinavia?" So the political thinker Irving Howe plaintively asked in his 1985 essay, "Thinking about Socialism. " The question seemed odd at the time, and it still does. Why should social democracy want to advance any further? Take Norway, for instance. This little nation is a socialist paradise. No, the Norwegians have not yet abolished private property; that is not a necessary condition for socialism anyway (as Howe himself conceded)

The ultimate surrender to a Norwegian state of mind came three days into a week-long backpacking trek through the barely populated Rondane district: During a nine-hour hiking day, my water bottle went dry around hour six. Everybody else drank liberally from mountain streams, using cups that dangled from their packs, standing midriver and grabbing a few swallows without getting wet in this land without bridges. Americans, however, grow up with stern warnings: Never, ever drink from any river.

A Marine Corps helicopter participating in huge NATO maneuvers off the coast of Norway crashed yesterday, killing two servicemen and leaving six missing, Navy officials said. Two of the 15 people rescued suffered serious injuries, said Lt. Cmdr. Bill Sonntag, a spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet in Norfolk. The names of the victims were being withheld pending notification of relatives. The CH-46 helicopter was operating from the assault ship USS Saipan about 60 miles off the coast of Norway when it crashed west of Bodo, Norway, Sonntag said.