Norway

The Leopard By Jo Nesbø Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett Knopf. 517 pp. $26.95   The horror, the horror. Joseph Conrad knew the savagery simmering in the heart of darkness, and Norwegian noir-master Jo Nesbø returns and returns to it because his mission is to show readers just how depraved human beings can be, and how noirer than noir a Norwegian author can be in this, our global village of crime fiction. At the heart of The Leopard is not a leopard, but a Leopold's Apple - a torture device designed by a 19th-century Belgian to scare the diamonds out of recalcitrant black warlords in the Congo.

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 - Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik belongs in psychiatric care instead of prison, Norwegian prosecutors said Tuesday, after a mental evaluation declared him insane during a bomb-and-shooting rampage that killed 77 people. The court-ordered assessment found that the self-styled anti-Muslim extremist was psychotic during the July 22 attacks, which would make him mentally unfit to be convicted and imprisoned for the country's worst peacetime massacre. The report, written by two psychiatrists who spent 36 hours talking with Breivik, will be reviewed by an expert panel before the Oslo district court rules on his mental state.

OSLO, Norway - Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was ordered to remain in pretrial detention for eight weeks Monday during a closed court hearing in which he was cut off from making statements irrelevant to the case, a judge said. The right-wing extremist has confessed to setting off a bomb in downtown Oslo and massacring dozens at an island youth camp outside the city, killing 77 people on July 22. The Oslo District Court approved a police request to keep Breivik in custody on terror charges for another eight weeks - four in solitary confinement - as they prepare a formal indictment.

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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.

WASHINGTON - President Obama said yesterday that a "lone wolf" terror attack in the U.S. is more likely than a major coordinated effort like the 9/11 attacks nearly a decade ago. With the nation preparing to observe the 10th anniversary of hijacked airliners crashing in New York and Washington and along the Pennsylvania countryside, Obama said the government was in a state of heightened awareness. "The biggest concern we have right now is not the launching of a major terrorist operation, although that risk is always there," the president said in an interview with CNN. "The risk that we're especially concerned over right now is the lone-wolf terrorist, somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide-scale massacres of the sort that we saw in Norway recently," he said.

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 - The anti-Muslim extremist who confessed to a bombing and youth-camp massacre that killed 77 people has told investigators he had considered attacking other targets linked to the government or the prime minister's Labor Party, police said Saturday. During 10 hours of questioning Friday, Anders Behring Breivik asked interrogators how many people he had killed in the July 22 attacks, and "showed no emotion" when they told him, police attorney Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby told reporters.

"Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war. " - "Julius Caesar," Act 3, Scene 1 The dogs of war are snarling. They strain forward, slavering, growling, pawing the air, eager to get at one another, to rend and tear and wet their lips with blood. As strangers in a dog park would, we try to pull them back, to exert control. But you feel your feet sliding beneath you, feel yourself carried, helpless and unwilling, into this fight they mean to have. It strikes you how poor a leash is reason.