Norway | featured news

The first clue that things are done very differently on Bastoy prison island, which lies a couple of miles off the coast in the Oslo fjord, 46 miles south-east of Norway's capital, comes shortly after I board the prison ferry. I'm taken aback slightly when the ferry operative who welcomed me aboard just minutes earlier, and with whom I'm exchanging small talk about the weather, suddenly reveals he is a serving prisoner – doing 14 years for drug smuggling. He notes my surprise, smiles, and takes off a thick glove before offering me his hand. "I'm Petter," he says.

A Norwegian art gallery lost a Rembrandt etching worth up to $8,600 in the mail after trying to save money on courier and insurance costs, the gallery's chief said Thursday.

Anxious to prove he's not insane, confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik told a court Monday that questions about his mental health are part of a racist plot to discredit his extreme anti-Muslim ideology.

Anders Behring Breivik, who admits killing 77 people in Norway last summer, used the video game "Modern Warfare 2" as training, he testified Thursday.

Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik defended his massacre of 77 people, insisting Tuesday he would do it all again and calling his rampage the most "spectacular" attack by a nationalist militant since World War II.

The terror trial against an anti-Muslim fanatic who confessed to killing 77 people in Norway starts Monday amid worries that he will use the proceedings to showcase his radical views.

The right-wing extremist who confessed to killing 77 people in a bomb and shooting rampage in Norway is not criminally insane, a psychiatric assessment found Tuesday, contradicting an earlier examination.

It seems as if violence is everywhere, but it's really on the run. Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon.

Held tightly on a police leash, the Norwegian man who confessed to killing 69 people at an island youth camp has reconstructed his actions for police back at the crime scene.

It's unlikely that the right-wing extremist who admitted killing dozens in Norway last week will be declared legally insane, according to the chief of the Norwegian Board of Forensic Medicine.