Interdisciplinary Review of General, Forensic, Prison and Military Psychiatry and Psychology and the related subjects of Behavior and Law with the occasional notes and comments by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova).
Norwegian gunman says pain of losing touch with his family is like grief of victims’ families
Stian Lysberg Solum, POOL/Associated Press - Defendant Anders Behring Breivik waits in court at the start of the 5th day of his mass killing trial in Oslo, Norway on Friday. Confessed mass murderer Breivik testified Thursday in a chilling account of his preparations for the massacre of 77 people.
By Associated Press, Published: April 22 | Updated: Monday, April 23, 7:07 AMAP
OSLO, Norway — The right-wing extremist who confessed to a massacre of 77 people in Norway compared on Monday the pain he caused the families of his victims to his own situation, saying he lost contact with his friends and family after the July 22 attacks.
Anders Behring Breivik, 33, showed no remorse as he continued his shocking testimony about his shooting spree at the annual summer youth camp of the governing Labor Party.
Calling the rampage “necessary,” Breivik compared being shunned by those close to him to the grief of the bereaved.
“The only difference was that for my part it was a choice,” he said.
Breivik has confessed to the bombing and shooting rampage but rejects criminal guilt, saying the victims had betrayed their country by embracing immigration. Even the defense admits there is virtually no chance of an acquittal, so the key issue to be determined in the trial is whether Breivik is criminally insane.
Two pscychiatric examinations reached opposite conclusions on that point. Breivik himself insists he is sane, and accuses the prosecutors of trying to make him look irrational.
“I know I’m at risk of ending up at an insane asylum, and I’m going to do what I can to avoid that,” he told the court.
Breivik became defensive as prosecutors quizzed him about sections of the 1,500-page manifesto he posted online before the attacks. It describes uniforms, medals, greetings and codes of conduct for the “Knights Templar” militant group that he claims to belong to. Prosecutors don’t believe it exists.
In one section, read by prosecutor Svein Holden, Breivik speculated that in his future society, the loyalty of potential knights might be tested by asking them to undergo surgical amputation and castration. Breivik chastised the prosecutor for what he called “low blows” and said the segment was taken out of context.
The self-styled crusader apologized to the family of a pub owner who was among the eight people killed in the blast outside the government offices in Oslo, saying it was not his intention to kill “civilians.”
Holden asked him if he wanted to express a similar apology to the families of the other victims, including the 69 killed on the youth camp on Utoya island.
“No I don’t,” Breivik said. “Utoya is a political indoctrination camp.”
“I see all multicultural political activists as monsters, as evil monsters who wish to eradicate our people, our ethnic group, our culture and our country,” he said.
Jon Hestnes, who heads a support group for victim’s families and survivors, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that Breivik’s apology was “pathetic.”
Speaking calmly, Breivik said he used a handgun to kill victims if the distance was less than 10 meters. Otherwise he used his rifle.
Asked why he spared one man who survived the shooting spree, Breivik said he thought it was because the man’s appearance made him look “right wing-oriented.”
“When I looked at him I saw myself,” Breivik said. “I think that was the reason that I didn’t fire shots at him.”
If found sane Breivik would face 21 years in prison though he can be held longer if deemed a danger to society. If sentenced to psychiatric care, in theory he would be released once he’s no longer deemed psychotic and dangerous.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
You have no doubt heard of journal "rankings." A journal's rank conveys information about the impact and quality of a journal. This can be useful information for both authors and consumers. An author might want to consider a journal's prestige, and the difficulty getting published in it. For consumers -- including expert witnesses who might be relying on a particular article in court -- ranking can serve as a proxy for the accuracy and reliability of a journal's content. How much should the trier of fact trust the information in this journal?
But there are lots of methods for ranking journals -- the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor, the h-index, just to name a few. And with the proliferation of journals in forensic psychology, it gets hard to keep track. Which journals have the best reputations? Which are the most cited? Which provide the broadest coverage of forensic psychology topics?
One popular way to rank-order journals is based on reference counts. How many times a journal is cited is an indicator of its reputation. In forensic psychology, according to an unpublished study by S. Black, the top-referenced journals are (in rank order):
Law and Human Behavior
Behavioral Sciences and the Law
British Journal of Psychiatry
Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology
American Journal of Psychiatry
Criminal Justice and Behavior
Now, a researcher with training in both psychology and library science has taken a somewhat different approach, devising a clever content-analysis procedure to rank-order journals in our field.
Chris Piotrowski started by screening several texts in the field and choosing terms that are popular both in research and practice. The 16 terms were: eyewitness testimony, competency to stand trial, alcoholic blackouts, infanticide, sentencing, forensic evaluations, polygraph, malingering, jury selection, homicide, diminished capacity, insanity defense, child abuse, Daubert standard, child custody and expert witness.
Next he used PsycNET, "the recognized major bibliographic resource in the social and behavioral sciences that indexes scholarly and professional journals," to run keyword searches on his 16 terms. For each search term, he rank-ordered journals based on the frequency of hits; a journal's total ranking was obtained by summing across all 16 terms.
The winners were (in rank order):
Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law
PsycCRITIQUES (formerly, Contemporary Psychology)
Law and Human Behavior
Behavioral Sciences and the Law
American Journal of Forensic Psychology
Journal of Psychiatry and Law
Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law
Mental & Physical Disability Law Reporter
American Journal of Psychiatry
American Psychologist
Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice
International Journal of Psychiatry and Law
Journal of Criminal Justice
Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
Journal of Applied Psychology
Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology
Psychological Reports
British Journal of Psychology
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law
I would be a little cautious about relying on this method, because the choice of keywords -- which is open to manipulation -- might influence the rankings. But as you can see, there is overlap between this method and the more traditional citation-count method used by Black. For instance, Law and Human Behavior and Behavioral Sciences and the Law made it into the top four, no matter which method was used. There are some noticeable differences as well, with several journals that were highly cited in Black's study not ranking high using this content analysis method.
For more information on the method and the exact scores for each journal, feel free to contact Dr. Piotrowski (HERE); I'm sure he will be happy to share a copy of the article, which is published in the current issue of the American Journal of Forensic Psychology.
Oh, in case you were wondering, that journal is number five on his list.
The article is: Top cited journals in forensic psychology: An analysis of the psychological literature (2012), American Journal of Forensic Psychology 30 (2), 29-38.
Law and Human Behavior; Behavioral Sciences and the Law; British Journal of Psychiatry; Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology; American Journal of Psychiatry; Criminal Justice and Behavior. Now, a researcher ...
When he walks in to court flashing a right-wing salute. When he testifies effortlessly about killing their children, brothers and sisters as if they were flies.
State prison healthcare still needs independent oversight, report says Los Angeles Times The report also raised concerns about high spending on inmate health, citing a 2010 national survey showing California spent $16000 per inmate for medical, mental and dental care -- at least three times the national average. Spending on medical care ...
Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act (which is already inadequate, but at least it's a step) does not apply to ICE detention centers, which means that there is almost no meaningful steps taken to end the sexual abuse of prisoners.
You have no doubt heard of journal "rankings." A journal's rank conveys information about the impact and quality of a journal. This can be useful information for both authors and consumers. An author might want to consider a journal's prestige, and the difficulty getting published in it. For consumers -- including expert witnesses who might be relying on a particular article in court -- ranking can serve as a proxy for the accuracy and reliability of a journal's content. How much should the trier of fact trust the information in this journal?
But there are lots of methods for ranking journals -- the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor, the h-index, just to name a few. And with the proliferation of journals in forensic psychology, it gets hard to keep track. Which journals have the best reputations? Which are the most cited? Which provide the broadest coverage of forensic psychology topics?
One popular way to rank-order journals is based on reference counts. How many times a journal is cited is an indicator of its reputation. In forensic psychology, according to an unpublished study by S. Black, the top-referenced journals are (in rank order):
Law and Human Behavior
Behavioral Sciences and the Law
British Journal of Psychiatry
Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology
American Journal of Psychiatry
Criminal Justice and Behavior
Now, a researcher with training in both psychology and library science has taken a somewhat different approach, devising a clever content-analysis procedure to rank-order journals in our field.
Chris Piotrowski started by screening several texts in the field and choosing terms that are popular both in research and practice. The 16 terms were: eyewitness testimony, competency to stand trial, alcoholic blackouts, infanticide, sentencing, forensic evaluations, polygraph, malingering, jury selection, homicide, diminished capacity, insanity defense, child abuse, Daubert standard, child custody and expert witness.
Next he used PsycNET, "the recognized major bibliographic resource in the social and behavioral sciences that indexes scholarly and professional journals," to run keyword searches on his 16 terms. For each search term, he rank-ordered journals based on the frequency of hits; a journal's total ranking was obtained by summing across all 16 terms.
The winners were (in rank order):
Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law
PsycCRITIQUES (formerly, Contemporary Psychology)
Law and Human Behavior
Behavioral Sciences and the Law
American Journal of Forensic Psychology
Journal of Psychiatry and Law
Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law
Mental & Physical Disability Law Reporter
American Journal of Psychiatry
American Psychologist
Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice
International Journal of Psychiatry and Law
Journal of Criminal Justice
Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
Journal of Applied Psychology
Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology
Psychological Reports
British Journal of Psychology
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law
I would be a little cautious about relying on this method, because the choice of keywords -- which is open to manipulation -- might influence the rankings. But as you can see, there is overlap between this method and the more traditional citation-count method used by Black. For instance, Law and Human Behavior and Behavioral Sciences and the Law made it into the top four, no matter which method was used. There are some noticeable differences as well, with several journals that were highly cited in Black's study not ranking high using this content analysis method.
For more information on the method and the exact scores for each journal, feel free to contact Dr. Piotrowski (HERE); I'm sure he will be happy to share a copy of the article, which is published in the current issue of the American Journal of Forensic Psychology.
Oh, in case you were wondering, that journal is number five on his list.
The article is: Top cited journals in forensic psychology: An analysis of the psychological literature (2012), American Journal of Forensic Psychology 30 (2), 29-38.
The trial of the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik has been a field day in the international media, with Breivik's ice-cold bearing and callous statements playing to the headlines. For many of the journalists inside the courtroom, however, the first couple of days in Oslo were disappointing in terms of actual information.
The accused appeared to have no reason to worry about a gruelling cross examination. Often, the prosecution's questions resembled those that would be asked by psychologists, inquiring after his mental state. Although Breivik is one of the worst terrorists in Europe since the Second World War, perhaps the need to understand his actions has been greater than the urge to hold him accountable.
But as the trial resumed on Friday, news broke that the Bosnian investigative weekly Sloboda Bosna had named Breivik's mystery Serbian contact as Milorad Pelemis, a war criminal who participated in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. Should this connection turn out to be true, it would be a vital piece of the puzzle of Breivik's international connections and the ideological underpinnings of the murders of 77 people in Oslo and Utoya in July.
In court, Breivik had explained that the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999 was "the straw that broke the camel's back" when it came to his radicalisation. Srebrenica is often overlooked when discussing sources of inspiration for the anti-Muslim extreme right in Europe.
But some groups regard the Serbs as heroes for retaliating against the "Islamisation" of the Balkans; they're role models in the fight against a looming "Eurabia" (the conspiracy theory that Europe is being "colonised" by Muslims as part of a secret deal between the EU and the Arab world).
In his manifesto, Breivik calls war criminal Radovan Karadzic an "honourable crusader". He also denies the true nature of the Yugoslavia horrors. This is as common in the so-called "counter jihad" movement as Holocaust denials are in neo-Nazi circles. The author Robert Spencer, of the Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) organisation, is one of the more influential polemicists spreading the claim that what happened in Srebrenica, and the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, is a myth.
The prosecution - and the first, heavily criticised psychiatric evaluation - tried to make Breivik's claims of an international network seem ludicrous, the daydreams of a megalomaniac.
Yet it has only been a couple of months since Germans were shocked by the unearthing of a neo-Nazi terror cell, Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, which had worked undisturbed for a decade. The prosecution has settled on the explanation that Breivik is a psychopath, going against many other psychiatric experts, and thereby ignores the far-right ideology from which he drew inspiration.
But Breivik is clever and well-spoken, the son of a diplomat from a stable country, and had no criminal record - he would have been an ideal terrorist agent, at least on paper. During his extensive period of preparation, he was never caught or even monitored by the police.
There are missing pieces to this puzzle and, naturally, Breivik's testimony is suspect. But this is what is known: Breivik was in Liberia in the spring of 2002 and flew to the UK from there. He claims to have met his Serbian contact in Monrovia (Milorad Pelemis was a mercenary there, according to Sloboda Bosna) and to have represented the contact at the founding meeting of an "international Christian military order" in London. Norwegian police have not found any evidence that the meeting took place or that the organisation existed. It has been verified that Breivik paid two brief visits to the Baltics in 2004, where he claimed to have received military training.
Page 2 of 2It would be no mystery if Breivik had sought contacts outside Norway. The Norwegian extreme-right scene is tiny and under constant surveillance. "If you wish to make things more complicated for the intelligence services, you have to cross national borders," Breivik told the court. His other statements in the past week, about years spent training with video games and his claims about "de-emotionalising" possibly indicate some sort of psychotic break, but Norwegian police have been remarkably uninterested in his international connections. It's certainly more convenient to dismiss him as a lone madman than to dig around Liberia and the Balkans.
Breivik claims to have met his contacts online. How real those contacts were, much less if they solidified into actual collaboration in the attacks, needs further investigation. But the far-right ideological influences that he cited are undeniable and should be a wake-up call for intelligence agencies that monitor militant Islamist forums and ignore their right-wing counterparts.
Throughout the trial, Breivik has said he was inspired by Al Qaeda - but has not named a specific inspiration for the July 22 attacks. The Srebrenica massacre, which took place over almost two weeks, ended on about July 22, 1995. Was Breivik's massacre of "Muslim-loving" youths an homage to that atrocity?
It remains to be seen whether he had practical support from other militant nationalists. But we already know that his ideology has adherents in the highest political assemblies. From the ex-Nazi Sweden Democrats in the north to Italy's Northern League separatists, and charismatic populists such as Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, similar ideas are growing in strength. It's not unlikely that more than one Anders Behring Breivik will cross the line from militant rhetoric to violence.
Lisa Bjurwald, based in Stockholm, is a freelance writer specialising in Europe's right-wing populist parties. Maik Baumgärtner is a Berlin-based freelance journalist and author specialising in right-wing extremism
One-page articleThe trial of the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik has been a field day in the international media, with Breivik's ice-cold bearing and callous statements playing to the headlines. For many of the journalists inside the courtroom, however, the first couple of days in Oslo were disappointing in terms of actual information.
The accused appeared to have no reason to worry about a gruelling cross examination. Often, the prosecution's questions resembled those that would be asked by psychologists, inquiring after his mental state. Although Breivik is one of the worst terrorists in Europe since the Second World War, perhaps the need to understand his actions has been greater than the urge to hold him accountable.
But as the trial resumed on Friday, news broke that the Bosnian investigative weekly Sloboda Bosna had named Breivik's mystery Serbian contact as Milorad Pelemis, a war criminal who participated in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. Should this connection turn out to be true, it would be a vital piece of the puzzle of Breivik's international connections and the ideological underpinnings of the murders of 77 people in Oslo and Utoya in July.
In court, Breivik had explained that the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999 was "the straw that broke the camel's back" when it came to his radicalisation. Srebrenica is often overlooked when discussing sources of inspiration for the anti-Muslim extreme right in Europe.
But some groups regard the Serbs as heroes for retaliating against the "Islamisation" of the Balkans; they're role models in the fight against a looming "Eurabia" (the conspiracy theory that Europe is being "colonised" by Muslims as part of a secret deal between the EU and the Arab world).
In his manifesto, Breivik calls war criminal Radovan Karadzic an "honourable crusader". He also denies the true nature of the Yugoslavia horrors. This is as common in the so-called "counter jihad" movement as Holocaust denials are in neo-Nazi circles. The author Robert Spencer, of the Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) organisation, is one of the more influential polemicists spreading the claim that what happened in Srebrenica, and the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, is a myth.
The prosecution - and the first, heavily criticised psychiatric evaluation - tried to make Breivik's claims of an international network seem ludicrous, the daydreams of a megalomaniac.
Yet it has only been a couple of months since Germans were shocked by the unearthing of a neo-Nazi terror cell, Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, which had worked undisturbed for a decade. The prosecution has settled on the explanation that Breivik is a psychopath, going against many other psychiatric experts, and thereby ignores the far-right ideology from which he drew inspiration.
But Breivik is clever and well-spoken, the son of a diplomat from a stable country, and had no criminal record - he would have been an ideal terrorist agent, at least on paper. During his extensive period of preparation, he was never caught or even monitored by the police.
There are missing pieces to this puzzle and, naturally, Breivik's testimony is suspect. But this is what is known: Breivik was in Liberia in the spring of 2002 and flew to the UK from there. He claims to have met his Serbian contact in Monrovia (Milorad Pelemis was a mercenary there, according to Sloboda Bosna) and to have represented the contact at the founding meeting of an "international Christian military order" in London. Norwegian police have not found any evidence that the meeting took place or that the organisation existed. It has been verified that Breivik paid two brief visits to the Baltics in 2004, where he claimed to have received military training. It would be no mystery if Breivik had sought contacts outside Norway. The Norwegian extreme-right scene is tiny and under constant surveillance. "If you wish to make things more complicated for the intelligence services, you have to cross national borders," Breivik told the court. His other statements in the past week, about years spent training with video games and his claims about "de-emotionalising" possibly indicate some sort of psychotic break, but Norwegian police have been remarkably uninterested in his international connections. It's certainly more convenient to dismiss him as a lone madman than to dig around Liberia and the Balkans.
Breivik claims to have met his contacts online. How real those contacts were, much less if they solidified into actual collaboration in the attacks, needs further investigation. But the far-right ideological influences that he cited are undeniable and should be a wake-up call for intelligence agencies that monitor militant Islamist forums and ignore their right-wing counterparts.
Throughout the trial, Breivik has said he was inspired by Al Qaeda - but has not named a specific inspiration for the July 22 attacks. The Srebrenica massacre, which took place over almost two weeks, ended on about July 22, 1995. Was Breivik's massacre of "Muslim-loving" youths an homage to that atrocity?
It remains to be seen whether he had practical support from other militant nationalists. But we already know that his ideology has adherents in the highest political assemblies. From the ex-Nazi Sweden Democrats in the north to Italy's Northern League separatists, and charismatic populists such as Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, similar ideas are growing in strength. It's not unlikely that more than one Anders Behring Breivik will cross the line from militant rhetoric to violence.
Lisa Bjurwald, based in Stockholm, is a freelance writer specialising in Europe's right-wing populist parties. Maik Baumgärtner is a Berlin-based freelance journalist and author specialising in right-wing extremism
The USian Immigrations and Customs Enforcement service has recently revised the rules applying to immigrants detained and awaiting their deportation hearings. Most notably for me, they’ve strengthened the absolutely shit regulations regarding sexual abuse in detention.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act (which is already inadequate, but at least it’s a step) does not apply to ICE detention centers, which means that there is almost no meaningful steps taken to end the sexual abuse of prisoners. 180 sexual abuse complaints have been reported since 2007, a number that almost certainly undercounts the number of people abused, since many do not speak English and aren’t aware of their rights or are afraid to exercise them for fear of deportation.
The new ICE regulations are supposed to improve supervision of detainees and make it easier to report. Detainees who report sexual abuse will have their names disclosed on a strictly need-to-know basis; retaliation is forbidden; staff will be trained in sexual abuse prevention; all facilities will be required to have policies regarding sexual assault. However, they have several glaring flaws:
This distance, the turning away from society, has made him uncorrectable. The biblical account of Cain and Abel says: “So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, lift up, and if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door.’ ” To turn away — which is not just not seeing but also not being seen — is dangerous: in that space, sin gathers. For Breivik, the victims were nobodies, with one exception: on Utoya one of the children turned around, looked straight at him, and said that he should not kill him — and Breivik did not kill him. The victim was no longer nobody but somebody.
A major expansion of New York State’s DNA database signed into law last week by Gov. Andrew Cuomo will enhance the ability of law enforcement to convict the guilty and, in some cases, exonerate the innocent. But, disappointingly, the measure still leaves New York State without certain protections to avoid wrongful convictions.
Time4Media from the National Library of Medicine exhibition, Visible Proofs
UNDER A SCOPE A 1931 article in Popular Science about “the new use of science in trailing crooks.” The science in some techniques still needs improving. More Photos >
A report in February by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences found “serious problems” with much of the work performed by crime laboratories in the United States. Recent incidents of faulty evidence analysis — including the case of an Oregon lawyer who was arrested by the F.B.I. after the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings based on fingerprint identification that turned out to be wrong — were just high-profile examples of wider deficiencies, the committee said. Crime labs were overworked, there were few certification programs for investigators and technicians, and the entire field suffered from a lack of oversight.
QUANTICO, Va. — The Federal Bureau of Investigation established its first crime laboratory in 1932 in a converted lounge in Washington. The one-man operation included a sink, a microscope and its most exotic piece of equipment: a helixometer, a lighted magnifier probe to inspect gun-barrel scoring.
Breivik's introduction is entirely given over to a half-baked history of political correctness, "no aspect" of which, he tells us, is "more prominent … than feminist ideology". The PC-project is bent on "transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy" and "intends to deny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European heterosexual males". But more than that, it has succeeded. The "feminisation of European culture" has been underway since the 1830s, and by now, men have been reduced to an "emasculate[d] … touchy-feely subspecies".
The antipathy to feminism – and women – threaded throughout Breivik's document is more than just incidental. The text is peppered with references to the pernicious effects of the "Sex and the City lifestyle, the propagation of sexual immorality (indexed by women's promiscuity), and the "erotic capital" women use to manipulate men. The degeneration of our civilisation is intimately linked to an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease and "emotionalism". Indeed, the danger of women's "unnatural" demand for equality is such that Breivik closes his introduction by claiming that "the fate of European civilisation depends on European men steadfastly resisting Politically Correct feminism".
This sci-fi fantasy of finally abolishing men's dependence on women's generative abilities is revealing. On the one hand, Breivik indicts feminism with causing our alleged "cultural suicide", both by encouraging reproductive treachery and also because women are apparently more supportive of multiculturalism. However, in another sense, Breivik's thought betrays an analogy between his monocultural nationalism and his veneration of a certain type of "warrior" masculinity, an analogy that revolves – as his manifesto's title implies – around the ideal of masculine independence. The "feminisation" of the European male corresponds to the "feminisation" of Europe itself. Our cultural purity is threatened by invasion from outside. Once proud, virile, and impregnable, Europe has been turned – Breivik suggests in Section 2.89 – into a woman, one who has submitted to rape rather than "risk serious injuries while resisting".
Unlike Breivik, we must resist the urge to make easy causal connections. No account of this man's background or beliefs about nationality, religion or gender can serve to explain his actions. His cool enumeration of technicalities about downloading the document, his careful inclusion of a press-pack of photos, the chilling reference to the sacrifices involved in its "marketing operation" – all this serves to exhibit an inhumanity which opens a chasm between ideas and action. Nevertheless, while the behaviour of Breivik must, and can, only be understood as insanity, we would do our understanding a disservice by accepting it as only that.
Anders Behring Breivik placed himself potentially outside of religious Christianity in a 1,500 page manifesto he has reportedly admitted to writing.
"A majority of so called agnostics and atheists in Europe are cultural conservative Christians without even knowing it," he wrote.
As Anders Breivik tried to justify his killing of more than 70 people to an Oslo court, David Blair was sitting a few rows behind him. It was a chilling experience.
Anders Behring Breivik in court: As he spoke, a handful of survivors stood up and left the court. A few others weptPhoto: AFP/GETTY
Later, Ms Engh’s iron self-control lapsed, for a moment, into exasperation. The killer would constantly refer to what he grandly called his “compendium” – several thousand pages of rambling paranoia, most of it cut and pasted from the internet, serving as the ideological basis for his actions. Once, he called it a “draft”, and remarked that he was still deciding if he believed in all it contained.
Six days in the company of a mass murderer - Telegraph.co.uk | Anders Behring Breivik Trial Day 5; Tearful Analysis - Google Blog Search | Mike Nova's starred items - 8:44 AM 4/22/2012
33 year old Anders Behring Breivik appeared before court today for fifth time in case of killing 77 innocent Norwegian people. He did not give Knight Templar clinched fist salute today. He started wit.
Anders Breivik, who has confessed to killing 77 people last year, said that before carrying out his bombing-and-shooting rampage, he studied attacks by Al Qaeda and other terrorists.
Anders Behring Breivik told prosecutors in court that his massacre last summer was justified, and that he had planned to behead a former prime minister.
Anders Behring Breivik was questioned about trips to Liberia and London during which he said he met a Serbian war criminal and founded his anti-Islamic militant group.
The anti-Muslim extremist is using the courtroom as a soapbox, but he might actually be discrediting his cause and making a case for trying terrorists in civilian court.
Madness, badness, sadness Bangkok Post First, one of the prosecutors of the Norwegian court read out the names and details of each of the 77 victims killed by Anders Behring Breivik on July 22, 2011. "She was at the water's edge... Shot dead." "He was in the Big Hall of the cafe. Shot dead. Hear no evil, speak no evil?Stabroek News
I am not a psychiatric case,Breivik tells court Indian Express Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who is on trial for killing 77 people last July, has insisted to an Oslo court that he is sane. "I am not a psychiatric case," Breivik told the court when questioned by a lawyer for the plaintiffs ...
At the beginning of Deborah Blum’s “Poisoner’s Handbook,” a murderer named Frederic Mors gets off virtually scot-free after confessing to multiple killings by poison, then disappears without a trace. Though Blum leaves the reader with the impression that Mors — whose adopted surname means “death” in Latin — will return, she never comes back to his story. But death moves throughout her latest book via myriad poisons administered by impatient heirs, unhappy spouses and psychopaths — or innocently ingested, because the science of forensic toxicology has not yet caught up with these deadly chemicals.
Mike Nova's starred items
Podcast: Science Times
