The week at a glance...Europe

Oslo

Mass murderer pleads not guilty: Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-immigrant extremist who has admitted to killing 77 people in an urban bombing and a rampage at a left-wing youth camp in Norway in July, appeared at his first public court hearing this week to plead not guilty, apparently on the grounds that he is a warrior. “I am a military commander in the Norwegian resistance movement,” he said. “And a Knight Chief Justice in the Knights Templar Norway and Knights Templar Europe.” Breivik, 32, also said he did not recognize the jurisdiction of the court because the government has embraced multiculturalism. “He wasn’t as frightening,” Sondre Lindhagen Nilssen, a teenage survivor of the camp massacre who attended the hearing, told the Oslo Aftenposten. “I just saw a totally confused person who doesn’t have the faintest contact with reality.”

Amsterdam

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Senile woman euthanized: The Netherlands crossed a new line in assisted suicide when a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s disease was helped to die. The Netherlands usually requires patients to be mentally alert and suffering from an incurable illness when they request euthanasia, but the 64-year-old unnamed woman had such severe dementia that she could no longer consent to the procedure. Assisted-suicide activists said she had long been a supporter of euthanasia and had expressed her wish to die in writing while still in possession of her faculties. Her husband and children supported the decision. She was put to death in March, but the news was not made public until last week.