Norwegian public television plans to broadcast a burning fireplace for 12 straight hours from Friday evening, with firewood specialists providing color commentary, expert advice and a bit of cultural tutoring.
“We’ll talk about the very nerdy subjects like burning, slicing and stacking the wood, but we’ll also have cultural segments with music and poems,” Rune Moeklebust, a producer for state broadcaster NRK.
“It will be very slow but noble television.”
READ ON: Norway plans 12-hour prime-time TV show of a fireplace
Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was jailed for a maximum term on Friday when judges declared him sane enough to answer for the murder of 77 people last year, drawing a smirk of triumph from the self-styled warrior against Islam.
An unrepentant Breivik, 33, gave the Oslo court a stiff-armed, clench-fisted salute before being handed the steepest possible penalty, 21 years. His release, however, can be put off indefinitely should he still pose a threat to a liberal society left traumatized by his bomb and shooting rampage last July.
Justifying blasting a government building and gunning down dozens of teenagers at a summer camp as a service to a nation threatened by immigration, he had said only acquittal or death would be worthy outcomes. But his biggest concern was being declared insane, a fate he said would be “worse than death”.
Judge Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen dismissed a prosecution call for her to label Breivik mad, a ruling that would have seen him confined indefinitely to psychiatric care rather than prison.
Up to 40,000 Norwegians staged an emotionally-charged sing-along in Oslo on Thursday near the court house where Anders Behring Breivik is on trial for the murder of 77 people in a protest organizers said showed he had not broken their tolerant society.
“It’s we who win,” said guitar-strumming folk singer Lillebjoern Nilsen as he led the mass sing-along and watched the crowd sway gently in the rain. Many held roses above their heads, and some wept.
The protest followed several days of defiant testimony from Breivik who has admitted he killed his victims in a blood soaked attack on Norway’s multicultural society, but denied criminal guilt, saying he did so in self-defense.
READ MORE: Thousands protest at trial of Anders Breivik
In an account that shocked the nation, Norwegian anti-Muslim fanatic Anders Behring Breivik described with a chilling calm on Friday how he methodically chased teenagers room by room and shot them dead on an island summer camp last year.
Addressing a courtroom frozen in horror, Breivik said he shot most of his victims several times, using the first shot to take them down, then following up with a shot to the head.
His trial, now into its fifth day and due to last 10 weeks, has deeply traumatized Norway, one of the most tolerant and stable countries in Europe.
Speaking intensely, the steely-eyed Norwegian described how his body tensed up as he fired his first shots at the ruling Labour Party’s youth camp on Utoeya island.
“I took the gun out and thought it was now or never, and it seemed like a year,” he said.
READ MORE: Shocking nation, Norway killer describes island massacre
Norway killer on trial: “I would have done it again”
The Norwegian anti-Islamic gunman who killed 77 people said at his trial on Tuesday his shooting spree and bomb attack were “sophisticated and spectacular” and that he would do the same thing again.
Anders Behring Breivik, 33, has pleaded not guilty and said he was defending his country by setting off a car bomb that killed eight people at government headquarters in Oslo last July, then killing another 69 people in a shooting spree at a youth summer camp organized by the ruling Labour Party.
“I have carried out the most sophisticated and spectacular political attack committed in Europe since the Second World War,” Breivik told the court in a prepared statement.
“They (Norwegians) risk being a minority in their own capital in their own country in the future.”
“Yes, I would have done it again, because offences against my people … are many times as bad,” he said, taking to the stand for the first time.
While he has admitted the killings and will likely be kept behind bars for the rest of his life, Breivik’s main objective is to prove he is sane, a court judgment that he sees as vindicating his anti-Muslim and anti-immigration cause.
The bracelet, marked with the word UTOEYA in capital letters, was given to those attending last summer’s Labour Party youth camp on the island. Vegard Groeslie Wennesland hasn’t taken his off since the day far-right militant Anders Behring Breivik shot dead 69 teenagers and adults. Hours earlier the 33-year old had planted a car bomb outside the prime minister’s office in central Oslo, killing eight.
In a nation of five million where most people either knew one of the victims or know someone who did, the attacks have cut deep. Survivors - including more than 240 wounded - still get flashbacks, panic attacks or the strange feeling they are spectators of their own lives. Young people have become more involved in politics.
But it is striking too what “July 22,” as the attacks are commonly called in Norway, has not done. It has not made Norwegians more fearful of one another, or triggered calls for tougher anti-terrorist measures. Instead, many Norwegians say it has reaffirmed their faith in a society they like to see as liberal, tolerant and egalitarian.
SPECIAL REPORT: Life after the Norway massacre
![A general view of the aurora borealis near the city of Tromsoe in northern Norway January 25, 2012. [REUTERS/Rune Stoltz Bertinussen/Scanpix]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lydfwq7Fs71qmaoalo1_1280.jpg)
A general view of the aurora borealis near the city of Tromsoe in northern Norway January 25, 2012. [REUTERS/Rune Stoltz Bertinussen/Scanpix]
