Earlier today a court in the capital of Norway, Oslo, came to the verdict that Anders Behring Breivik was guilty of the systematically murdering 77 innocent people in 2011.

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 immediate reactions to the terrorist attack in Oslo in July 2011 were both politicised and inaccurate. The opening of the perpetrator's trial nine months later finds leading ideological positions still full of evasion, says Cas Mudde.

A government switchboard operator noted the conversation in which an unnamed caller spoke of shooting youth members of the ruling Labour Party.

Florence far-right gunman Gianluca Casseri, who shot dead two Africans Tuesday and Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik may have more in common than expected, experts on far-right movements point out.

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(Photo: Reuters)
The body of Gianluca Casseri lies on the ground in Florence
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The anti-Muslim extremist who confessed to a bombing and shooting massacre that killed 77 people in Norway has tried to declare himself a resistance leader at his first public court hearing but was quickly cut off by the judge.

Anders Behring Breivik was on Monday escorted by guards into an Oslo court room packed with dozens of reporters and spectators, including survivors of his rampage at a youth camp near the capital who were seeing him in person for the first time since the July 22 attack.

Anders Breivik's manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties. The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three "counter-jihad" sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian.

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SNAPSHOT

Violent 'Counter-Jihadism'

What -- and Who -- Inspired Anders Behring Breivik’s Violence?