NORWAY: Terrorist far-right mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s appeal to the European Court of Human Rights that solitary confinement violates his human rights was rejected yesterday.

The Strasbourg-based court ruled definitively that the case “doesn’t reveal any violations” and it “rejected the application as inadmissible for being manifestly ill-founded.”

He is serving a 21-year sentence for killing 77 people at a Norwegian Workers Youth League summer camp in a bomb-and-shooting rampage in 2011.

IRAQ: The Supreme Court in Baghdad endorsed a manual recount of all ballots from last month’s national elections yesterday, while rejecting invalidation of ballots from abroad and from voters displaced by war.

The court backed parliament’s demand that judges take over the Independent Elections Commission in order to supervise the recount.

No single bloc won a majority and negotiations are under way to form a new government.

JAPAN: Tokyo announced yesterday that it will suspend civilian evacuation drills it started last year while North Korea was repeatedly test-firing missiles near and over Japanese islands.

Nine drills to prepare residents for possible missile attacks were to be held later this year.

The Cabinet Secretariat in charge of crisis management said recent diplomatic developments mean the prospect of strikes from North Korean missiles has subsided for now.
 

AFGHANISTAN: Eight police were killed yesterday in two separate Taliban attacks in Ghazni and Baghlan provinces.

Ghazni provincial official spokesman Arif Noori reported six police dead and four more wounded in an attack on security posts, claiming at least seven insurgents were killed in the hours-long gun battle.

Police spokesman Zabiullah Shuja said the Taliban, who had observed a three-day ceasefire last weekend for Eid al-Fitr, killed two police and wounded another three in Baghlan province.