The week in 60 seconds

By Rachel Cornwell

Much of the world this week seemed to have entered a collective state of denial. In Austria, the British historian Peter Irving was jailed for three years after claiming that the Holocaust was unconvincing and unsubstantiated as a historical concept, and that, to his mind, it was far more plausible that several million missing Jews had instead been living happily under new identities in Israel since the conclusion of the Second World War.

Unfortunately for him, not least several hundred other inmates of a Vienna prison, the presiding judge did not share his views. Delusion on a far grander and more worrying scale was in full swing in the United States, where a UN report calling for Guantanamo Bay to be shut down immediately was dismissed by White House spokesman Scott McClellan as a “discredit” to an organisation which really should be looking into other things. Like legitimate reasons for carpet-bombing Iran.

Closer to home, our own, marginally more rational government occupied itself by issuing frequent and alarming instructions not to panic about the extremely high probability that we will all shortly die from bird flu. Meanwhile Parliament, clearly in the mood for banning things, struck off both glorification of terrorism and smoking in public places from the list of things we can do to while away the time before the pandemic breaks.

Elsewhere, the Middle East struggled to adapt to the addition of Hamas to the political spectrum, whilst Britain attempted to cope with its own dissident political force in the slightly less threatening shape of Prince Charles. The disappointing news that the new Wembley stadium may take longer to complete than St Paul’s Cathedral was somewhat alleviated by an unexpected victory in the field of glorified tea tray racing.

And it was unfortunate that, after sustaining a £12m penalty for failing to meet targets, the one letter the Royal Mail managed to deliver on time and to the right place was a note from Moors murderer Ian Brady, to the mother of one of his victims.

23rd Feb 2006