ne of Britain's leading architects, Richard Rogers, is battling to save his $1.7bn (£971m) redesign of a New York convention centre, after his connections to a pro-Palestinian protest group outraged politicians and Jewish organisations.
Lord Rogers, the architect behind the Welsh Assembly building and the Millennium Dome, was summoned to meet the chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation yesterday. The company wants him to explain his involvement in Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, revealed in The Independent last month.
He hosted a meeting of the group at his London headquarters, at which architects considered calling for a boycott of Israel's construction industry in protest at the building of the separation barrier in the Occupied Territories.
The convention centre was built in the memory of Jacob Javitz, a firm supporter of Israel who was a senator for more than 20 years. "It carries the name of someone whose legacy is contrary to such views," said Malcolm Hoenlein, of the Conference of Major Jewish Organisations.
Lord Rogers cut ties to the group last week. "I have never backed a boycott and I have never stated that I favour targeted activities," he said.
03/04/06 -- CHICAGO (Reuters) - A confession extracted by torture at the hands of Israeli security 'thugs' should not be allowed in an American court, lawyers for a Palestinian immigrant accused of funneling money to Hamas said on Friday.
U.S. prosecutors said the man, Mohammed Salah, was a liar who had information known only to high-level Hamas figures before he made the 1993 confession in question and there was no evidence to support his claims of torture.
The U.S. government considers Hamas a 'terrorist organization.' In January, it swept to victory in Palestinian elections.
Salah, a U.S. citizen who lives in the Chicago area, is due to go on trial in October on charges leveled in 2004 that he and two other Palestinian immigrants conspired to get hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas.
He spent five years in Israeli jails in the 1990s on similar charges, and prosecutors want to use his confession in that case against him at his trial.
In an impassioned pretrial argument before Judge Amy St. Eve of the U.S. District Court, Salah's lawyer, Michael Deutsch, said his prosecution 'is nothing more than post-9/11 political propaganda' and the confession was 'abhorrent' to the U.S. system of law.
He said the confession, made 30 days after his arrest at an Israeli checkpoint, came after days of sleep deprivation, physical and sexual abuse and being tied for hours to a toddler-sized wooden chair with the front legs shortened to inflict pain.
'It's embarrassing that this kind of argument would be going on in an American courtroom,' Deutsch said, comparing the methods used by Israel in its occupied territories in 1993 with those once employed in South Africa and Chile. It violated not only international human rights but the U.S. Constitution's guarantees, he said."
