Tag: Robert

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Business

NBA suspends Suns proprietor Robert Sarver for utilizing racial slurs, harassing workers

NBA fines and suspends Phoenix Suns and Mercury owner for misconduct

The NBA suspended Phoenix Suns and Mercury owner Robert Sarver for a year and fined them $10 million Tuesday after an independent investigation uncovered multiple violations of workplace standards of conduct.

The investigation revealed that Sarver repeated the N-word at least five times. He also made gender-related comments and inappropriate language related to female employees. He also abused employees by yelling and verbally abusing them.

The investigation also found that Suns’ human resources department was historically ineffective.

The league launched the investigation in November after an ESPN article detailed alleged wrongdoing by Sarver. The NBA hired the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which reviewed more than 80,000 documents — including emails, text messages and videos — related to Sarver’s conduct.

Sarver initially called the allegations “false,” “inaccurate,” and “misleading,” while firmly denying the allegations of misconduct. In November he said: “I would very much welcome an impartial NBA investigation that could prove ours only outlet to clear my name and the reputation of an organization of which I am so proud.”

The review of Sarver’s 18-year tenure as managing partner of the teams found the results corroborated the original reporting.

“The statements and behavior described in the findings of the independent investigation are disturbing and disappointing,” said NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. “We believe that the result is correct, taking into account all the facts, circumstances and context brought to light by the comprehensive investigation of this 18-year period.”

The $10 million fine is the maximum permitted by the NBA’s constitution and bylaws. Sarver will also be banned from all NBA and WNBA facilities, events, games, practices and business activities.

“The NBA’s organizational findings are largely focused on historical issues that have been addressed in recent years,” said a statement from Suns Legacy Partners, the company that manages the Suns and Mercury. “Robert Sarver also accepts responsibility for his actions. He recognizes that his behavior during his eighteen years of ownership at times did not reflect his values ​​or those of the Suns.”

Sarver’s fine will be donated to organizations working to address race and gender issues inside and outside the workplace. During his suspension, Sarver will complete a training program on respect and proper behavior in the workplace.

“While I disagree with some of the details of the NBA report, I would like to apologize for my words and actions that have offended our staff,” Sarver wrote in a statement sent to CNBC. “I take full responsibility for what I have done. I am sorry for causing this pain and these misperceptions do not align with my personal philosophy or values.”

The findings echo revelations about former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was fined $2.5 million and banned for life after audio recordings caught him making racist remarks. The ban forced Sterling to sell the team to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion after 33 years in ownership. Sterling’s lawsuit against the NBA was settled in 2016.

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Entertainment

Robert Downey Sr., Filmmaker and Provocateur, Is Useless at 85

Robert Downey Sr., Filmmaker and Provocateur, Is Dead at 85

Robert Downey Sr., who made provocative movies like “Putney Swope” that avoided mainstream success but were often critical favorites and were always attention getting, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Rosemary Rogers, said.

“Putney Swope,” a 1969 comedy about a Black man who is accidentally elected chairman of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, was perhaps Mr. Downey’s best-known film.

“To be as precise as is possible about such a movie,” Vincent Canby wrote in a rave review in The New York Times, “it is funny, sophomoric, brilliant, obscene, disjointed, marvelous, unintelligible and relevant.”

The film, though probably a financial success by Mr. Downey’s standards, made only about $2.7 million. (By comparison, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” that same year made more than $100 million.) Yet its reputation was such that in 2016 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry, an exclusive group of movies deemed to have cultural or historical significance.

Also much admired in some circles was “Greaser’s Palace” (1972), in which a Christlike figure in a zoot suit arrives in the Wild West by parachute. Younger filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson (who gave Mr. Downey a small part in his 1997 hit, “Boogie Nights”) cited it as an influence.

None other than Joseph Papp, the theater impresario, in a letter to The New York Times after Mr. Canby’s unenthusiastic review, wrote that “Robert Downey has fearlessly descended into the netherworld and come up with a laughing nightmare.” (Mr. Papp’s assessment may not have been entirely objective; at the time he was producing one of Mr. Downey’s few mainstream efforts, a television version of the David Rabe play “Sticks and Bones,” which had been a hit at Mr. Papp’s Public Theater in 1971.)

Between “Putney Swope” and “Greaser’s Palace” there was “Pound” (1970), a political satire in which actors portrayed stray dogs. Among those actors, playing a puppy, was Robert Downey Jr., the future star of the “Iron Man” movies and many others, and Mr. Downey’s son. He was 5 and making his film debut.

That movie, the senior Mr. Downey told The Times Union of Albany, N.Y., in 2000, was something of a surprise to the studio.

“When I turned it into United Artists,” he said, “after the screening one of the studio heads said to me, ‘I thought this was gonna be animated.’ They thought they were getting some cute little animated film.”

Robert John Elias Jr. was born on June 24, 1936, in Manhattan and grew up in Rockville Centre, on Long Island. His father was in restaurant management, and his mother, Betty (McLoughlin) Elias, was a model. Later, when enlisting in the Army as a teenager, he adopted the last name of his stepfather, Jim Downey, who worked in advertising.

Much of his time in the Army was spent in the stockade, he said later; he wrote a novel while doing his time, but it wasn’t published. He pitched semi-pro baseball for a year, then wrote some plays.

Among the people he met on the Off Off Broadway scene was William Waering, who owned a camera and suggested they try making movies. The result, which he began shooting when John F. Kennedy was still president and which was released in 1964, was “Babo 73,” in which Taylor Mead, an actor who would go on to appear in many Andy Warhol films, played the president of the United States. It was classic underground filmmaking.

“We just basically went down to the White House and started shooting, with no press passes, permits, anything like that,” Mr. Downey said in an interview included in the book “Film Voices: Interviews From Post Script” (2004). “Kennedy was in Europe, so nobody was too tight with the security, so we were outside the White House mainly, ran around; we actually threw Taylor in with some real generals.”

The budget, he said, was $3,000.

Mr. Downey’s “Chafed Elbows,” about a day in the life of a misfit, was released in 1966 and was a breakthrough of sorts, earning him grudging respect even from Bosley Crowther, The Times’s staid film critic.

“One of these days,” he wrote, “Robert Downey, who wrote, directed and produced the underground movie ‘Chafed Elbows,’ which opened at the downtown Gate Theater last night, is going to clean himself up a good bit, wash the dirty words out of his mouth and do something worth mature attention in the way of kooky, satiric comedy. He has the audacity for it. He also has the wit.”

The film enjoyed extended runs at the Gate and the Bleecker Street Cinema. “No More Excuses” followed in 1968, then “Putney Swope,” “Pound” and “Greaser’s Palace.” But by the early 1970s Mr. Downey had developed a cocaine habit.

“Ten years of cocaine around the clock,” he told The Associated Press in 1997. His marriage to Elsie Ford, who had been in several of his movies, faltered; they eventually divorced. He credited his second wife, Laura Ernst, with helping to pull him out of addiction. She died in 1994 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mr. Downey drew on that experience for his last feature, “Hugo Pool” (1997).

In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by a daughter, Allyson Downey; a brother, Jim; a sister, Nancy Connor; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Downey’s movies have earned new appreciation in recent decades. In 2008 Anthology Film Archives in the East Village restored and preserved “Chafed Elbows,” “Babo 73″ and “No More Excuses” with the support of the Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation. At the time, Martin Scorsese, a member of the foundation’s board, called them “an essential part of that moment when a truly independent American cinema was born.”

“They’re alive in ways that few movies can claim to be,” Mr. Scorsese told The Times, “because it’s the excitement of possibility and discovery that brought them to life.”

Mr. Downey deflected such praise.

“They’re uneven,” he said of the films. “But I was uneven.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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Politics

Robert Mueller will take legislation college students behind the decision-making means of the Russia inquiry.

Robert Mueller will take law students behind the decision-making process of the Russia inquiry.

Robert S. Mueller III will teach a course at the University of Virginia’s law school intended to take students inside his investigation that concluded Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald J. Trump, the university announced on Wednesday.

The course, called “The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel,” will be taught by Mr. Mueller alongside three former federal prosecutors: James L. Quarles III, Andrew D. Goldstein and Aaron Zebley, who was Mr. Mueller’s deputy. Mr. Mueller recruited the three men to work on the investigation, which spanned two years of the Trump administration.

Mr. Mueller will lead at least one of six in-person classes and said that he hoped to bring in other top prosecutors as guest speakers, according to the university.

The course will cover the investigation chronologically, from the hiring of Mr. Mueller as special counsel in 2017 until the inquiry’s conclusion in 2019. The instructors also intend to explain the challenges that prosecutors faced and “the legal and practical context” behind critical decisions, the university said.

The final class is expected to focus on obstruction of justice and the role of special counsels in presidential accountability. The Mueller report detailed actions by Mr. Trump that many legal experts said were sufficient to ask a grand jury to indict him on charges of obstruction of justice, but Attorney General William P. Barr cleared him of obstruction soon after the report was completed.

The announcement of the course is likely to revive curiosity around the Russian inquiry, which Mr. Trump repeatedly derided as a “witch hunt” and of which Mr. Mueller has seldom spoken publicly. He was a reluctant witness during a closely watched congressional hearing in July 2019, where he testified for nearly seven hours, giving many clipped answers and largely not straying from his report’s conclusions.

Last summer, Mr. Mueller wrote an opinion essay for The Washington Post the day after Mr. Trump commuted the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr., a political operative. In the essay, Mr. Mueller defended the prosecution of Mr. Stone for federal crimes as part of the Russia inquiry.

“We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law,” Mr. Mueller wrote.

Mr. Zebley told the University of Virginia that the course instructors would rely on public records to explain the path of the investigation.

After the inquiry ended, Mr. Mueller, Mr. Zebley and Mr. Quarles left the Justice Department and returned to the private law firm WilmerHale in Washington, where they are partners. Mr. Goldstein is now a partner at the firm Cooley in Washington. Mr. Mueller and Mr. Zebley are both alumni of the University of Virginia’s law school.

All four lawyers had notable careers at the Justice Department and said they were looking forward to sharing those experiences with students, according to the university.

“I look forward to engaging with the students this fall,” Mr. Mueller said.

Categories
Politics

Robert Mueller to assist educate regulation college class on Trump-Russia probe

Robert Mueller to help teach law school class on Trump-Russia probe

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller makes a statement on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election at the Justice Department in Washington, U.S., May 29, 2019.

Jim Bourg | Reuters

The notoriously tight-lipped former special counsel Robert Mueller will be opening up about his Russia probe to law school students in Virginia this fall.

The University of Virginia School of Law said Wednesday that Mueller will participate in a class on his investigation, which examined alleged ties between former President Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and the Kremlin. The class will be taught by three other prosecutors who were on Mueller’s high-profile team.

The class, “The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel,” will be taught in person in Charlottesville over six sessions. Mueller himself will lead at least one class, according to the school.

In a short statement provided by the law school, Mueller said he was fortunate to be returning to the school where he earned his law degree in 1973.

“I look forward to engaging with the students this fall,” Mueller said. Mueller returned to private practice after his investigation and is a partner at the law firm WilmerHale.

The class will be taught by Aaron Zebley, the former deputy special counsel; Jim Quarles, Mueller’s former senior counsel; and Andrew Goldstein, the former senior assistant special counsel.

According to a news release provide by the law school, the class will “focus on a key set of decisions made during the special counsel’s investigation.”

“The course will start chronologically with the launch of the investigation, including Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Other sessions will focus on navigating the relationship with the Justice Department and Congress, investigative actions relating to the White House and the importance of the Roger Stone prosecution,” the school said.

“The final sessions will focus on obstruction of justice, presidential accountability and the role of special counsel in that accountability,” the release added.

Mueller’s investigation began in 2017 and wrapped up in 2019, with the release of “The Mueller Report,” which became a bestseller.

In the report, the longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation director concluded that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian government.

Mueller also outlined ten episodes that raised the possibility that Trump had obstructed justice, but declined to say definitively whether Trump had committed a crime, citing longstanding Justice Department policy against charging sitting presidents.

According to UVA, Zebley said the course will “use the extensive public record to explore why some paths were taken and not others.”

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Business

BET founder Robert Johnson on enhancing Black illustration in workforce

BET founder Robert Johnson on improving Black representation in workforce

Robert Johnson, founder of BET, told CNBC on Monday that he believes that once it doesn’t affect their share price, companies will be more serious about addressing racial inequality within their workforce.

“Companies understand return on capital. They understand return on equity. They understand total return on shareholders,” Johnson told Closing Bell. “Link all of these factors to achieving employment opportunities for Black Americans at all levels. I think then you will see results because companies understand that. They respond to financial factors and market conditions.”

Johnson’s comments follow the release of a new report on the employment of blacks in the US private sector by consulting giant McKinsey & Company. The McKinsey report, based on data from 24 companies, which together have 3.7 million employees, found remarkable differences in the representation of blacks in management positions.

Black Americans make up 12% of the total private sector workforce, but for the companies that participated in the McKinsey report, it was only 7% of executive employees. According to the report, black representation at the senior manager, vice president, and senior VP level drops to 4% to 5%.

“It will take approximately 95 years, as we go now, for black workers to achieve talent parity (or 12 percent representation) at all levels of the private sector,” the report said.

Johnson said, in his opinion, the only way for companies to work seriously to fill the employment gaps, especially in senior positions, is to “hold companies accountable for not making a commitment to address the gaps” .

“I think there are ways to do this,” said Johnson, who founded Black Entertainment Television in 1980. A little over two decades later, in 2001, he became America’s first black billionaire when Viacom acquired BET’s holding company. He now sits on the board of Discovery and is the founder and chairman of RLJ Companies.

Johnson said one way to be accountable in eliminating racial differences in employment is to set it as a target in corporate deeds.

“Shareholders should hold them accountable as soon as they are in their articles of association,” said Johnson, adding that proxy advisory firms like Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis “could explore the whole concept of no to companies that do not commit this kind of racial parity or basically closing the employment gap. ”

Johnson said companies of all sizes should also commit to something similar to the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which the league expanded last year to add diversity to their coaching ranks.

Teams are now required to interview at least two outside minority candidates for head coaching jobs, up from at least one since its inception in 2003. Also, the rule has been expanded to require teams to interview at least one outside minority candidate for an open coordinator positions; So far there has been no diversity mandate for these roles.

NFL franchises could be fined for not complying with the Rooney Rule, Johnson noted. “I’m not sure we want to punish companies because they can easily pay the fine,” he warned. “I think there should be some kind of moral equivalent that if you don’t, you will be singled out and your inventory will be reported as a failure, causing certain people to become involved in this form of racial justice and equality believe their take investments in other places. ”

Last year, Nasdaq made a proposal to the Securities and Exchange Commission to improve diversity among company boards. The exchange operator’s proposal would require the majority of companies to have at least two different board members: a woman and a person who is LGBTQ or an under-represented minority.

According to the proposal, companies could ultimately be removed from the stock market if they do not publish board data. In December, when the proposal was published, over 75% of the roughly 3,200 companies listed on the Nasdaq failed to meet the requirement, according to the New York Times.

Johnson previously made proposals on how to close the racial wealth gap in the US. In a CNBC interview earlier this month, Johnson stressed the need to nurture black entrepreneurship in America through capital allocation programs.

“Black companies tend to hire black people as a whole, so if you create more black companies, more black jobs will be created,” Johnson said. “More black jobs mean more black people are paying to buy their homes, black people … are saving for retirement, black people are investing. In the end, we’re taking a big step towards closing the huge wealth gap.”

A Citigroup report last year found that racial inequality has cost the US economy $ 16 trillion over the past two decades.

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Business

Robert Altman, Video Recreation Mogul Who Survived Scandal, Dies at 73

Robert Altman, Video Game Mogul Who Survived Scandal, Dies at 73

Mr. Altman’s survivors include Mrs. Carter and her son, a daughter, Jessica Carter Altman, a singer and lawyer; and two sisters, Susan and Nancy Altman.

After giving up banking and the law, Mr. Altman founded ZeniMax, based in Rockville, Md., In 1999 and then worked with a software developer, Christopher Weaver, of Bethesda Softworks until a dispute arose.

As the parent company of Bethesda, ZeniMax has devoured other brands. When concerns about violent video games were raised, he filled the company’s advisory board with political figures, including Robert Trump, the former president’s younger brother and Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic chairman.

For a man whose entire professional life has been shaped by just one person, Mr. Altman’s successful career transition may not have been as steep as it seemed. James Altman quoted ZeniMax General Counsel Grif Lesher as saying that his father was so convinced of his own creativity that he would not hesitate to rewrite Shakespeare because he insisted “it can be improved.”

Devoting almost a decade to self-defense has freed Mr. Altman from further ambitions in banking, corporate law or capital power politics.

“Until your picture is on the front page of the Washington Post, until you are charged and many false allegations are made, it is very difficult to understand what it is,” he said in a television interview with Charlie Rose in 1993.

No wonder Fallout 3, one of the video games his company developed, invited gamers on a 23rd-century adventure to the ruins of post-catastrophic Washington when he switched careers. His favorite, his son said, was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrm, which gives players the opportunity to “live a different life in a different world” and play “any type of character imaginable.”

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Health

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is barred from Instagram over false coronavirus claims.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is barred from Instagram over false coronavirus claims.

Instagram on Wednesday deleted the report by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and prominent anti-vaccine activist, for providing false information related to the coronavirus.

“We removed this account because we repeatedly shared debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement.

Mr. Kennedy, the son of former Senator and US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, worked as an environmental attorney for decades but is now better known as a crusader against vaccines. A 2019 study found that two groups, including his nonprofit now called Children’s Health Defense, had funded more than half of the Facebook ads spreading misinformation about vaccines.

During the pandemic, he found an even wider audience on platforms like Instagram, which he had 800,000 followers on. Although Mr Kennedy has said he is not against vaccines while they are safe, he regularly advocates discredited links between vaccines and autism, arguing that it is safer to contract the coronavirus than to get vaccinated against it.

Facebook is becoming more aggressive in its efforts to stamp out misinformation about vaccines, and this week it says it would remove posts with flawed claims about the coronavirus, coronavirus vaccines, and vaccines in general, whether it was paid advertisements or user-generated Posts. In addition to Mr. Kennedy’s Instagram account, the company said it removed eight more Instagram accounts and Facebook pages on Wednesday as part of its updated policy.

They did not include Mr Kennedy’s Facebook page, which was still active early Thursday and making many of the same unfounded claims against more than 300,000 followers. The company said it has not automatically disabled accounts on its platforms and that there are no plans to delete Mr. Kennedy’s Facebook account “at this point.”

Children’s Health Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Members of Mr. Kennedy’s family have spoken out against his anti-vaccination efforts, including a brother, sister and niece who accused him of “dangerous misinformation” in a column they wrote for Politico in 2019 . Another niece, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a New York Presbyterian Hospital / Weill Cornell Medical Center doctor, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in December challenging his claims.

“I love my uncle Bobby,” she wrote. “I admire him for many reasons, including his decades of struggle for a cleaner environment. But when it comes to vaccines, he’s wrong. “

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Entertainment

Robert Cohan, 95, Dies; Exported Up to date Dance to Britain

Robert Cohan, 95, Dies; Exported Contemporary Dance to Britain

Robert Cohan, a New York born dancer and choreographer who changed the course of British dance by helping found a renowned contemporary dance company and school in London in the late 1960s, died there on January 13th. He was 95 years old.

His nephew Roy Vestrich confirmed the death.

Mr. Cohan’s journey to running the London company began in 1954 when, as a key member of the Martha Graham Company, he met Robin Howard in New York, a wealthy grandson of former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and a great fan of Graham’s work.

Almost a decade later, Mr. Howard sponsored a company trip to the Edinburgh Festival and a subsequent season in London, and was so encouraged by the success of the visit that he suggested Ms. Graham set up a studio there.

Mr. Cohan had taught at the Graham School although he had continued to dance with it, and both Mrs. Graham and Mr. Howard agreed that he should be the director of the London Outpost. In May 1966, in a studio on Berner’s Place near Oxford Street, Mr. Cohan began teaching Graham Technique – with an emphasis on weighted movements emanating from the spine and pelvis.

Over the next year, in a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Mr. Cohan said he and Mr. Howard spoke “every night with good wine” about expanding the company and finding a permanent home for it.

They settled in a former British Army drilling hall near Euston Station in central London and called it The Place to house both a school and a new company they founded, the London Contemporary Dance Group, later London Contemporary Dance Theater to accommodate.

The company debuted in 1969 at the Adeline Genée Theater in East Grinstead, Sussex, south of London, and received good critical reviews. Mr. Cohan, who commuted between New York and London while continuing to perform with the Graham Company, decided to devote himself exclusively to the British company.

The London company initially performed pieces from the works of Graham and other choreographers, but Mr. Cohan soon decided that in future they would only offer works that had been specially created for their dancers. As part of this new policy, The Place became a greenhouse for nurturing local talent and spawned major choreographers such as Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, Darshan Singh Buller, Robert North and Aletta Collins.

The company toured the UK under Mr. Cohan, exposing audiences to contemporary dance for the first time in many cases.

“He started a school, founded a company, introduced the Graham technique in the UK, choreographed and bred a new generation of modern dance style choreographers, and promoted a contemporary dance boom in the 1970s,” said Debra Craine, chief executive officer Dancer critic of the London Times said in an interview. “Its importance and influence are almost incalculable.”

Handsome and charismatic, with long hair and the platform shoes that were trendy in the late 1960s and 1970s, Mr Cohan made The Place a creative hub not only for dancers and choreographers, but also for musicians, artists and filmmakers with common interests in dance. Composer Peter Maxwell Davies, photographer Anthony Crickmay and filmmaker Bob Lockyer, who recorded a number of Mr. Cohan’s dances for the BBC, were among the artists in Mr. Cohan’s circle.

Mr. Cohan was a prolific choreographer whose work was popular with audiences. Perhaps his most important piece was “Cell” (1969), which was created with two of his frequent collaborators, the designer Norbert Chiesa and the lighting designer John B. Read, and based on Richard Lloyd’s music. He encouraged his dancers to work on both experimental and mainstream creations.

The London Contemporary Dance Theater gave its first American tour in July 1977. “During the two-day debut engagement of this young British company at the American Dance Festival, there was never a dull moment,” wrote Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times in her review from New London, Connecticut, in which Mr. Cohan as “the highly individual choreographer of unusual scope and depth “.

Allen Robertson and Donald Hutera wrote in their authoritative survey “The Dance Handbook” in 1989 that Mr. Cohan’s “pragmatic commitment to promoting dance and nurturing new talent in Britain was as important as the work of Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert” , the founders of the Royal Ballet and Ballet Rambert.

Robert Paul Cohan was born in Manhattan on March 26, 1925. (Arrived just before midnight, he had an official birth date of March 27th, shared his family so he could later say he had two birthdays and was happy to celebrate both.) He was the eldest of three children from Walter and Billie (Osheyack) Cohan and grew up in Brooklyn. His mother worked for the US Postal Service and his father was a printer.

Robert took dance classes from a young age and was a fan of Fred Astaire, but he wasn’t seriously interested in dance until he was transferred to the UK to develop technical skills as part of the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II.

In London he saw Sadler’s Wells Ballet (the forerunner of the Royal Ballet) perform Robert Helpmann’s “Miracle in the Gorbals”. Inspired by this experience, he began his education at the Martha Graham School after leaving the army in 1946.

“I had this revelation,” he said in the Guardian interview, “that I would do it for the rest of my life.” His decision to turn down a job with the Veterans Administration and become a dancer sparked a two-year conflict with his family.

Within a few months, Graham had asked him to join their company, and he was soon one of their regular partners. Mr. Cohan’s appearance as Poetic Lover in Graham’s Deaths and Entrances “gave new meaning to the whole work,” wrote John Martin in a Times review. He added, “He dances admirably and acts with an engaging simplicity.”

When the Graham Company was not performing, Mr. Cohan danced on Broadway in the musicals “Shangri-La” and “Can-Can” and in 1957 worked in cabaret in Cuba with Jack Cole’s jazz dance company. (He described the experience as dancing “in a G-string for the mafia. ”)

Mr. Cohan began choreographing in the early 1950s and made his debut at the American Dance Festival with the solo “Perchance to Dream”. He wanted to teach and choreograph independently and left the Graham company in 1957, which infuriated Graham. According to one report, she scratched his back with her nails when they parted; Not a weakling, he should have scratched her back.

In 1962 he returned to the company, although in the same year he founded his own small troupe and from 1961 to 1965 headed the dance department of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

In 1966, Mr. Cohan became co-director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and he continued to dance with it until he officially left in 1969 when he dedicated himself to his role as director of the school and company at The Place.

In the next two decades he created more than 30 works for the London Contemporary Dance Theater, including “Stages” (1971), “Stabat Mater” (1975), Nympheas (1976) and “The Phantasmagoria” (1987) working for the dance companies Batsheva and Bat-Dor in Israel.

However, its success in generating a new contemporary dance audience in the UK, as well as new groups of choreographers, dancers and companies in the genre, meant that the London Contemporary Dance Theater now had to compete for funding in a far more diverse and crowded sector, as well the International Dance Umbrella Festival in London.

Mr. Cohan resigned from the company in 1989, returned to head the company in 1992 and left the company in 1994 in a dispute with the British Arts Council, the company’s main funding agency. The company was later wound up and a new downsized force from Mr. Alston took its place.

Mr. Cohan retired to a farmhouse in the Cevennes region in south-central France and restored it and shared it with his colleague, Mr. Chiesa. He continued to choreograph for the Scottish Ballet and the Yorke Dance Project, for which he created a series of solos via Zoom last year during the pandemic.

He became a British citizen in 1989 and knighted in 2019

In addition to Mr. Vestrich, his nephew, his nieces Lee and Lesley Vestrich and their children and grandchildren, Mr. Cohan, survive.

When asked in 2019 if he wanted to continue choreographing, Mr. Cohan replied: “Absolutely. That’s what I live for. “

Categories
Politics

Ex-firefighter Robert Sanford charged for assaulting police

Ex-firefighter Robert Sanford charged for assaulting police

A general view of Lehigh County Jail where retired firefighter Robert Sanford was due to appear before a federal judge on January 14, 2021 in Allentown, Pennsylvania in connection with the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Mark Makela | Reuters

A retired Pennsylvania firefighter was arrested and charged Thursday with crimes related to the January 6th Capitol riot in which he allegedly hurled a fire extinguisher that hit three Capitol police officers in the head.

55-year-old Robert Sanford was identified by a friend in a widespread video as the man who threw the fire extinguisher into a group of police officers surrounded by supporters of a ferocious mob President Donald Trump outside the Capitol.

The cops hit in the head did not include cop Brian Sicknick, who died a day after being hit by rioters.

The friend told the FBI Tuesday that Sanford, who recently retired from the Chester Fire Department, had told him that he was wanted as an attacker on the video, according to a document released by the US Attorney’s Office in Washington.

Sanford had also told his friend that he had traveled to Washington DC with a group of people on a bus to attend a January 6 rally on The Ellipse where President Donald Trump spoke and urged supporters to join him at his Efforts to help reverse Joe Biden’s presidential election victory, the document reads.

The group, including Sanford, “then followed the president’s instructions and went to the Capitol,” the document says.

At that time, Congress held a joint session to confirm Biden’s election as president.

Sanford, who lives in Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, has been charged with knowingly entering or staying in a restricted building or compound without legitimate authority to attack disorderly or disruptive behavior for reasons of the Capitol, civil disorder and certain officials, resistance to perform or hinder them while they are employed in the city fulfillment of official duties.