Healthy move
Queen Elizabeth II received her COVID-19 vaccine Saturday.
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Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, have received their COVID-19 vaccinations, royal officials said Saturday.
Buckingham Palace officials said in a statement that the 94-year-old monarch and Philip, 99, received their jabs Saturday, joining 1.5 million people in Britain who have been given a first dose of a vaccine.
The injections were administered at Windsor Castle, where the queen and her husband have been spending their time during the lockdown in England.
Royal officials said they took the rare step of commenting on the monarch’s health in order to prevent inaccuracies and further speculation. The queen “decided that she would let it be known she has had the vaccination,” the palace statement said.
On Dec. 8, Britain became the world’s first country to begin a mass vaccination drive against the coronavirus. The government says it is aiming to deliver the first vaccine doses to some 15 million people in the top priority groups by the middle of February.
That includes everyone older than 70, as well as front-line health care workers, care home residents and anyone whose health makes them especially vulnerable to the virus. — Associated Press
Cohen continues to rehabilitate image
The rehabilitation of Michael Cohen has reached a surreal new stage: Quizzing the actor Ben Stiller about his approach to impersonating him on “Saturday Night Live.”
Since September, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer has been producing a podcast from the Park Avenue apartment where he is serving the remainder of
his prison sentence for lying to Congress, evading taxes and facilitating campaign finance crimes.
The show, “Mea Culpa,” has been downloaded nearly 3 million times and is available in 37 countries, Cohen said. Before Stiller, featured in an episode released Friday, guests have included Rosie O’donnell, the magician and former “Celebrity Apprentice” star Penn Jillette, political journalists, and current and former operatives from both parties, including James Carville and Anthony Scaramucci.
The topic of every show so far? Blistering criticism of the president’s every move.
Cohen, who once famously claimed he would take a bullet for Trump, said he has made it part of his penance to dismantle Trump’s legacy and “return this nation to a place of sanity,” though he categorizes his show as “a news commentary program” instead of an “anti-trump program.”
He said he plans to con
tinue his podcast throughout the Biden administration.
“We cannot fool ourselves into believing that Trump will just disappear,” he told The Associated Press. “Accordingly, he will continue to remain a topic of discussion.”
The launch of the podcast followed Cohen’s publication over the summer of a tell-all memoir about his conversion from Trump acolyte to avowed enemy.
In his interview with Stiller, Cohen likened Trump’s signature scowl to the visage of Derek Zoolander, Stiller’s pouty male model persona. Stiller, for his part, said he recognized in Cohen the “dichotomy” of fear and a killer instinct.
“I felt like there was a humanity in there that I was trying to connect with,” Stiller said, adding he didn’t want his SNL impression “to be this scathing, mean thing.”
Cohen, on the other hand, seems to be going for the jugular, while satisfying his own addiction to the limelight.
He rails breathlessly in every show against the “idiot in chief.” In one recent episode of “Mea Culpa,” he complained that the presidential pardon process had “devolved into a corrupt and transactional circus, with Trump as its ringmaster.”
Trump cutting short his recent Florida vacation
and returning to Washington to double down on his challenge to the election results “sent my blood pressure through the roof!” Cohen told listeners in his Long Island cadence.
Cohen, despite years of introspection, has remained at a loss to explain his unswerving allegiance to a businessman he feels abandoned him at the most vulnerable point in his life. He has likened his fealty to Trump to a mental illness and said he thought of himself as acting like a drug user in need of an intervention.
The “most important victory” of the podcast, Cohen said, is that he believed some people who once supported Trump changed their minds after listening.
“I have learned that there are tens of thousands of people who are exhausted and anxious and in need of some type of outlet to channel their frustration about our current political climate,” Cohen said.
“If I can help them deal with their fears or feel somewhat better about the darkness that is enveloping all of us, I feel like we’ve accomplished something extraordinary.”
Cohen, 54, had been scheduled to remain in prison until November but was released in May to serve the remainder of his sentence at home.