Upon announcing “Love Story” on Thursday’s Good Morning America, Swift also revealed that she has re-recorded Fearless as Fearless (Taylor’s Version), featuring “6 never-before-released songs from the vault.”
While she did not officially announce the release date of the re-recorded version of Fearless, strange capitalizations in her note spell out “April 9th”; Billboard has confirmed with Swift’s rep that April 9 is the release date for the re-recorded album.
“When I think back on the Fearless album and all that you turned it into, a completely involuntary smile creeps across my face,” Swift wrote in a note to fans. “This was the musical era in which so many inside jokes were created between us, so many hugs exchanged and hands touched, so many unbreakable bonds formed. So before I say anything else, let me just say that it was a real honor to get to be a teenager alongside you.”
TEL AVIV — As Israel outpaces Western nations in its Covid-19 vaccination effort, it has become a role model for a world aching to return to life as it once was.
The country has inoculated a third of its population of 9 million in little more than a month, and over 80 percent of those 60 and older.
But if you ask most Israelis, the country’s handling of the coronavirus has been anything but a success story. A recent poll by the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute found that just 24 percent of Israelis approve of the government’s management of the crisis.
While Israel boasts the world’s highest vaccination rate, it is also battling the world’s third-worst infection rate.
Despite the vaccination campaign, January was Israel’s deadliest month, with 1,433 people dying from the virus — a third of the 5,000 fatalities since the pandemic began. Israelis have also experienced some of the world’s strictest and longest national lockdowns, with residents mostly confined to their homes for a cumulative four months.
In late December, Israel became the first country to enter a third lockdown. Meant to last two weeks, it is still in force.
Much of Israel’s successful vaccination rollout rests on its small size — roughly equivalent to New Jersey in both land size and population — and its centralized universal health care system that enables virtually all Israelis to be vaccinated quite seamlessly.
Yet there is another element driving Israel’s sprint toward becoming the first country to vaccinate a majority of its population: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is running for re-election, again.
“Many Israelis feel that the management of this crisis has been very much affected by Netanyahu’s own political considerations,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said.
In previous elections, Netanyahu was fighting corruption charges; now, ahead of the March 23 election, he faces trial on those charges, a challenger from his own party, and a pandemic that has killed thousands of Israelis and left many feeling that he has failed to safely navigate this crisis.
Protesters calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resignation outside his official residence in Jerusalem last week. The pandemic has delayed Netanyahu’s trial on bribery and fraud charges.Menahem Kahana / AFP – Getty Images
Netanyahu, whose trial has been delayed several times due to the lockdowns and is scheduled to appear in court Monday, seems to be counting on a successful vaccination operation to not only enable Israel to emerge from the coronavirus, but also to help win him re-election.
“He thinks the vaccine is going to help him, but I don’t, because the situation in Israel is only getting worse,” said Orly Almog, a member of the Black Flag movement, an anti-Netanyahu protest that began in March 2020 and has been demonstrating against Netanyahu since the pandemic began.
Experts say the vaccine has not been as effective in lowering the caseload as some expected because not enough Israelis have been fully inoculated—35 percent have received the first dose, while 20 percent have received both.
Also, according to Itamar Grotto, associate director general at the Ministry of Health, the vast majority of new cases in Israel are associated with the British variant, which is potentially more contagious and difficult to control with the current vaccines.
Political opponents and anti-Netanyahu protesters aren’t the only ones criticizing his handling of the pandemic.
Some 200 leading Israeli doctors and scientists have established two groups — the Common Sense Model and the Public Emergency Council for the Coronavirus Crisis (PECC) — to speak out against what they say is the mismanagement of the crisis. Members of these groups include former directors of Israel’s Ministry of Health, heads of Israeli hospitals and medical schools, and recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Israel Prize, the country’s highest distinction.
According to these experts, Israel’s reliance on national closures has been both unnecessary and ineffective.
“Lockdowns can lower the prevalence of disease, but in the end, they do not affect the number of sick or dead people,” said Dr. Yoav Yehezkelli, member of the Common Sense Model and the PECC who helped design Israel’s programs for dealing with an epidemic.
Lockdowns, he said, “can be taken in an extreme situation where the health system is flooded as we saw in the beginning of the pandemic in China or Italy.”
But the Israeli health care system “has never been close to collapsing” said Yehezkelli, who lectures on emergency and disaster management at Tel Aviv University.
Not all medical experts share this perspective.
Lockdowns “have been very very useful in reducing morbidity and mortality in the first two rounds,” said Ronit Calderon-Margalit, a professor of epidemiology at Hebrew University, who has been advising the government, referring to Israel’s previous lockdowns.
Israeli medical personnel tend to Covid-19 patients at the Ziv Medical Center in Safed, northern Israel, on Tuesday. The country has already vaccinated a third of its population in little over a month. Jalaa Marey / AFP – Getty Images
It’s the steps taken getting out of lockdowns that can cause problems.
“There hasn’t been a clear strategy of the government, and even when there was, in the case of the traffic light strategy, it was never carried out,” Calderon-Margalit added, referring to the model in which lockdowns are enforced in “red” areas with high infection rates, and “green” areas with low infection rates have more freedom.
“We wasted the arsenal of the lockdowns,” she added.
Even government officials say the latest lockdown has been a failure.
“The forecasts were wrong,” Ran Balicer, the chairman of the national expert panel on Covid-19 said minutes before a Cabinet meeting Thursday.
“Lockdown as a means of magic … is dead,” added Balicer, a professor in the Department of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University.
Ahead of this meeting, Netanyahu was pushing for another lockdown extension. In the hours before the lockdown was supposed to end on Friday morning, the government announced that it would be extended until Sunday.
As in other countries, some experts also decry the overwhelming economic costs of closure.
According to Aaron Ciechan over, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry, “four hours of lockdown is worth the annual budget of the Israel Cancer Association.”
Yehezkelli and his colleagues worry most about the devastating long-term effects on Israelis’ physical and mental health.
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These medical experts also believe the government’s decisions have been driven by politics. Health Minister Yuli Edelstein is a Netanyahu political appointee with no background in health. His predecessor, Yakov Litzman, who served until May 2020, had no medical background, flouted his own ministry’s coronavirus guidelines, and tested positive for Covid-19.
Critics cite as a prime example of politically driven decision-making the lack of enforcement of Covid-19 guidelines in many ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, where schools often remain open, and huge weddings and funerals continue to take place.
Israel would be in a much better place, many medical experts say, had Netanyahu not abandoned the so-called traffic light strategy to enforce lockdowns.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews argue with Israeli border police officers during a protest over the coronavirus lockdown restrictions in Ashdod, Israel, last week.Oded Balilty / AP
Israel’s previous coronavirus czar, Ronni Gamzu, tried to implement that strategy, but was blocked by Netanyahu because many of the red areas are ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods that are strongholds for the embattled prime minister. Not wanting to alienate the ultra-Orthodox, who represent 12 percent of Israel’s population, Netanyahu opted for the current across-the-board approach.
The resentment created by this double standard will be a factor for many voters in March, Plesner said. “Enforcement is highly skewed in favor of the ultra-Orthodox population,” who according to government statistics constitute nearly 40 percent of virus cases, and receive just 2 percent of fines for violating lockdown rules.
According to Calderon and other medical experts who are not part of the Common Sense Model or the PECC, virtually every health professional in Israel agrees that the traffic light policy is preferable to the all-out lockdown, which has led to a fatigue that hinders compliance, making this lockdown less effective.
Grotto, the Health Ministry official, said there is truth to criticism that Netanyahu’s handling of the pandemic may be driven by political interests.
“But it’s also cultural. Even if the ultra-Orthodox community was not part of the [governing] coalition, still there would be a problem with the enforcement,” he said, noting that despite the high death toll among them, many religious leaders and their followers continue to rebel against restrictions.
The prime minister’s office declined to comment on the record for this story.
For most democratically elected leaders, these challenges could present an existential threat to any hope of re-election.
Yet Netanyahu is known as a political wizard, or “King Bibi” to his base, for good reason.
According to the latest polls, Netanyahu has the best chances of forming a government, though he is favored by just about 30 percent of voters.
Second behind him in the polls: “Don’t know” or “None of them.”
Trent Reznor, the Oscar-winning composer and frontman of Nine Inch Nails, has denied claims that he was involved in a sexual assault alongside Marilyn Manson, made by Manson in his memoir.
Earlier this week, Manson was accused by his former partner, actor Evan Rachel Wood, of years of “horrific” abuse. She had previously accused an unnamed person of sexual assault, physical violence including torture, and various forms of emotional abuse. Four other women concurrently published accounts of sexual, physical and emotional abuse from Manson.
He denies the allegations, calling them “horrible distortions of reality”, and saying “my intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual”.
In the wake of the allegations, a passage from Manson’s 1998 autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell began circulating online, in which Manson claims that he and Reznor sexually assaulted a heavily intoxicated woman. Reznor has responded, saying:
I have been vocal over the years about my dislike of Manson as a person and cut ties with him nearly 25 years ago. As I said at the time, the passage from Manson’s memoir is a complete fabrication. I was infuriated and offended back when it came out and remain so today.
The book passage is from an unpublished 1995 Manson interview with Empyrean magazine. A publisher’s note in the book explains the interview was never printed in Empyrean because the magazine publishers “believed that the magazine had followed unethical interview procedures in order to extract information from Mr Manson”.
Reznor and Manson were once close, with Reznor signing him to his label Nothing Records and co-producing his first two albums. He later cut ties, and in 2009 called Manson “a malicious guy [who] will step on anybody’s face to succeed and cross any line of decency. Seeing him now, drugs and alcohol now rule his life and he’s become a dopey clown.”
Following the allegations of the five aforementioned women this week, further women have alleged abuse from Manson.
Model Scarlett Kapella alleges emotional, physical and sexual abuse; musician Chloe Black alleges physical and verbal abuse; artist and film-maker Louise Keay Bell, who has previously made allegations against the singer, reiterated her claims that he “emotionally and financially abused me”, and harassed her following the initial allegations. Fashion stylist Love Bailey claims he held a Glock pistol to her head in a 2011 incident, and retailer Torii Lynn also alleges that Manson abused her. Manson has not responded to these particular allegations. The Guardian has contacted his management for comment.
Following this week’s allegations, Manson has been dropped by his label Loma Vista Recordings, and removed from two US TV series he was due to appear in.
Los Angeles police were called to the singer’s home on Wednesday night to check on the welfare of the singer, and stated to the Daily Mail there was “no evidence of any trouble whatsoever”.
His ex-wife Dita Von Teese made a statement following the allegations, saying she had not experienced abuse from Manson, and that their marriage had ended due to “infidelity and drug abuse”.