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The day has come! After months of preparation and two Semi-Finals, acts from 26 countries will compete in the Grand Final of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest. The result will be determined by a combination of expert juries and viewers from all 41 participating countries. The show will feature special guest performances from reigning Eurovision queen Netta, former winners Dana International, Conchita Wurst and Måns Zelmerlöw, as well as Eurovision icon Verka Serduchka. And... earlier this week we could also confirm that Madonna will perform as guest star during the show! The Grand Final of the 64th Eurovision Song Contest...

TEL AVIV, May 15 (Reuters) - The Eurovision Song Contest has found few fans in a famous mosque in the Israeli host city, where worshippers have complained that the gaudy festivities are disrupting their observances of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. A "Eurovision Village" pavilion set up on the Tel Aviv beachfront to host parties is located directly opposite the century-old Hassan Bek mosque, named after an Ottoman governor and frequented by Israeli Arabs from nearby Jaffa. The 41-country songfest has been a focus of pro-Palestinian boycott calls, and some Muslims fasting daily as part of Ramadan resent the...

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel’s webcast of the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final was hacked with animated images of explosions in host city Tel Aviv, which the national broadcaster blamed on Hamas militants... After the 41-country competition kicked off on Tuesday with a first semi-final, Kan’s webcast cut to animated satellite footage showing explosions in Tel Aviv set to a menacing soundtrack. Kan played down the hack, noting that the evening ended without further incident as Greece, Belarus, Serbia, Cyprus, Estonia, Czech Republic, Australia, Iceland, San Marino and Slovenia made it through to Saturday’s finals... ...Palestinians and their foreign supporters have...

Without a song, the day would never end; the road would never bend. In the purple dusk of twilight time, the music is a beautiful melody that haunts one's reverie. Yet the news that the Eurovision song contest (Eurovision) will be held in Tel Aviv, Israel has produced an outcry from the usual suspects, unrelentingly hostile toward the State of Israel. Participants in the annual contest, more than 50 countries, primarily but not confined to members of the European Broadcasting Union, submit an original song to be performed on live TV or over the radio. The contest has been won...

Dame Vivienne Westwood, Peter Gabriel and Wolf Alice are among 50 artists who have called for the Eurovision Song Contest to be relocated from Israel. Citing human rights concerns, they have signed an open letter urging the BBC to ask organisers to move the contest. "Eurovision may be light entertainment, but it is not exempt from human rights considerations," they wrote.

Hardly anybody in America cares about the annual Eurovision Song Contest, and that's just as it should be, given that on the whole, it's almost as horrible a viewing experience these days as the Oscars or Emmys. But in Europe, Eurovision is as big as ever – almost as big a draw as the Super Bowl in the U.S., if you can imagine a Super Bowl that no straight man would ever be caught dead watching, but that is a magnet for gays, teenage girls, gays, a scattering of the senile and feebleminded who happened to have left their TVs...

Organizers of a music festival in Düsseldorf, Germany, withdrew their invitation to composer and singer Brian Eno over his longtime involvement in attempts to boycott Israel, JTA reported on Friday. Eno was slated to appear at the Electricity Conference festival in October, but last week he was among a group of artists who signed a letter urging a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest that will be held next year in Israel. Festival organizer Rüdiger Esch told the Westdeutsche Zeitung that it “was the only right decision” to disinvite Eno because “we don’t want to invite anyone who supports activities...

Two European Parliament lawmakers from Ireland on Sunday expressed support for boycotting Israel following its winning the Eurovision song contest, JTA reported. Lynn Boylan of Ireland’s far-left Sinn Féin party wrote on Twitter following Saturday’s win, “Israel wins Eurovision so let’s make BDS more successful than ever in 2019.” Nessa Childers, another Irish lawmaker for the Party of European Socialists, retweeted Boylan’s message, adding the word: “This!” She later wrote: “Jerusalem? The mind boggles. I thought Tel Aviv.” Órla Nic Biorna, a regional lawmaker for Sinn Féin, an Irish nationalist movement that was affiliated with the now-defunct Provisional Irish Republican...

The victory of Israeli, Netta Barzilai, and her song 'Toy' in the May 2018, Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon, Portugal, was not so much amazing or spectacular. The talented young lady's unremarkable song, 'Toy', resembles more of a techno 'Hokey Pokey' or contemporary 'Chicken Dance' rather than a vocal masterpiece. However, what was remarkable were the words she used in her victory speech saying, "Next year in Jerusalem!" What does her phrase mean? 2000 year ago the Jewish people were expelled by the Romans from their land and dispersed to the four corners of the earth (even China!). Since then...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday with an homage to Israel’s winning Eurovision song “Toy,” performed by Netta Barzilai. Instead of “boker tov” —  “good morning”–  Netanyahu opened his on-the-record remarks to cabinet ministers with “boker toy.” Israel’s victory, its first since 1998, means it wins the right to host next year’s finals, which has transformed in those intervening decades into a massive extravaganza with two rounds, tens of thousands of fans, and millions more tuning in around the world. “These days, Jerusalem is blessed with many gifts,” the prime minister said Sunday. “We received another...

The Eurovision Song Contest has completed its lineup of 26 contestants who will face off for this year’s crown, following a second semifinal. Performers from Serbia, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine, Sweden, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Slovenia and The Netherlands earned enough votes Thursday night to reach the Grand Final. Missing out on Saturday’s headline show were Russia, Georgia, Latvia, Malta, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and San Marino. Half of the votes were cast by a professional jury and the other half remotely by viewers.

Break out the sequins and pop the champagne - it's Eurovision time again. It's that time of year when delegations from across Europe - and further afield - come together to find out which country will be crowned the winner of the annual song contest-cum-live TV spectacle. This year marks the 62nd edition of the international gathering that, over the years, has brought us such gems as Waterloo by Abba, Making Your Mind Up by Bucks Fizz and Flying the Flag by Scooch. For some it's a deluge of gaudiness, kitsch and music to make your ears bleed. To many...

Imagine you’re in high school and you find out for the past 50 years, there’s been a massive annual party that everyone else just assumed everyone else knew about but you were never invited. And also, the party has glorious dance music, over-the-top costumes, and human-sized hamster wheels. That’s how it feels to be an American who is only now finding out about Eurovision Song Contest. From what I can gather, the European Song Contest is like American Idol in its heyday, if you took every boring white guy with a guitar and replaced him with a techno dancer in...

As the annual Eurovision Song Contest approaches, the Stockholm theater hosting the event has published the rules about waving flags, and enumerated several flags that will be forbidden. Flags with commercial messages, those that discriminate against sectors of the population, those that disrupt the broadcast and those with messages in languages other than English will not be permitted. The specific list of banned lags include those of Kosovo, Basque, the Crimean Peninsula, the PLO, Donetsk, Northern Cyprus, Transnistria and ISIS. Saeb Erekat, a senior member of the Palestinian Authority, sent a letter in response, demanding an apology from the organizers...

When Conchita Wurst raised her microphone-shaped winner’s trophy at the Eurovision Song Contest in May, she smashed through a lavender ceiling. […] … Russian politicians interpreted the result as a sign of moral decay in the West. “This is the end of Europe,” railed Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic party of Russia. “It’s rotted away. There are no more men and women. There is just ‘it’.” Valery Rashkin, the deputy leader of the ­Communist Party, demanded that Russia leave the frothy competition and establish a heterosexual alternative, tentatively called The Voice of ­Eurasia. […] Now he’s getting...

Conchita Wurst is responsible for flooding that left over 50 people dead earlier this month, church leaders in the Balkans have claimed. The Austrian drag artist, whose real name is Thomas Neuwirth, seized international attention after winning Eurovision 2014 with his hit Rise Like a Phoenix. […] “This [flood] is not a coincidence, but a warning,” Patriarch Amfilohije of Montenegro said, according to e.novine.com. “God sent the rains as a reminder that people should not join the wild side.” […] The Russian Orthodox Church has previously described Conchita as an “abomination” and that his victory was “one more step in...

The Russian Orthodox Church and several politicians have strongly condemned last week's Eurovision winner, a bearded Austrian cross-dresser who promotes gay rights, and have suggested that they will create their own pop competition. "The last Eurovision contest's results exhausted our patience," Communist Party deputy Valery Rashkin said about the winner of Europe's top pop competition, 25-year-old Conchita Wurst. "We must leave this competition. We cannot tolerate this endless madness." He added that he would like to see the creation of "Voice of Eurasia," which would invite other countries from the former Soviet Union to participate, according to AFP news agency....

Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst, popularly known as “the bearded lady,” won the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday with the James Bond-theme-like ballad “Rise Like a Phoenix”, before a global TV audience of about 180 million people in 45 countries.

It is 40 years since Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton - a victory that started their meteoric rise to super group status with millions of fans around the globe. When the four-piece stepped on to the stage accompanied by a man dressed as Napoleon to deliver their country's entry for the competition, they were virtually unknown. The audience at the 1,700-seat Brighton Dome on 6 April, 1974, had no idea how huge the Swedish group, which performed Waterloo, would become. Most of them were concentrating on the UK entry - Olivia Newton John with her song Long...