I am getting too old for this kind of song... UGLY song.

As the US prepares to open a new embassy to Israel in the holy city of Jerusalem, Palestinian groups - echoing observers around the world - have fiercely condemned the move by Washington.

"This is the most flagrant and hostile act by the United States against the Palestinians since the beginning of the [Israeli] occupation," Yasser Abd Rabbo, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee member and former minister of information, said, according to Gulf News.

Abd Rabbo is among those who negotiated the Oslo Accords, secret negotiations between Israel and Palestine that created the Palestine Authority and led to the recognition of the PLO by Tel Aviv as the representative of the Palestinian people.

Rabbo said that Arab nations can react to the move by implementing an 1980 Arab summit resolution in which 15 Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, call for all nations to cease trade and other cooperation with any country that moves its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.

"Palestinians' options are limited, yet can be very effective if properly used," commented Khalil Shaheen, director of research and policies, and board member at Masarat, the Palestine Centre for Policy Research and Strategic Studies in Ramallah.

"The Palestinians can have a veto, which is no less important than the one the US exercises at the UN Security Council, on any political process Trump tries to launch — either between the Palestinians and Israelis or at a regional level," he noted.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201805141064421293-palestine-reaction-embassy-move/

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has begun a diplomatic tour to China, Russia and the European Union. The trip is aimed at bolstering Iran’s stance amid Washington’s withdrawal from the Iran deal and re-imposing sanctions. Sputnik discussed this with Rasool Nafisi from Strayer University in Virginia.

Sputnik: What do you expect from Mohammand Javad Zarif's diplomatic tour? Do you [think] he will be able to change Washington's stance on Iran?

Rasool Nafisi: Well, Washington's stance is clear. The president is going to give another 6 month to re-impose all of these sanctions. And in the meantime, Iran will have time to renegotiate. And Europeans, of course, want to keep the agreement. The problem is — the Iranian leadership seems to be totally adamant about not changing its position or giving an inch. Of course the Europeans are willing to keep it. So Mr. Zarif is not really having much of a tough time convincing the convinced.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201805131064410262-us-president-connected-israel-lobby/

Fifty-five Palestinian protesters, including six children under 18, have been killed by Israeli fire during demonstrations on the day of the US embassy's inauguration in Jerusalem, the Palestinian health ministry said Monday.

More than 2,700 protesters have been injured in Gaza on what has been the most violent day of the six week long Great March of Return. Those wounded on Monday include 203 children and 78 women, according to the ministry. 

The Palestinian government denounced Monday’s violence as a “terrible massacre” perpetrated “by the forces of the Israeli occupation”, and called for an immediate international intervention to prevent further deaths. A day of national mourning has been declared by the government in Ramallah, to be held Tuesday.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/426617-gaza-protests-embassy-jerusalem/

 

Monday's ceremony included a dual-language musical performance of Hallelujah and Peace Will Yet Come to Us All, as well as several prayers, including by controversial Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, who offered a prayer for Trump, and praised God and Jesus. "We thank you every day that you have given us a president who boldly stands on the right side of history, but more importantly on the right side of you oh God when it comes to Israel," he said.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201805141064441061-us-embassy-jerusal...

 

I will never sing Hallelujah ever again. Gus is an atheist.

 

In the Second century AD, Jewish rebels who had stunned the Romans and liberated a portion of Judea, overstruck imperial coins with images and a message of their own, “Year One of the Redemption of Jerusalem.”

The Roman emperor Hadrian had planted the seeds for the rebellion with his ambitions to remake Jerusalem, including the planned construction of a Temple to Jupiter on the site of the old Jewish Temple.

The leader of the Jewish rebellion, Bar Kokhba, was fired by a vision of a united Israel with Jerusalem as its capital that had been the exception during the prior millennium, thanks to the depredations of the Assyrians and Babylonians, among others. But such was the power of the national idea — and his messianic zeal — that Bar Kokhba ventured all on regaining it.

And lost. Not for nearly another 2,000 years would the vision come to fruition. At a ceremony in 1982 burying bones of some of those long-ago rebels with military honors, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared, ‘’Israel and Judea are reborn. We have redeemed Jerusalem.”

 

Read more shit at:

https://nypost.com/2018/05/14/jewish-dreams-of-jerusalem-as-israels-capi...

 

Selective Reporting Increases the Risk of a Greater Middle East War.

 By  James O’Neill*

 

The mainstream media news in recent days has carried reports of an exchange of rockets between forces based in Syria and what has been generally characterized as an Israeli “response.”  The Israelis claim that Iranian forces fire the rockets aimed at the Golan Heights. There are conflicting accounts as to whether or not the Iranian’s are responsible or whether the rockets were in fact fired by Syrian forces.

The claim and counterclaim have obscured more significant points that are not mentioned by the mainstream media. The first of these is that the latest round of attacks by the Israeli forces on military positions in Syria is not the first such attack.

Israel has long taken to itself the right to attack Syrian military positions. These attacks have intensified in recent years and are part of Israel’s dual aims with regard to Syria. The first aim is to expedite the overthrow of Syria’s President Bashar al Assad. The Israeli attacks generally benefit the various terrorist groups fighting the Syrian army and its Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah allies.

Israeli support for the terrorist groups further extends to the use of Israeli military hospitals in the Golan Heights treating wounded terrorists.

The second important factor is that the Iranians, like the Russians and Hezbollah, are in Syria at the request of the legitimate sovereign Syrian government, recognised as such and by the United Nations and other international bodies. The almost invariable use of the pejorative nomenclature  “Syrian regime” is a non-subtle attempt to propagandize the view of the US government and its lackeys that the Syrian government is in some way illegitimate.

The third omission in the news reports is that the area being shelled by the Syrians and/or Iranians is that the sole target is the Golan Heights. This is a significant (700 mi.²) piece of land, the western two thirds of which has been occupied by Israel since the six-day war in 1967.

It is a fundamental principle of international law that territory conquered in a war cannot be retained by the conquering power, in this case Israel. This principle is restated in Security Council resolution 242 (1967) which in the preamble emphasized “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” and further emphasized the requirement of all member states “to act in accordance with article 2 of the charter” (prohibiting force in the resolution of disputes).

The resolution went on to require (clause 1 (i) the “withdrawal of Israel Armed Forces from territories occupied in the recent (6 Day War) conflict.” Israel simply ignored this resolution is it ignores all obligations under international law that do not record with its geopolitical goals.

On 14 December 1981 Israel went further and purported to annex the territory it had illegally occupied since 1967. Three days later on 17 December 1981 the United Nations Security Council unanimously (with no abstentions) in Resolution 497 declared that Israel’s Golan Heights Law, which gave effect to  the annexation, was “null and void and without international legal effect”, and called on Israel to rescind its action.

Again, that was ignored by Israel, as was a later General Assembly resolution on 29 January 2007 which expressed the General Assembly’s deep concern that Israel had it not withdrawn from the Syrian Golan, contrary to relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, and stressed the illegality of Israel’s settlement constructions and other activities in the occupied Syrian Golan since 1967.

The resolution went on to state that the occupation and de facto annexation constituted a “stumbling block in the way of achieving a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region.”  It demanded once more that Israel withdraw to the pre-June 1967 lines.

In a familiar pattern, voting was 107 in favour, 6 against and 60 abstentions.

Apart from ignoring Israel’s continuing disregard of UN resolutions condemning its occupation and annexation of Syrian Golan, the media also fail to examine why Israel should continue its defiance of the overwhelming wishes of the international community.

There are two major factors in operation here. The first is that the geographical expansion of Israel’s territory has been a central plank of Israeli policy since at least the publication of the Yinon Plan in February 1982, which set out the blueprint for a “greater Israel.”  The Plan envisaged the incorporation into Israel wholly or significant parts of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

There is no possible legal basis upon which such a plan could be an advanced, but as noted, considerations of international law are rarely factored into Israel’s geopolitical considerations.

The second factor in operation here is that the Syrian Golan is, according to a November 2015 article in the UK journal The Economist (www.economist.com 7 November 2015) the site of three test drillings conducted by a subsidiary of the US company Genie Energy. These drillings indicated oil reserves “with a potential of billions of barrels.”  Again according to the Economist, the Israeli government is being urged by lobby groups to take advantage of the chaos in Syria to demand international recognition of Israel’s annexation.

One clue as to why Genie Energy should receive so little media coverage of its activities, including the potential theft of Syrian resources, can be found in the composition of the board of directors. That board includes Jacob Rothschild of the UK banking dynasty, Dick Cheney, former US vice president under GW Bush, James Wolsey, a former head of the CIA, and Rupert Murdoch. The latter’s media empire ensures that coverage of Israel is rarely critical. Murdoch, whose 1700 worldwide newspapers unanimously editorialized in favour of the 2003 Iraqi invasion, also ensures that the public is not given vital relevant information.

That was never clearer than in the current (non) coverage of the sustained illegal interventions in the Syrian war by the United States, United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia and Australia or the astonishingly one-sided coverage of the current massacre of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers as they protest the theft of their land and destruction of their human rights. Also completely missing from the media commentary is a discussion of what Robert Kennedy Jr aptly called “another pipeline war” (www.ecowatch.com 25 February 2016).

The Syrian war is a highly relevant component of the wider geopolitical issues affecting the region. These include, but are not limited to, the US plan to use Qatari gas via a pipeline to Europe with the overall objective of reducing or eliminating European reliance upon Russian gas. This pipeline necessarily transits Iraq and Syria. The hybrid war waged on Iran since 1979, and most recently including the unilateral withdrawal of United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is also part of this wider geopolitical framework.

Iran and Syria are also key elements in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a transformative infrastructure program that the US and some of its key allies are seeking to undermine.

The Australian government is very fond of proclaiming its belief in and support for the “international rules based order.” The disjunction between the rhetoric and the reality is  again something that is ignored by the mainstream media. By its continuing failure to fully and accurately inform its readership of Middle Eastern realities, the risk of a wider war is measurably increased.



*Barrister at law and geopolitical analyst. He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au

 

A "Greater Middle East War" is what the US (and Israel) is on course for (I would hate to be carthage...) — banking that the Russians and the Chinese (Chinese not yet involved in this caper) will be restrained and not push the button of "responses" or "retaliations" which would take us towards WW3.

But no matter what happens, our despicable media will always blame the Russians or the Martians, or whatever, rather than their glorious Western duplicitous governments that have been pushing shit in Syria for more than 60 years to steal its oil (syria: 60 years of conspiracies from the west...) or any other caper such as war on Iraq.

The exchange of missiles last week on the Syrian-Israeli border was anything but normal.

This firefight established new rules of engagement in the Levant, and made the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights an “operational theater” in the Syrian conflict overnight.

The mainstream media’s version of events began with Israel retaliating against Iranian missile strikes, and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) destroying Iran’s military capabilities inside Syria. But that information is questionable: it comes almost exclusively from Israelis who rarely miss an opportunity to beat the “Iranian threat” war drum.

In the lead-up to the May 10 skirmish—just after the Trump administration exited the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear agreement—Israeli officials began warning of an impending Iranian attack from inside Syria. Then, within hours of the ensuing firefight, an Israeli army spokesman announced that the elite “Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had fired 20 missiles into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, after which Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman boasted that “we hit nearly all Iranian infrastructures in Syria.”

IDF spokesman Brigadier General Ronen Manilas described Israel’s actions as “one of the greatest operations of the Israel Air Force in the past decade.” But as the dust settled, an altogether different version of events began to take shape.

A check of the actual conflict chronology shows that Israel initiated the incident by striking Syrian military targets in Kisweh (the Damascus suburbs) and Baath city (Quneitra) over the two preceding days. Russia had warned both Syria and Iran of the impending Israeli strike with the result that neither Iranian military personnel nor weapons systems appear to have been hit. The Syrian military (and not the IRGC) retaliated by firing 55 rockets at Israeli military outposts and installations in the occupied part of the Golan. Local Arab media identified these targets as key Israeli surveillance centers that crippled Israel’s “eyes and ears” along that vital demarcation line. Israel’s vaunted “Iron Dome” defense system failed to intercept most of these rockets, while the Syrian military intercepted more than half of Israel’s missiles, according to Russian military officials.

What is undisputed: the military back-and-forth was the first major firefight between Syria and Israel in the occupied Golan Heights since 1973—making the Golan an operational theater for the first time in over four decades. This is also the first time during the Syrian Civil War that the Syrian military has retaliated against Israeli strikes by hitting Israeli military installations—not just the incoming missiles and the Israeli warplanes firing them. And finally, Israel must contend for the first time with the fact that any battle it initiates can be waged in its own backyard.

Clearly, this is neither the result nor the response that Israel expected.

 

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/get-ready-for-the-new-mi...

It is hard to imagine anything so nauseating as a group of affluent liberals defending the mass murder of poor colonized people in the name of democracy and security. Though a species of moral turpitude associated with 19th century colonial tropes, in 2018 it remains very much alive under the banner of the UK Labour Friends of Israel (LFI).

In response to the shocking scenes of violence unleashed by Israeli security forces against Palestinian protestors on the boundary of the besieged Gaza Strip, resulting in the deaths of at least 58 people, including children, and the wounding of a further 2700, international condemnation of Israel has been near total.

Given that this latest body count raises to over 100 the number of Palestinians killed over the six weeks of Great Return March protests, organized to demand the right of return of refugees to their homes, along with a total of 10,000 wounded and injured, over 100, there is no doubting the willingness of Israel’s security forces to unleash lethal force against civilians.

Yet, as if to confirm the truth that colonialism is the toilet of the human soul, Labour Friends of Israel – a group of avowed Israel-supporting Labour Party MPs and officials – in a tweet subsequently removed amid the deluge of criticism it incurred, sought to defend this massacre by raising the spectre of Hamas. 

It reads: 

Tragic events on the Gazan border; all civilian deaths are regrettable. Hamas must accept responsibility for these events. Their successful attempt to hijack peaceful protest to attack Israeli border communities must be condemned by all who seek peace in the Middle East.”

Language is important, for it is the key to unlocking consciousness, and the language deployed by LFI in its response to Israel’s massacre of unarmed Palestinian protestors in Gaza confirms that for them the world is defined by a hierarchy of human worth, thus assuaging the groups collective conscience in defending the indefensible. 

But though LFI constitute a particularly egregious example of moral collapse when it comes to mitigating this unconscionable massacre, there are other culprits whose foray into the swamp of equivocation is worthy of condemnation. 

Consider, for example, the BBC’s coverage. 

In its reporting of the massacre the word ‘clashes’ predominated, conjuring the image of two equal sides engaged in a battle of some sort.

Thus for the typical Oxbridge-educated BBC journalist and editor, a Palestinian wielding a slingshot is the moral equivalent of a Kevlar-helmeted Israeli soldier wielding an advanced sniper rifles – moreover, a sniper rifle that may well have been supplied by the UK.

As for CNN, that bastion of US liberal news propaganda (oops, sorry, coverage), here again it’s not a massacre it’s clashes, as in ‘Dozens of Palestinians killed In Gaza clashes as US Embassy Opens’. 

Speaking of which, the extent of the contempt in which the rights of the Palestinians are held, and thus the contempt in which they as a people are held, was measured in the juxtaposition of the opening of the new US Embassy in Jerusalem with Palestinians being mown down by gunfire in Gaza. The headline carried on the front page of the New York Daily News, excoriating Ivanka Trump’s attendance at the event on behalf of the administration, spoke for millions.

There is no longer any hiding place when it comes to the brutal injustice of the plight of the Palestinian people. Too, the attempt to deploy Hamas as the terrorist bogeyman, used to justify Israel’s asphyxiating blockade of two million people in Gaza, is a perversion of both the history and the reality of the issue. 

Hamas is a product of Israel’s brutality and violence, Israel’s brutality and violence is not and never has been a product of Hamas. Further, the roots of this latest bout of lethal violence on the part of the Israeli security forces do not lie in the stance of the Netanyahu government, or indeed any Israeli government. Instead its roots lie in Israel’s mode of existence as a settler colonial apartheid state, a key component of which is the dehumanization and subjugation of the Palestinians.

Desmond Tutu, the first black archbishop if Cape Town, South Africa, and who received the Nobel Prize for his role in the struggle against South African apartheid, understood this all too well. In 2014, he is reported to have said: 

I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”

He goes on: 

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our democracy without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime.”

It is no accident that the post-apartheid South African government peremptorily announced the withdrawal of its ambassador from Israel in light of the massacre in Gaza. After all, on the most prosaic of levels, who more qualified to recognize today’s victims of apartheid than yesterday’s victims of apartheid? 

Labour Friends of Israel, a key pole of opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, has plumbed new depths of indecency with its mealy-mouthed apologia for Israel’s dreadful and appalling massacre of Palestinian protestors in Gaza. 

Shakespeare was right:

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/05/17/the-moral-collapse-of-labour-friends...

 

 

Read from top.

Australia has aligned with the United States as one of only two countries to vote against an independent investigation into the recent killing of 60 Palestinians in Gaza.

The United Nations human rights council held a special meeting on Friday night to discuss the “deteriorating human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory”. 

Twenty-nine countries, an overwhelming majority, voted to urgently set up an “independent, international commission of inquiry” to investigate recent violations of human rights and international humanitarian law there.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/19/australia-and-us-oppose-un...

A German daily newspaper has fired a cartoonist over an ‘anti-Semitic’ illustration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following Israel’s victory in the Eurovision song contest and the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza.

Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) published the cartoon of Netanyahu, mocked up as Eurovision winner Netta Barzilai, holding a missile marked with the Star of David on Tuesday. In the background, the Star of David can also be seen in place of the ‘V’ in a banner reading ‘Eurovision Song Contest.’ A speech bubble coming out of Netanyahu’s mouth reads: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

READ MORE: ‘Once a Holocaust denier, always a Holocaust denier’: Netanyahu slams Abbas

The newspaper later apologized for the work of cartoonist Dieter Hanitzsch, with editor-in-chief Wolfgang Krach saying the illustration used anti-Semitic cliches.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/427172-germany-netanyahu-cartoon-antisemitism/

 

 

A bit lame compared to the Gus toon at top...

A parody of Netta Barzilai's "Toy" song, the Israeli winner of Eurovision, by a Dutch comedian sparked the ire of Israel, which denounced it for its "anti-Semitic" clichés. The text refers in particular to the recent violence in Gaza.

"Look how beautifully I throw bombs,

Israel wins again,

it's been 70 years since the party started"

 

The political parody by Sanne Wallis de Vries, broadcast on May 20 on the Dutch public channel BNNVARA, did not make everyone laugh. This diversion of the "Toy" song by the Israeli winner of the Eurovision Netta Barzilai angered the Israeli authorities especially a few days after the deadly violence that occurred in the Gaza Strip.

In background images scrolling on a screen behind the Dutch humorist, dressed in an outfit reminiscent of Netta Barzilai, scenes of Palestinians protesting against the transfer of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem. At least 60 people were killed during the demonstration and more than 2,000 were injured by Israeli gunfire.

"If the holiday falls, make sure to bet on the embassies

With your ka-ching, ka-ching and ping-a-ping,

With your dollars and your money

With your ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching"

              sings the Dutch artist.

 

Translation by Jules Letambour

After nearly a decade, Israel delivers more than 10 tons of Palestinian mail
Allam Moussa, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of communications, said the backlog of mail, which dates to 2010, was allowed in from Jordan after long negotiations with Israeli authorities. The mail will take weeks to deliver.

• By Loveday Morris

Read from top.

"On September 17, at about 11 p.m. Moscow time [20:00 GMT], the communication with the crew of the Russian Il-20 aircraft was lost when it was over the Mediterranean Sea, some 35 kilometers from the Syrian coast, on its way back to Hmeymim airbase," the report said.

 

Latakia came under fire earlier today in a missile attack military sources said come from the direction of the sea. The Russian Defense Ministry in its statement about the missing plane identified four Israeli F-16 airplanes as part of the attack on Latakia. Personnel at Hmeymim airbase have organized a search and rescue operation.

Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson refused to comment on the plane disappearance. After taking a break for a consultation with the command, the spokesperson said that IDF doesn't comment on reports from abroad.

WATCH: Syrian Air Defense Repels Israeli Air Strike on Damascus

Earlier on Monday, Syrian media reported a missile attack on the Syrian city of Latakia. A source told Sputnik that there were drones and missiles involved in the attack.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201809181068115828-russian-plane-syri...

Tensions with Moscow and lack of candidate due to controversy over the politicization of the competition by the Kiev authorities, forced Ukraine not to participate at Eurovision in Tel Aviv.

After four embarrassing refusals and lack of a potential candidate for Eurovision, Ukraine has resigned on 27 February from participation in the musical contest which has increasingly political stakes for Kiev. In three days, the four big favorites of the Ukrainian public have successively announced their refusal to represent their country during the popular contest, which will take place this year in May in Israel, accusing the authorities of wanting to "politicize" it.

 

Read more:

https://francais.rt.com/international/59552-politisation-concours-tensio...

 

 

Read from top.

Arab League Fully Supports Syria's Sovereignty Over Golan Heights

Earlier, US President Donald Trump tweeted that it was time for the US to fully recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Secretary-General of the Arab League Ahmed Aboul Gheit announced that the league fully supports Syrian sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

"The League of Arab States fully supports Syria's right for its occupied territory. We have a specific position, based on resolutions, on this issue," Aboul Gheit said on Thursday.

The official insisted that the Golan Heights were occupied territory belonging to Syria under international law and the resolutions of the United Nations and the UN Security Council.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201903211073439253-arab-league-suppor...

 

 

Read from top.

Eurovision has always been an exercise in bad taste, but this year’s event takes things to an extreme. If you want to enjoy the kitschy song contest, which will take place from 12 to 14 May in Tel Aviv, Israel, then you have got to ignore the bloody political context that surrounds it. Indeed, Israel is so intent on keeping Eurovision politics-free that anyone it says might disrupt the event will be blocked from entering the country.

One of the most frustrating things about being Palestinian (I’m half-Palestinian myself) is that there seems to be no acceptable way to defend your humanity or protest agains your oppression. Calls to boycott Eurovision, for example, have been decried as divisive. Last month, celebrities including Stephen Fry, Sharon Osbourne and Marina Abramović signed a letter stating that Eurovision’s “spirit of togetherness” is “under attack by those calling to boycott [the competition] because it is being held in Israel, subverting the spirit of the contest and turning it from a tool of unity into a weapon of division”.

Look at that language. A peaceful form of protest is described as an “attack” and a “weapon”. Palestinians and their supporters are cast as unreasonable, violent aggressors. Meanwhile, the larger context is ignored. The fact that most Palestinians, even those just a few miles from Tel Aviv, have no hope of attending Eurovision thanks to the severe travel restrictions imposed on them, is ignored. The fact that there is an entire infrastructure – from a concrete border wall to segregated roads – that is designed to separate Palestinians and Israelis is ignored.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/08/the-eurovision-boy...

 

Read from top.

Eurovision 2020 may have been cancelled, but we still have a "winner".

 

Key points:

• Russia followed Iceland in second place, with Lithuania in third
• Moldova came in last place
• Australia did not place as voters were unable to vote for entrant Montaigne, per Eurovision rules

 

Australia has voted to crown Iceland's Daði & Gagnamagnið this year's top Eurovision act following a nationwide vote and countdown as part of an SBS Eurovision replacement special, Eurovision 2020: Big Night In!

The group's synth-pop track went viral before the song contest was called off due to the coronavirus in March.

Think About Things has since gone on to amass over seven million views on YouTube.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-16/eurovision-2020-big-night-in-iceland-daði-gagnamagnið-winner/12230332

 

Read from top.

 

 

After the real finale was called off due to the pandemic, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) aired a substitute show on Saturday with a message to unite countries despite the crisis.

A two-hour special called "Eurovision: Europe Shines A Light" was broadcast in dozens of countries around the world.

Read more: Alternatives to the Eurovision Song Contest

The program featured the original song entries from the 41 countries that take part in the contest in a non-competitive format.

In Germany, viewers could still cast votes for the song that "won the hearts" of the audience.

Lithuanian band The Roop was declared the winner at the event which was held in front of empty seats at Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie hall.

Read more: Germany's Eurovision contestant revealed

Several other countries also held their own alternative ESC contests, including the "Free European Song Contest" in Germany and the UK's "Eurovision" Come Together."

The finale was originally scheduled to take place in Rotterdam from May 12 – 16, but was called of due to measures to stem the spread of COVID-19.

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/german-viewers-plump-for-lithuania-as-eurovision-winner/a-53467696

 

Read above and from top.

Conchita and Duncan, move over! The next major Eurovision artist might be a computer.

Can artificial intelligence help compose a song that is just as successful as last year’s hit by Duncan Laurence? In the AI Song Contest teams from all over Europe and Australia will compete attempting to create the next Eurovision hit with the help of artificial intelligence. Can computers blow us away with their creative power?

In the AI Song Contest, teams of musicians, artists, scientists and programmers explore the creative power of artificial intelligence (AI) and the influence AI will have on the music industry in the future. A total of 13 teams from Australia, Sweden, Belgium, The UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands are competing.

And you get to decide who wins! From 10 April you can listen to all songs on this website and leave your evaluation. Which song earns your douze points?

A panel of AI experts will evaluate the songs on AI level. The panel consists of Vincent Koops (NL), Senior Data Scientist at RTL and composer, Anna Huang (US), leading AI researcher in music generation, and Ed Newton-Rex (UK), Composer and Director at the AI lab at ByteDance.

The winner will be announced on May 12, 2020.

The AI Song Contest is an online project organised by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO in collaboration with NPO Innovation and NPO 3FM.

Can computers blow us away with their creative power?

The AI Song Contest is a public project researching the creative abilities of AI and its impact on us as musical animals. For this contest, various teams investigate the recipe for a great Eurovision song by trying to generate a new one. To generate new music, AI models (just like a human composer) have to 'listen' to large amounts of existing music (data) before it can generate meaningful musical ideas. Therefore the teams will work with existing data and newly-created data.

If you have any questions about the AI Song Contest, please send us an email: aisongcontest@vpro.nl.

 

https://www.vprobroadcast.com/titles/ai-songcontest/about.html

 

See it:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=-yIu5VLZj5g&feature=emb...

 

 

The Australian team named Uncanny Valley has won the AI Song Contest with a track entitled Beautiful the World. The event was organized by Dutch broadcaster VPRO in cooperation with radio station NPO 3FM and NPO Innovation.