Today has been a sad day in Eurovision world. The hackers, an Azerbaijani anti-gay group, attacked the biggest and one of the oldest Eurovision sites, esctoday.com and destroyed all its content or 12 years old hard work from its editors, among them also yours truly. The text they displayed is translated as follows: "What do gay men bring to
Azerbaijan? What will happen in Azerbaijani families after the gay
parade? There is no place for gays immoral in Azerbaijan. Leave our
country. No place in Azerbaijan for gay men who look like animals. There is no place for the evil in this country. We paint blue to red blood". Also some other sites were down due to attacks today. The official Eurovision website, eurovision.tv was down for a few hours last month for similar attack. So far these's no official statement by EBU for the matter but this published by a German site Prinz.de: "Of course it's unfortunate for these
websites and their owners that their websites were attacked. We are here
to organize a song contest, not a gay parade. As always, there's a
solid security arrangements around the contest." Public relations and
communication manager of the Eurovision 2012 Tahir Mammadov told APA
that reasons of the incident are being investigated and the public
community will be informed in details later.
And now to some lighter arguments. Thirteen countries did their second rehearsal today and some were improved and changed some way like Finland that had changed its backdrop completely. Some were vocally less convincing today than the first rehearsal like Greece, Cyprus and Iceland. Some were showing of their dresses for the first time, like San Marino, Latvia and Cyprus. Some gave again a perfect performance, like Albania, Israel and Denmark. And Romania that really convinced today. Another 13 semifinalists will rehearse tomorrow.
My flying reporter Robert has been busy as well. Three more excellent in depth interviews to show: Sinplus from Switzerland, Rona Nishliu from Albania and Zeljko Joksimovic from Serbia (that I will publish tomorrow)
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