内容摘要：This image provided by Blue Origin shows, first row, seated, from left: Lauren Sanchez and Kerianne Flynn and standing in back from left: Amanda Nguyen, Katy Perry, Gayle King and Aisha Bowe in West Texas. (Blue Origin via AP)

This image provided by Blue Origin shows, first row, seated, from left: Lauren Sanchez and Kerianne Flynn and standing in back from left: Amanda Nguyen, Katy Perry, Gayle King and Aisha Bowe in West Texas. (Blue Origin via AP)

with “Bird of Pray,” a song whose intense vocals and prog rock sound owe something to the 1970s – as does the bell-bottomed pink suit Daniil Leshchynskyi wore in Tuesday’s semi-final.Valentyn Leshchynskyi said the lyrical message of loss and hope, centered on a phoenix-like bird, resonates with what Ukrainians experienced in recent years.

“We want to build a dream on the stage – even for three minutes, for Ukrainians – like the war will be over in the very near future,” he told The Associated Press.Ukraine is a longtime Eurovision competitor – as was its neighbor Russia. Both saw their relationship with the continental pop contest transformed by Moscow’s full-scale invasion three years ago.Russia was kicked out of Eurovision. Ukrainian folk-rap group

won the 2022 contest less than three months after the invasion. Winning brought the right to host the contest the following year. When war made that impossible,to stage Eurovision with a distinctly Ukrainian flavor, decking out the English city in blue and yellow Ukrainian flags.

Even before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine used Eurovision for cultural diplomacy, as a way to tell the world about their country’s history, music and language. Ukrainian singer

won the contest in 2016 — two years after Russia illegally seized Crimea — with a song about the expulsion of Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944. Kalush Orchestra’s winning song “Stefania” blended rapping in Ukrainian with a haunting refrain on a traditional Ukrainian wind instrument.In 2022, an apartment building-sized chunk of the

in Italy’s Dolomite mountains detached during a summer heat wave, sending an avalanche of debris down the popular summer hiking destination, killing 11.A glacier in Tibet’s Aru mountain range suddenly collapsed in 2016, killing nine people and their livestock, followed a few months later by the collapse of another glacier.

There also have been collapses in Peru, including one in 2006 that caused a mini tsunami; most recently, a glacial lagoon overflowed in April, triggering a landslide that killed two.“It’s amazing sometimes how rapidly they can collapse,” said Lonnie Thompson, a glacier expert at the Ohio State University. “The instability of these glaciers is a real and growing problem, and there are thousands and thousands of people that are at risk.”