Spanish broadcasting founder dies

Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS) founder Raul Alarcon died last week in Miami. He was 82, reports Radio Online.

The Spanish-language broadcasting pioneer was born in Cuba and founded his first radio station there in 1951. He acquired his first US radio outlet 1983 in New York, after fleeing Cuba following Fidel Castro's rise to power.

Alarcon served as president of SBS's board of directors until November 1999, and was recently honoured with the Medallas de Cortez Lifetime Achievement Award.

ABC Radio does not have a broadcast deal in place to cover the Beijing Olympics, just weeks away from the opening ceremony, raising the prospect that a tradition of public broadcasting from the games could be broken, says The Age.

The public broadcaster, which has covered every Olympic Games since World War II, is locked in dispute with Sydney radio station 2GB, which owns the rights to the games and wishes to on-sell them.

Macquarie Radio, which owns 2GB, is obliged to sell rights to a second carrier, capable of broadcasting the games across regional Australia. Only the ABC Radio fits that description.

The adoption of a Bill that allows full-time state broadcasts in Kurdish has been mostly welcomed by Kurdish activists and intellectuals, but they say it is hardly enough on its own, reports Todays Zaman.

In a session last week, Parliament adopted new legislation amending a law on the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) network allowing broadcasts in non-Turkish languages.

The Bill was passed in a vote of 225 to 75. The Bill has been awaiting parliamentary approval for the past three weeks. The new legislation allows TRT to allocate one of its channels for full-time broadcasting in Kurdish.