Tim Blair

NEWS BITS

• John Kerry meets the workers.

• The spokesman for pro-logging group Timber Communities Australia is one of those guys with job-appropriate surnames.

• Triple J’s Steve Cannane poses a question:

The Australian record industry has just had its best year ever. But it doesn't want you to know about it. This month ARIA announced its sales figures for last year. In its press release, it talked about Delta, it talked about falling CD singles sales, it talked about the rise in DVD sales, but at no stage did it tell us it was the industry's best year ever. Why bury the good news?

• And Imre Salusinszky reports directly from the the war that nobody can pronounce:

The renewed outbreak of violence between Kosovo's Albanian Muslim majority and its ethnic Serb minority has shattered the fragile peace of people who can't follow the politics of the Balkans.

The re-emergence after five years of Europe's main Christian-Muslim conflict has also reignited fears of ethnic cleansing and of people in English-speaking countries having to try and pronounce the names of cities such as Srbica, Gorazde and Kragujevac.

But the biggest danger in a collapse of Kosovo's delicate ethnic balance would a "domino effect" by which people in southern Kosovo would be forced to leave their homes, and then people in London, New York and even Sydney would be forced to pretend at dinner parties that they had the faintest idea of what these primitive peoples were actually arguing about.