Deebster

unvaluable

You've edited this post and left this in (or added it!?) so I suppose you mean it!

The widow of Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya, has had her X account restored after it was briefly suspended for unknown reasons.

This seems a misleading headline, unless what I've quoted was edited in. I'm no fan of Musk, but it could be something like a load of people (or bots) reported the account and an automated system put it into review.

I only do the cryptics myself - I like that you can be confident you have the right answer without waiting for the crossers to check your guess.

I assume it's just an example of how to create new topical words since it's a lot easier to name an album than to get a word well-known enough to be eligible for the dictionary.

The artists all seem to be big names so I assume it's their popularity rather than any history of quirky album names that's decided the list.

These are all short words full of the most common letters, so will make designing crosswords easier because they'll be useful "crossers".

... with features like local-only (i.e. privacy-respecting) language translation. Good.

I think at the end he forgot he was meant to get a person round (dead or alive). I guess you could cremate the person before beginning and maglev the remains round, as long as you can argue that it's still a person (minus all the water, anyway).

When I saw this I thought this was an old one, but not at all. Was there a similar one before? Or has someone else done this joke already?

Morocco being “al-Maghrib” is suprising to me, since I know al-Maghrib as the Maghreb region, aka the part of north Africa that speaks Maghreb Arabic (al-Maġrib al-ʿArabī).

Wikipedia says it's المملكة المغربية which is “al-Mamlakah al-Maghribiyah” but I don't know if the map's version is an acceptable shorthand.

“There’s no silver bullet here, but there’s some silver buckshot, hopefully.”

This is something it's easy to forget. Small improvements are still improvements, and enough of them will get us there. Don't let doomscrolling (and stories like this) lead you into despair and apathy.

Here's the Ponzo illusion that they describe instead of just including:

I think most people share your confusion. It seems that F5 was following their responsibility as a CNA, but one guy disagreed enough to leave with all his toys.