On the BBC News Home page, there is a section which shows the most popular stories now — the most read, the most emailed and so on.

The emailed list is as follows:

1. Bad bosses may damage your heart
2. Compulsive gamers ‘not addicts’
3. Beach-sex couple to be deported
4. New laws against forced marriages
5. Mauritania’s ‘wife-fattening’ farm

All quirky little items — the sort of thing you might send on to someone. Particularly your boss, in the case of the first item. As you might expect, most of these stories are from November 2008. All apart from Mauritania’s ‘wife-fattening’ farm, which dates from January 2004.

So what has caused the sudden burst of interest in wife-fattening?