Popular Elsewhere
14:23 UK time, Thursday, 8 September 2011
A look at the stories ranking highly on various news sites.
What's it like to be the ? Well, for a start you need nine ex-Navy Seals surrounding you round-the-clock, says film maker Michael Moore in a popular Guardian article. He pinpoints the moment when he became so hated, when he was booed off stage at his Oscar acceptance speech questioning the war in Iraq.
From then, he says he got so much hate mail "it almost seemed as if Hallmark had opened a new division where greeting card writers were assigned the task to penning odes to my passing". The threat level increased and the ex-Seals were employed. Among Moore's many tales of watching his bodyguards thwart attacks was an attempt to stab him with a very sharp pencil, his bodyguard taking the hit. "You ever see a Navy Seal get stabbed?" he asks, "The look on their face is the one we have when we discover we're out of shampoo".
The Independent wonders if it has found . Readers are drawn to an article about Labour MP for Middlesbrough Sir Stuart Bell. The paper says the MP had not held a surgery in his constituency for 14 years, instead conducting his affairs from his house a mile and a half outside the town centre. But another detail may also have caught readers' interest - the paper mentions Sit Stuart is an author of erotic fiction.
"" claims a popular Telegraph article. Tim Stanley says the cult of Santa Muerta - or as he likes to call it - "the patron saint of death for Mexican drug cartels" - keeps cropping up at crime scenes.
Most recently, an altar to the "skeletal figure of death" was found in a 300m tunnel which ran under the US border with Mexico. He describes Santa Muerta as "part Virgin Mary and part folk demon... a cloaked saint wielding a scythe". And for Stanley, its prominence goes some way to explaining anti-immigration feeling in the US.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, eight foreign aid workers appeared at the Taliban's highest court to plead their case on charges they preached Christianity.
