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Top 10: This week's most popular stories

The charming story of a reluctant hero's Facebook reunification with a crash victim he helped well and truly eclipsed hard news on WikiLeaks in the popularity stakes this week.

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Source: SBS


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Last week, it seemed almost pointless to put together a list of the 10 most popular stories, because almost every last one of them was about WikiLeaks.

In fact, the entire top 20 (bar two stories) were Wiki-related, perhaps indicating the news-consuming public's long-accumulated thirst for insights into what governments really think of each other.

However this week's top 10 shows precisely the opposite kind of longing - the one for good news.

It's best to begin with the week's second-highest rating story; that of a motorbike crash victim who turned to Facebook hoping to find a kind stranger who comforted her and buy him a beer.

Sophie Moon appealed to her 300-plus friends and those of her sisters for help finding the white-tee-and-cowboy-boot clad man, who appeared in a video of the crash site.

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She wasn't expecting her appeal to go viral, eventually reaching almost 70,000 Facebook users and attracting the attention of commercial TV newtorks (and, we admit it, SBS).

However, neither Sophie nor her saviour were keen on the avalanche of interest, nor its attendant speculation on romance and movie deals, which is why she protected her 'hero's identity and it remains a mystery to this day.

It was Sophie's reluctance to spill the beans on the man whom hundreds of users had christened 'the Dude' that in fact made this week's most popular story.

In third place, by a small distance was Hugh Jackman's 'eye-catching' entry to Oprah's Sydney show. The actor arrived at the Opera House by flying fox, but his X-men powers evaded him as he slammed face-first into a lighting rig.

Paramedics escorted him quickly off stage and he returned shortly after wearing a bandaid and clutching a glass of Grange. All's well that ends with excellent red wine.

WikiLeaks reared its head in fourth place, with the Vatican hitting back at revelations it refused to cooperate with an Irish probe into child sex abuse.

The Headline That Had It All came in fifth, with our very own Matthew Hall's blog about how WikiLeaks had eclipsed the Oprah-juggernaut's tour Down Under.

Finally in sixth place some hard, miserable news of the kind to which news consumers are more accustomed. South Korea shrugged off a recent deadly shelling and continued to perform live-fire drills that did nothing to soothe tensions with the North.

In seventh place, Julian Assange - who by now needs no introduction - was placed in isolation as British and Swedish prosecutors decided whether he should be extradited to face sex charges.

As consipracy theories abounded, even Australia's Labor Party was 'split' over the PM's stance on the debacle, taking eighth place.

As if to make up for its absence from the week's top three, WikiLeaks dominated the end of the list.

Leaked allegations of rampant corruption in Uzbekistan - a key US ally in oil- and insurgent-rich central Asia - took ninth place, and Assange vowing to continue leaking despite sex charges rounding off the top 10.


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