Like any end-of-year roundup compiled in late December our survey of the news and features stories that Times Online readers found most interesting in 2008 will perforce be a little inexact. Nevertheless, we are pleased to present for your edification and interest our most-read articles of the year.

1: Found in a rundown Boston estate: Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango

From October, at the height of the US presidential campaign, came this captivating human-interest story about the Democrat candidate’s aunt who was living in humble circumstances a few miles from where he studied at Harvard. Did this story underline his working-class hero credentials? Or expose him as the type of cad who would build a fortune while his aunt languished in poverty? The debate raged in our reader comments for months.

2: International Olympic Committee launches probe into He Kexin’s age

Mike Walker, a computer security expert, told The Times how he tracked down two documents that he believed had been removed from a Chinese government website. The documents, he said, stated that He’s birth date was January 1 1994 - making her 14 and therefore ineligible to compete - and not January 1 1992, which is printed in her passport.

3: Sarah Palin: conservatives find the girl of their dreams

Into in already unique US election contest came Sarah Palin, a vice-presidential candidate with a folksy manner and an assault rifle. This August profile of the Alaskan maverick was one of our biggest stories of the summer.

4: CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers

September saw the shocking case of a Delhi car parts factory owner bludgeoned to death by an angry mob of recently laid off workers. He had called a meeting with the former employees with a view to reinstating them but the assembly turned violent, with tragic consequences.

5: President Bush regrets his legacy as man who wanted war

In June, a rueful President Bush admitted in an exclusive Times interview that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. He expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood.

6: Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games

The video of a new computer animation technique which can render faces that bridge the ‘uncanny valley’ of credibility was a hugely popular article and our biggest video story of 2008.

7: Russell Brand calls George Bush a retard at MTV awards

The mercurial entertainer, who had already stirred up a hornets’ nest of publicity in the UK with his hoax telephone call about a sex attack, went on to arouse ire in the USA with his outspoken views on the Jonas Brothers, American politics in general and George Bush in particular. The story drew colossal numbers of US readers keen to find out who this Russell Brand guy was. Brand’s ill-judged ‘Manuelgate’ telephone call was then just a twinkle in his eye.

8: Coming soon - superfast internet

The coming of Grid computing, where tasks are performed by a distributed network rather than by one computer, both intrigued and, in some cases, perplexed Times Online readers who are naturally more engaged with matters technological than newspaper readerships. The story of blazingly fast internet speeds crawled across now-outmoded internet connections in April.

9: Nouriel Roubini I fear the worst is yet to come

The New York University economics professor’s prescient remarks about a deepening of the financial crisis that now convulses the world were considered extreme by some commentators at the time but in the light of recent events may not have been quite apocalyptic enough.

10: Credit crunch may take out large US bank warns former IMF chief

In August Professor Kenneth Rogoff, a leading academic economist, said there was yet worse news to come from the worldwide credit crunch. He was right.

11: Barack Obama lines up a cabinet of stars as John McCain struggles on

In October, as the Barack Obama rollercoaster began to gather an unstoppable momentum, talk began to turn from whether he might win to what he might do once he did.

12: Oral history: The Monica Lewinsky scandal ten years on

A timely retrospective on 1998’s biggest political scandal, topped off with perhaps one of the broadest puns ever to grace a Times headline, tickled the fancy of thousands of Times Online readers last January.

13: Soldier forced to sleep in car after hotel refuses him a room

Corporal Tomos Stringer, veteran of multiple tours in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, had travelled to Surrey to help with funeral preparations for a friend killed in action only to be told by staff of the Metro Hotel, in Woking, Surrey that it was company policy not to accept members of the Armed Forces as guests. The outrage provoked in the many readers of this story has since encouraged something of a change in the hotel’s admissions policy.

14: Get Osama Bin Laden before I leave office orders George W Bush

The outgoing US President’s desire to wrap up one of the principal threads of his War on Terror led to consultations with British Special Forces and the Pakistani government on an all-out mission to finish the seven-year hunt for the Terrorist kingpin.

15: Saddam Hussein’s body was stabbed in the back says guard

The body of Saddam Hussein was stabbed six times after he was executed, according to Talal Misrab, head guard at the former president’s tomb north of Baghdad and one of the people that helped bury the corpse. The Iraqi Government vehemently denied that any such mutilation took place.

16: Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

June’s story of a biotech breakthrough that could solve two of the biggest challenges facing mankind drew a huge amount of readers searching for some much-needed good news. The developers of the system promise us a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011.

18: Barack Obama is warned to beware of a huge threat from al Qaeda

No sooner was America’s popular President-elect given the news that he would be moving into the White House after Christmas than he heard this chilling reminder of the implacable nature of his nation’s foes.

18: Royal Navy in firefight with Somali pirates

That a motley crew of ocean-going muggers had effectively taken possession of one of the world’s busiest trade routes was an irritation felt more keenly in our island nation than elsewhere. November’s stirring story of the Royal Navy’s first shots in anger against pirates since the dawn of the ironclad era was one of the year’s few success stories.

19: Horror as teenager commits suicide live online

Abraham K. Biggs, a 19-year-old from Broward County, Florida committed suicide live on the internet as hundreds of web surfers watched – apparently taunting him and offering encouragement. Even after he had swallowed a lethal handful of pills the spectacle went on as he lay on his bed and died in front of his webcam. The macabre tale exercised a morbid fascination on several hundred thousand web surfers throughout November 2008.

20: Google could be superseded says web inventor

Tim Berners-Lee, the visionary developer who created the concept of the World Wide Web, said that many web phenomena, such as the "current craze" for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, would eventually be superseded by networks that connected all types of things — not just people — thanks to a ground-breaking technology known as the "semantic web". The technologically savvy Times Online readership were understandably very keen on this story, making it comfortably the biggest story for March and narrowly the last in our roundup of the most-clicked upon news stories of 2008.