Fact Check flashback: The 10 most popular stories

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It's ABC Fact Check's first birthday. In order to celebrate, here's a look back at the 10 most popular stories we've published.

From the budget deficit to the assassination of JFK and Schapelle Corby's prison release, the list features a mix of fact checks, fact files and fact or fictions.

Did your favourite make the cut? Let us know.

Opposition Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen accused his federal counterpart Joe Hockey of "cooking the books" and "voodoo economics" to justify dramatic spending cuts in the May 13 budget.

"Now what's happening here is that Joe Hockey has doubled the deficit, adding $68 billion to the deficit by changes to Government spending and changes to Government assumptions, and now he's asking the Australian people to pay for it", Mr Bowen told journalists in his electorate on April 27.

Fact Check examined this statement and found it checked out.

Since the election, the official forecast deficit had doubled. The economic assumptions were different from those used before the election, and spending decisions had been made that were not in the previous forecasts.

On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of former US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Fact Check took a look at some unusual facts about his death.

It contained facts about President Kennedy's alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was arrested in a Texas movie theatre, less than 90 minutes after Kennedy's shooting. And the year before Kennedy was shot the US State Department lent Oswald, a former marine, $US435.71 in travel expenses to return to the states after three years living in Russia.

It also contained facts about other US presidential assassinations. Did you know Kennedy was the fourth US president to be assassinated? Others were Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901).

Late last year as state and territory governments were considering adding same-sex marriage laws to the books, Prime Minister Tony Abbott was resisting the change at a federal level.

''From time immemorial, in every culture that's been known, marriage or that kind of solemnised relationship has been between a man and a woman," Mr Abbott said on October 25.

But Fact Check found a significant body of academic work which showed marriage-like relationships had not always followed that rule.

The Roman emperor Nero was married to two men. There have been 'female husbands' in Africa. In Tibet, marriages were solemnised between one woman and several brothers. And in China and some other parts of South-East Asia, marriages were solemnised between a man or a woman and a ghost.

On Anzac Day, Fact Check asked the question: How much of what Australians have come to believe about the Anzacs is fact, and how much is fiction?

Military historians set the record straight on the following five myths:

The Anzacs landed in the wrong place;

Bumbling British were to blame for the failed landing;

The Anzacs were bushmen and natural athletic soldiers;

Simpson and his donkey saved many lives; and

The drip gun aided the Gallipoli evacuation.

"For decades people have tried to explain the failure at Gallipoli by blaming it on the Royal Navy, but the Royal Navy did land the troops in approximately the right spot. It was what happened after the landing where things went wrong," Professor Peter Stanley said.

Criticism of spending cuts announced in the May budget triggered a Coalition campaign to persuade the public that the proposed changes were necessary.

"At the moment we're paying a billion dollars a month – one billion dollars every month in interest, in interest on the debt that Labor has left," Treasurer Joe Hockey said in Question Time on May 26.

Mr Hockey was one of 33 Coalition members to raise the topic of Australia' interest bill over a single week in May.

But Fact Check found that using either gross debt or net debt as a measure, the claim was exaggerated.

Ahead of the May budget, Prime Minister Tony Abbott was under pressure following reports the Government was going to announce a "deficit levy".

The mooted plan was being interpreted as breaking a pre-election commitment not to raise taxes.

But what exactly did the Coalition promise on tax? In this fact file, Fact Check looked back at what Tony Abbott had been promising in the lead up to the 2013 federal election.

The 'Temporary Budget Repair Levy' was introduced, and passed both houses of Parliament on June 17.

The toppling of Ukraine's pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych and the takeover of the Crimean region by Russia captured headlines around the world.

At a function on March 4, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton told the audience that "if this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the '30s".

Ms Clinton spoke again the next day, telling attendees at a lecture that the "claims by president Putin and other Russians [are] that they had to go into Crimea and maybe further into eastern Ukraine because they had to protect the Russian 'minorities', and that is reminiscent of claims that were made back in the 1930s when Germany under the Nazis kept talking about how they had to protect German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia and elsewhere throughout Europe".

Fact Check found there were enough similarities between the actions of Germany prior to World War II and Mr Putin's Russia today to justify Ms Clinton's Putin-Hitler comparison.

On February 18, Liberal MP Kelly O'Dwyer was asked by a triple j caller about Australia's international obligations on refugees. "The level of refugees that we get here in Australia is really minimal, compared to countries like in the EU, for example," the caller said.

Ms O'Dwyer replied: "I would actually point out the fact that we have one of the highest per capita intakes in the world. If we're not currently the highest we're probably the second highest. We and Canada generally are either the top one or two per capita who actually take in the most number of refugees so I would have to respectfully say that that’s not correct."

Fact Check found Ms O'Dwyer was incorrect. She had only counted refugees resettled through the UN humanitarian program, not the combined figure that includes refugees recognised in Australia.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott tried to discredit a group of asylum seekers who alleged they were mistreated by the Royal Australian Navy, by claiming they were attempting to break Australian law.

"Do you believe Australian naval personnel or do you believe people who are attempting to break Australian law? I trust Australia's naval personnel," Mr Abbott said on January 23.

Australia recognises people's right to seek asylum and entering Australia without a valid visa is not a criminal offence.

Because of that, Fact Check found Mr Abbott's claim that the asylum seekers were attempting to break Australian law was incorrect.

After Schapelle Corby was released from Bali's Kerobokan Prison on February 10, there was much speculation of an interview deal with a commercial television network.

It was rumoured that she was being paid up to $3 million for her story.

Some, however, questioned whether the convicted drug smuggler would be able to keep any of the money.

Fact Check took a closer look at whether governments could do anything to stop Corby getting paid for telling her story.

Topics: federal-government, government-and-politics, political-parties, liberals, alp, abbott-tony, australia