Pick of the week

19 - 25 August

BBC News Online presents a round-up of some of the week's more remarkable stories covered by BBC correspondents.

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Submariners perish on sea bed

The Russian Navy confirms that all 118 men on the submarine Kursk are dead. Nine days after it sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea, Norwegian divers opened one of the escape hatches only to find the entire vessel flooded.

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Putin's naval disater

The grief felt by the families of the crew of the Kursk was tinged with bitterness and anger at the way President Putin and the Russian Navy handled the crisis. For the first time, a Russian government is coming under sustained attack from the media there.

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Cocaine wars

One of the poorest countries in South America is about to get more than a billion dollars from the United States. But it is not to relieve poverty or deprivation, instead to help the government of Colombia in the fight against cocaine. The aid will pay for military hardware and expertise.

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Colombia's simmering civil war

The US is warned that it risks being dragged into a civil war if it goes ahead with plans to send a huge shipment of military equipment to the government of Colombia. The $1.5bn programme, known as Plan Colombia, is intended to help fight the country's drug barons.

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Belfast's feuding loyalists

Violence erupted across Northern Ireland during the last week, but it was in the loyalist heartland of Belfast's Shankhill road that the feuding between paramilitary gangs turned to murder. Some of those caught up in the conflict spoke out.

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Investigators study Bahrain air crash

Investigators trying to establish the cause of a crash of an airliner belonging to Gulf Air, studied the plane's data recorders. All 143 people on board the Airbus-320 were killed as it plunged into the sea a few miles from its destination in Bahrain.

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