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If you're a nervous flyer, the descent into Kandahar Airfield is probably not for you.

Minutes before we're due to land - in the dead of night - the lights on our RAF plane go off and our helmets and flak jackets go on. Just a precaution, we're told. Welcome to Afghanistan.

Setting off from Brize Norton earlier that day, news had come through of a grim milestone - the number of British deaths in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001 had now passed the 200 mark.

With that toll rising at an alarming rate, and with Afghans voting to elect a new president, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 5 live wanted to see for itself what was happening - how the war against the Taliban was being fought and what life was like for some of those at the sharp end.

So, over the course of the week, we talked to pilots, medics, frontline soldiers, mechanics, an Afghan interpreter and the man in charge of the whole operation in the south of Afghanistan - and therefore in command of most of Britain's forces.

Tales of bravery, dedication and self-sacrifice seemed to be everywhere. From the young men, just out of their teens, clearing a path through minefields, to the nurse caring for the most seriously injured soldiers, it was all pretty humbling.

The scale of the place was startling too: 16,000 servicemen and women, and more military hardware than you could shake a stick at, spread over 45 square km; 290,000 meals are served here every week; nearly four million litres of sewage is produced every day.

And who'd have thought we'd stumble across a Burger King and a Pizza Hut in a place like this?

With the burger bars and coffee shops, it would be quite easy to be lulled into a false sense of security.

If there was any danger of that happening, we were soon reminded of the threats just the other side of the security fence one evening when we were broadcasting into the Drive programme.

A couple of rockets were fired into the base by the local Taliban. The same thing happened the next night - it's a regular occurrence apparently, and it rarely leads to any damage, somebody told us as we dived for cover.

Of course, being on a military airbase, on what's called an "embed" - a trip organised by the Ministry of Defence - gave us a particular perspective on the conflict, not the complete picture.

It didn't mean though that our editorial independence was compromised - we spoke freely to soldiers of many different ranks, and apart from things which may have jeopardised security, nothing was off limits.

Clearly, what we weren't able to do from where we were was to give any sense of how this war is affecting Afghans. That wider context was provided by our correspondents across the country.

But what we were hopefully able to do was add something to our audience's understanding of the conflict.

And as lives continue to be lost - on all sides - with grim regularity, to pose some serious questions: is all this heartache and sacrifice worth it? Is this war making Afghanistan and the world a safer place? Or are those lives being lost in vain?

Liam Hanley is assistant editor on 5 live Drive

I was at an Open day meeting for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online a few days ago where some of the main people responsible for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s website outlined plans in each of its areas for the next six months. My colleague, Nic Newman, spoke about plans for the Journalism sections of the site, which include News, Sport, Weather and Local content.

You can see Nic's presentation below, and you can read more about the event and comment at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet Blog.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

The guilty verdict for the Burmese pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was perhaps the least surprising news story of the week.

The military junta running the country were expected to find her guilty of breaching the terms of her house arrest when an American man swam to her compound and stayed two days - he was sentenced to seven years for his part in the incident - and they duly did.

But is there more to it than that?

Western governments - including the UK and the rest of the EU - were quick to condemn the verdict and threatened to impose more sanctions on Burma. A move welcomed by human rights groups.

But did they act too hastily and not consider the verdict carefully enough before issuing their condemnatory statements? That is a question we discussed on The World Tonight.

A former British ambassador to Burma - or Myanmar as it is also known - Derek Tonkin, who is an advocate of constructive engagement with the government in Rangoon, told us that the verdict sent an interesting signal.

The sentence of three years in prison was commuted to 18 months house arrest. Mr Tonkin also said he understood that the terms of Ms Suu Kyi's house arrest are a bit softer than they were.

Human rights organisations say Aung San Suu Kyi is a prisoner of conscience and should not be in detention at all, but given the nature of the regime what can be read into the sentence?

According to Derek Tonkin and some other observers, the relative leniency of the sentence is a signal to Burma's neighbours and particularly China, India and the countries of - that the military government are listening to their calls for restraint.

According to these analysts, the verdict was carefully calibrated to prevent Ms Suu Kyi taking part in elections planned for next year while not appearing over harsh.

Other observers point out that the junta has a plan to restore constitutional order in Burma - a country wracked by rebellions by its various ethnic minorities since independence from Britain more than 60 years ago and ruled by the military since 1962.

A new constitution has been drawn up by a convention which Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), boycotted.

Under the plan, elections will be held next year and a new generation of leaders will come to the fore. The aim of the junta seems to be to entrench the military's role in politics, but sharing power with civilian politicians - though not the NLD.

The thinking is they can break out of the partial international isolation they are in and then start to rebuild the economy which has seen one of the wealthiest countries in south east Asia become one of the poorest - if not the poorest.

China has been criticised by Western governments and human rights groups for being too soft on Burma - and indeed following the verdict, the Chinese called for respect for Burmese sovereignty and blocked a British attempt to get the UN Security Council to condemn the junta.

But there are signs the Chinese are gently trying to push the junta towards sharing power with civilians. .

But for this to succeed, the generals need civilian partners who have credibility with the outside world, so reports that the leader of the Burmese government in exile, that would involve the military becomes very interesting.

There may be no immediate prospect of Aung San Suu Kyi being freed and allowed to have a political role, but it looks like there is a possibility that things may change in Burma - if only very slowly. We'll continue to follow the story.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Like other media organisations ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News has been subject to the reporting restrictions in the Baby Peter case, .

These were ordered because the defendants were the subject of another trial, for the rape of a two-year-old girl, which could have been compromised if the jury were prejudiced by information from the earlier case, and also because there were children who were still in the process of being placed with alternative carers.

Now that Steven Barker has been found guilty and sentenced in the rape trial, and all the children are being cared for, the guilty trio's anonymity has ceased and we along with the rest of the media have been able to name them.

This sounds deceptively simple, but when you look at what this means online it is more complicated. A news website like the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s will have a huge archive of stories, some of which may contain information which only later becomes the subject of legal restriction.

On this occasion, there were indeed two stories in our own archive relating to the very early stages of the Baby Peter case which, if you searched for them, did give the names of the defendants. We did not republish or link to them from new stories, but on this occasion plenty of other people chose to do so.

There were vigilante-style websites, blogs and individual e-mailers who were determined to make the names public and who were making a point of linking to our archived stories.

We removed the stories from our archive even though in practice the details were easy to find, and the information had already been reproduced and cached elsewhere on the internet. Now that the re the . Not, incidentally, a very practical or easy way of doing things if we had to do it very often.

But it has raised again a wider question as to how useful or effective such restrictions can be, given the ease with which the web allows information to be shared, stored and duplicated on other sites, blogs or in search engine caches.

My colleague Ceri Thomas, on another occasion, summed up well the challenges posed by the internet to the Contempt of Court Act. This case has provided another illustration of those issues, and another example of how seeking to restrict access to information may not necessarily be the most effective approach.

The judge in the second trial, for the rape of the two-year-old child, recognising the risk that it could be compromised by the jury seeing potentially prejudicial information circulating online, eventually decided that it could go ahead anyway. The members of the jury were simply given instructions not to do any research on the internet. In other words, the onus was placed on them, as trusted participants in the judicial process, to focus only on the evidence before them in court.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

All I can say is "Thank God It's Friday".

We're coming to the end of a full week of reporting UK bank results which started with and , moved onto , then and today finished with . We even had thrown into the mix for good measure.

We've reported all this in a great deal of detail on radio and TV and online and they have all painted a mixed picture. It's clear that a lot of our audience members want some clear answers to some straightforward questions.
• Are the banks doing enough to support the economy?
• Are the worst of bank losses behind us?
• Is quantitative easing working?
• Where has all the money the taxpayer has put in actually gone?
• And when will we get it back?

Well, it's pretty tough to give definitive answers to those. If there's one thing confirmed by reporting this weeks results, it's that interpreting them is as much art as science.

For confirmation of that, you need only look at our reporting of today's RBS results, where we are reporting a broadly break-even £15m profit while others, , are reporting a £1bn loss (it depends whether you include the pre-tax post-exceptionals, and we had a lively debate about that ourselves).

Or you could look at how banks have chosen to report their business lending. RBS tell us that they have approved 85% of new loan requests (down from 86%). Barclays claim a figure of 90% approval for loan applications from credit-worthy businesses - spot the difference?

What we have tried to do this week is to extract the meaning and find the story in each of this week's results, and I'd urge you to take a look at Robert Peston's blog posts throughout this week to get the best picture we can provide.

One thing that would have helped this week is if the chief wxecutives of Northern Rock and Lloyds-HBOS - banks in which we as taxpayers have a huge interest - had been willing to speak to us. They could help with the answers to the many of the questions you are rightly asking.

Jeremy Hillman is editor of the business and economics unit.

We've just launched a new news programme on 1Xtra - the digital sister station to Radio 1 which features contemporary black music. We've always had news content on the station and an award-winning documentary strand - but it's been mixed with a music programme in the afternoons. So our new format is two 15-minute news programmes broadcast at noon and 5pm Monday to Friday.

The 1Xtra News Show is hosted by Tina Daheley and supported by a brilliant new entertainment presenter Nesta McGregor and our versatile sportsman David Garrido.

Our first edition kicked off with a subject of critical relevance to our young, urban target audience. Figures seen by 1Xtra show that four out of every 10 young people say they have unprotected sex. Many young men we spoke to don't like the feel of a condom - young women worried about their reputation if they carry some in their bags. Yet we know how much teenage pregnancy and STIs affect this audience. We've been talking to teenagers and early 20-somethings about "barebacking" and the consequences.

We'll also have an investigation into online sex abuse and sexual bullying. Police have told us that they're increasingly worried about teenagers swapping intimate or naked photos on their mobiles. We've spoken to victims - who sometimes blame vindictive exes for forwarding explicit videos and pictures taken in happier times.

Nesta is in Ayia Napa - a favoured summer destination for our audience - it's an urban music Ibiza. 1Xtra programmes are also coming from there as some of the biggest names in urban music perform there in the busiest week of the holiday season there - amid reports the credit crunch may be hitting the venue this year.

Sport and entertainment/music news is high on our audience's priority list for any news programme that's relevant to their lives. We're also pledged - as with Newsbeat on Radio 1 - to make the important, interesting, relevant and accessible. It may not be for everyone who consumes ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News - but it is for our listeners on 1Xtra - and we'd love to hear from you.

Rod McKenzie is editor of and 1Xtra News.