For those of you who thought that finding the cargo ship that disappeared three weeks ago, along with its Russian crew, would give us answers to the questions surrounding the maritime mystery, think again.

Russian authorities have confirmed that the "Artic Sea" was located off the West African coast, but have given no details on why the ship vanished for so long without communicating its location or asking for help.

Did pirates attack the crew? Did the ship intentionally cut itself off from the world? Was it transporting secret and expensive cargo? We'll go live to Moscow for more on this story with Matthew Chance.

Also today, we'll look at a disturbing Human Rights Watch report on a spate of killings of gay men in Iraq. The contents of the report didn't come as a surprise to me, having reported on homosexuality in the Middle East before, though reading descriptions of torture and execution of the most savage kind still shocked me.

The irony is that being gay in Iraq was safer under Saddam Hussein than it is now. HRW quotes witnesses as saying that security forces have targetted gay men and that some men have been killed by their own families, in what is the Middle East's most perverted justification for murder, so called "honor killings."

We're live in Baghdad for that.

Plus, we'll take you live to Wall Street for the reason behind an ugly stock sell off. Investors are once again worried that they may have been overly enthusiastic in the last few weeks. But here's something to cheer about: in the midst of all the gloom, Japan is now officially out of recession. Its economy rose in the second quarter of 2009, a few days after France and Germany announced that they snapped out of their own recessions.

And, as always, the rest of the day's top news, sports and weather stories.

See you on TV,

Hala

Posted by: CNN Anchor, Hala Gorani
Filed under: Today At The I-Desk