GAMPAHA, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - A Sri Lankan court ended a ban on the sale, distribution and advertising of all Fonterra milk products, lawyers said, soon after the company suspended operations in Sri Lanka on Friday.

The New Zealand dairy giant said earlier it had temporarily suspended work at the Sri Lanka unit, citing precautionary measures to ensure the safety of its 755 employees after it faced product bans, court cases and angry demonstrators.

The district court of Gampaha last week banned Fonterra from selling or advertising its products after food safety authorities said they found the toxic agricultural chemical dicyandiamide (DCD) in two batches of milk powder. Fonterra vigorously disputes the finding.

After a nearly three-hour court session, Sudath Perera, a lawyer representing Fonterra, said, "The enjoining order was dissolved on suppression and misrepresentation of the facts submitted to the courts."

Upul Jayasuriya, who represented a health sector trade union that filed the case, said the judge had said consumers could make a decision on whether or not to use Fonterra milk powder.

"They (defendents) made submissions, but the judge did not refer to any suppression and misrepresentation. The judge said that there is no independent report to say that there is DCD," Jayasuriya said.

The court also has summoned top officials at the Fonterra subsidiary on contempt of court charges for not adhering to the earlier ban.

Perera said the contempt of court case has been fixed on September 25.

Sri Lanka's state-run Industrial Technology Institute (ITI) found the DCD in a batch Anchor full-cream milk power and another of the Anchor 1+ brand for young children, which were manufactured between October and December 2012.

Fonterra has disputed the accuracy of the ITI testing, but the local company Fonterra Brands Lanka last week told Reuters it had recalled two batches of Anchor-branded products in accordance with the health ministry directive.

Sri Lankan opposition follows a global food scare after Fonterra said earlier this month that some of its products could contain a bacteria that can cause botulism. Its products have been removed from shelves from China to Saudi Arabia, while other countries have restricted imports.

(editing by Jane Baird)

The three-hour trading outage on the Nasdaq stock exchange Thursday also can be expected to trigger new rounds of regulatory scrutiny on computer-driven trading. Investors' shaky confidence in the markets also took another hit.

The exchange was set to open as normal Friday.

Questions about potential dangers of the super-fast electronic trading systems that now dominate the U.S. stock markets ripple again through Wall Street and Washington. Stock trading now relies heavily on computer systems that exploit split-penny price differences. Stocks can be traded in fractions of a second, often by automated programs. That makes the markets more vulnerable to technical failures.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission expects to put forward next week a plan for new restrictions and oversight on high-speed trading, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said Friday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the CFTC commissioners haven't yet voted to open the proposed plan to public comment.

The Nasdaq episode cracked the midday calm of a quiet summer trading day on Wall Street. Brokers and traders scrambled to figure out what went wrong.

Nasdaq-OMX CEO Robert Greifeld told CNBC on Friday that unspecified, external factors caused the glitch, and that the exchange followed all the proper procedures to correct the problem.

"We all have to be aware of the other person not acting always in the proper way, and you have to have your system be able to handle defensive driving," Greifeld said. "We're deeply disappointed with what happened yesterday. We aspire to perfection. We want to get to 100 percent up time."

The shutdown appeared to occur in an orderly fashion and didn't upset other parts of the stock market.

But it was a major embarrassment. While hardly as stunning as the "flash crash" that set off a steep and sudden stock-market plunge in May 2010, the Nasdaq disruption some are dubbing the "flash freeze" did stir memories of it.

After the 2010 market break, regulators "never really developed a fix for it, and these kinds of things are going to continue to happen," said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who was the top market oversight official at the CFTC in the late 1990s. High-speed trading commanded by mathematical formulas rather than people brings "the possibility of a calamity," Greenberger said.

Regulators need to slow down automated trading by requiring trades to be placed "with human input," he said.

On Thursday, only a few hours after trading ended for the day, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission said she will work to finalize SEC rules that would subject U.S. exchanges to tighter oversight of automated trading.

"Today's interruption in trading, while resolved before the end of the day, was nonetheless serious and should reinforce our collective commitment to addressing technological vulnerabilities of exchanges and other market participants," SEC Chairman Mary Jo White said.

The SEC likely will scrutinize Nasdaq's systems and emergency procedures, and could order the exchange to upgrade them if it finds them lacking, said Phil Stern, a former SEC attorney now in private practice. In addition, Nasdaq could face significant financial penalties and other sanctions as a result of the breakdown, Stern suggested.

"The (SEC) is going to have to be satisfied one way or the other that the likelihood of this happening again is extraordinarily remote," he said. "They have to be sure that the Nasdaq has taken every step to avoid a recurrence of this event."

The actions Nasdaq takes, or should take, will be closely watched. Those range from improved testing and backup of its systems to ramping up its crisis management and communicating more clearly with the investing public.

The Nasdaq exchange was born of technology and is dominated by the biggest names in the field like Microsoft, Apple and Google. Thursday's breakdown followed a series of tech-rooted disasters involving various exchanges. They included Facebook's bungled public offering launch on Nasdaq in May 2012, one of the largest IPOs in history. The SEC later fined Nasdaq $10 million for that disruption the largest penalty it ever imposed on an exchange.

___

AP Business Writer Christopher S. Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.

Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. never met but they fought for the same cause at the same time on two continents. Mandela said he was prepared to die to see his dream of a society where blacks and whites were equal become reality. King was assassinated in 1968 while working for that same dream.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison during white racist rule in South Africa. Released in 1990, he went on to become president and shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with the white South African president, F.W. de Klerk. King won his Nobel Peace Prize nearly 30 years earlier.

Mandela traveled to the United States after he was released and he spoke at Yankee Stadium, telling the crowd that an unbreakable umbilical cord connected black South Africans and black Americans. There was a kinship between the two, Mandela wrote in his autobiography, inspired by such great Americans as W.E.B. Du Bois and King.

King, for his part, was unable to visit South Africa. In 1966 he applied for a visa after accepting invitations to speak to university students and to religious groups but the apartheid government refused to give him one. In December 1965, King delivered a speech in New York in which he denounced the white rulers of South Africa as "spectacular savages and brutes" and called on the U.S. and Europe to boycott the nation, a tactic the West eventually embraced and that helped end white rule.

"In South Africa today, all opposition to white supremacy is condemned as communism, and in its name, due process is destroyed," King said. "A medieval segregation is organized with 20th century efficiency and drive. A sophisticated form of slavery is imposed by a minority upon a majority which is kept in grinding poverty. The dignity of human personality is defiled; and world opinion is arrogantly defied."

King and Mandela were inspirational symbols for huge freedom struggles happening in both countries, said Clay Carson, a Stanford professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.

"I think both of them were moral leaders. Both were people who had very strong principles, stuck to those principles even in the face of criticisms, and in Mandela's case being in prison for such a long time," said Carson.

King's widow, Coretta Scott King, attended Mandela's 1994 inauguration as South Africa's first black president. She was on the podium as Mandela gave his speech at a celebration. "I looked over to her as I made reference to her husband's immortal words ... 'Free at last! Free at last!'" Mandela wrote in his autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom."

Mandela again quoted from the "I Have a Dream" speech "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last" during his 1994 address to the U.S. Congress. Mandela, 95, has been hospitalized since June, much of that time in critical condition.

Denis Goldberg, a close Mandela friend who spent two decades in prison while Mandela was incarcerated, noted that one major difference between America's and South Africa's racial equality struggle was that U.S. blacks were a minority in their country while blacks in South Africa "were an oppressed majority."

Carson puts King and Mandela in the same category as Mahatma Gandhi, India's nonviolent independence leader. Both Mandela and King were influenced by Gandhi.

"In the end what set them apart is they held so firmly to their principles regardless of their consequences and issues of popularity," he said. "And I think in all three cases what they fundamentally offered is a way out of a conflict that in the hands of others would have ended up in a violent resolution. What they did was offer to the other side a vision of a shared future."

Unlike King, whose non-violent ways were rooted in his deep religious faith, Mandela gave reasoned arguments for why violence should be used as a means to bring about change, said Charlene Smith, an authorized biographer of Mandela. Mandela received training from the Algerian National Liberation Front in Morocco in 1962, according to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

Mandela didn't think South Africa's white leaders would listen to reason and that the only way to bring about change was to fight, said Smith, the author of three books on the former president, including "Mandela: In Celebration of a Great Life."

Mandela spent 18 years at Robben Island, a prison that America's first black president Barack Obama visited in June. It was at Robben Island, Smith said, that Mandela learned to befriend hostile guards who could allow prisoners radios and newspapers.

"The only way you're going to get anything is by making your enemy your friend," Smith said. "And he shows it over and over again when he comes out of prison."

King made his famous speech on Aug. 28, 1963, during the March on Washington, a civil rights event that drew approximately 250,000 people to the National Mall.

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," King said.

A year later, Mandela also spoke of harmony when he said these words during a trial that ended with him being sentenced to life in prison: "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

___

On the Internet:

Letters from and to King on South Africa: http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/theme/4708

Rev. Wade Compton is a senior pastor at Bradley United Methodist Church in Greenfield, Ind. He says holding summer services on a well-stocked 10-acre fishing lake is putting new congregants at ease and making them more receptive to his sermons and gospel readings. The sanctuary is a former bait shop, and attendees get two hours of free catch and release fishing.

Compton is hoping fishing enthusiasts attracted to his outdoor church will come to his limestone church after the season ends.

___

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWRzY8QTyGU

Internal cost-cutting efforts offset the need for IRS employees to take a mandatory furlough day on Monday, the IRS said in a statement on Tuesday.

In April, the IRS said its 90,000 employees would need to take five furlough days this year as part of across-the-board "sequester" budget cuts. The IRS has closed call centers and other taxpayer services on furlough days.

The sequester went into force on March 1 after President Barack Obama and Congress failed to agree to a deficit-cutting plan, requiring government agencies to cut spending by $85 billion for the rest of the fiscal year.

(Reporting By Patrick Temple-West; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

-

Lap distance: 7.004 km (4.352 miles). 44 laps. Total distance 308.052km (191.415 miles).

Start time: 1200 GMT

2012 pole: Jenson Button (Britain) McLaren 1:47.573

2012 winner: Button

Race lap record: Sebastian Vettel (Germany) Red Bull 1:47.263, 2009

Tyres: Hard (orange), medium (white)

-

WINS

Four different teams have won the nine races so far this year (Lotus, Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes).

Red Bull's triple champion Sebastian Vettel is the only driver with four wins in 2013. Ferrari's Fernando Alonso and Mercedes's Nico Rosberg have won two races each. Lotus's Kimi Raikkonen and Mercedes's Lewis Hamilton have each won one.

Alonso has 32 career wins, Vettel 30, Hamilton 22, Raikkonen 20 and McLaren's Jenson Button 15.

Ferrari have won 221 races since the championship started in 1950, McLaren 182, Williams 114 and Red Bull 38.

-

POLE

Mercedes have been on pole seven times in 10 races. Vettel has taken the other three.

Vettel has 39 poles to his credit, putting him third in the all-time list (Michael Schumacher had 68 and Ayrton Senna 65). Hamilton has 30 and Alonso 22.

Hamilton's pole in Hungary last month was his third in a row and lifted him ahead of late Argentine five-times champion Juan Manuel Fangio in the all-time lists.

Mercedes have locked out the front row in qualifying three times this year.

Alonso has not been on the front row in the last 20 races, with his last appearance being his pole in Germany in July 2012. He has not been on pole in a dry qualifying since 2010.

-

POINTS

Caterham and Marussia have yet to score a point after three seasons in Formula One.

None of the five 2013 rookies has scored points so far.

Kimi Raikkonen has now finished a record 27 successive races in the points for Lotus, although scoring systems have changed since Michael Schumacher set 24 in a row in 2001-03.

Raikkonen last failed to score in China in 2012. He is the only driver to have scored points in every race this year and has also racked up 38 successive grand prix finishes - three short of Nick Heidfeld's record of 41.

Former champions Williams scored their first point of the season in Hungary, ending a run of 10 races in a row without scoring.

-

BELGIUM

Spa is the longest circuit on the calendar and one of the fastest, with an average speed of around 230 kph and cars on full throttle for about 70 percent of the time. Button and Vettel, last year's top two in the race, made only one pit stop.

The circuit has hosted 45 of the 57 Belgian Grands Prix to date.

Michael Schumacher won six times at Spa, the most by any driver. Raikkonen has won four times and been on the podium every time he has finished there.

There are no Belgian drivers at present. Only seven Belgians have scored points in Formula One. The last to do so was Thierry Boutsen in 1992.

Ferrari have won 16 times in Belgium to McLaren's 14. Both have won 12 times at Spa.

Apart from Vettel's win with Red Bull in 2011, Ferrari and McLaren have won every Belgian Grand Prix since 1999.

Five of the last 11 races at Spa have been won from pole.

Five of the current drivers have won the Belgian GP: Button (2012), Vettel (2011), Hamilton (2010), Raikkonen (2009, 2007, 2005, 2004) and Felipe Massa (2008).

-

MILESTONES

McLaren's first world championship grand prix win was in Belgium with Bruce McLaren in 1968. (Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Pritha Sarkar)

Hannah Gastonguay, 26, said Saturday that she and her husband "decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us" when they took their two small children and her father-in-law and set sail from San Diego for the tiny island nation of Kiribati in May.

But just weeks into their journey, the Gastonguays hit a series of storms that damaged their small boat, leaving them adrift for weeks, unable to make progress. They were eventually picked up by a Venezuelan fishing vessel, transferred to a Japanese cargo ship and taken to Chile where they are resting in a hotel in the port city of San Antonio.

Their flights home were arranged by U.S. Embassy officials, Gastonguay said. The U.S. State Department was not immediately available for comment.

The months-long journey has been "pretty exciting" and "little scary at certain points," Gastonguay told The Associated Press by telephone.

She said they wanted to go to Kiribati because "we didn't want to go anywhere big." She said they understood the island to be "one of the least developed countries in the world."

Kiribati is a group of islands just off the equator and the international date line about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. The total population is just over 100,000 people of primarily Micronesian descent.

Hannah Gastonguay said her family was fed up with government control in the U.S. As Christians they don't believe in "abortion, homosexuality, in the state-controlled church," she said.

U.S. "churches aren't their own," Gastonguay said, suggesting that government regulation interfered with religious independence.

Among other differences, she said they had a problem with being "forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don't agree with."

The Gastonguays weren't members of any church, and Hannah Gastonguay said their faith came from reading the Bible and through prayer.

"The Bible is pretty clear," she said.

The family moved in November from Ash Fork, Ariz., to San Diego, where they lived on their boat as they prepared to set sail. She said she gave birth to the couple's 8-month-old girl on the boat, which was docked in a slip at the time.

In May, Hannah, her 30-year-old husband Sean, his father Mike, and the couple's daughters, 3-year-old Ardith and baby Rahab set off. They wouldn't touch land again for 91 days, she said.

She said at first, "We were cruising."

But within a couple of weeks "when we came out there, storm, storm, storm."

The boat had taken a beating, and they decided to set course for the Marquesas Islands. Instead, they found themselves in a "twilight zone," taking more and more damage, leaving them unable to make progress.

They could have used a sail called a genoa, she said, but they risked snapping off the mast and losing their radio and ability to communicate.

They had been on the ocean for about two months and were low on supplies. They were out of food and were down to "some juice and some honey." She said they were able to catch fish, but they didn't see any boats.

Still, we "didn't feel like we were going to die or anything. We believed God would see us through," she said.

At one point a fishing ship came into contact with them but left without providing assistance. A Canadian cargo ship came along and offered supplies, but when they pulled up alongside it, the vessels bumped and the smaller ship sustained even more damage.

They were getting hit by "squall after, squall, after squall."

"We were in the thick of it, but we prayed," she said. "Being out on that boat, I just knew I was going to see some miracles."

They watched the surrounding storms disperse, and "next thing you know the sun is out. It's amazing."

Eventually, their boat was spotted by a helicopter that had taken off from a nearby Venezuelan fishing vessel, which ended up saving them.

"The captain said, 'Do you know where you're at? You're in the middle of nowhere,'" she said.

They were on the Venezuelan ship for about five days before transferring to the Japanese cargo ship, where they were for nearly three weeks before landing in Chile on Friday. The Chilean newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias reported the story of their arrival.

"They were looking for a kind of adventure; they wanted to live on a Polynesian island but they didn't have sufficient expertise to navigate adequately," police prefect Jose Luis Lopez, who took the family's statement at San Antonio, told the newspaper.

Sean Gastonguay's brother Jimmy, who lives in Arizona, said he had provided a description of the family's vessel to the U.S. Coast Guard and exchanged emails with them once they were picked up by the first boat.

"There was some concern, but we were hoping for the best, and they eventually popped up," he said. He was able to keep track of the family with the help of the Coast Guard as they were transferred from ship to ship.

"We're all happy. We have good peace of mind now," he said.

Hannah Gastonguay said the family will now "go back to Arizona" and "come up with a new plan."

___

Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, N.M., contributed to this report.

Bo entered the courthouse under police escort in the eastern city of Jinan, the court said, in closely choreographed proceedings held under extremely tight security, with police sealing off nearby roads with red and yellow traffic barriers. Though kept far away from the media, some of Bo's supporters gathered outside the perimeter, intermittently yelling out, "He served the people!" and "He was a good cadre!"

Once the powerful party boss in the megacity of Chongqing, the charismatic Bo became the most senior leader to fall from power in years after revelations emerged early last year that his wife had killed a British businessman.

Bo's removal marked China's biggest upheaval in the leadership since the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989. Bo's revival of the symbolism of Mao Zedong's radical era had unnerved China's previous leadership, although current leader Xi Jinping, installed last fall, has appeared keen to adopt his own brand of Mao-like tactics.

Five of Bo's relatives attended the trial, the Jinan Intermediate People's Court said in a stream of posts on its Sina Weibo microblog, though the relatives were not identified. The postings were a rare display of openness for a high-profile political trial in China. Journalists from foreign media outlets were kept from the courtroom, but the court said 19 reporters were among the 110 people attending the trial.

"All the seats are filled and all is in good order," the court said.

The scandal was triggered last year when Bo's police chief, a top aide, fled to a U.S. consulate in a neighboring city, an event that embarrassed the party's leadership ahead of a key political transition. It would later emerge that the police chief had evidence of the Briton's murder in late 2011, making the Bo family an international diplomatic liability for the leadership.

The charges against Bo, analysts have said, appear carefully calibrated to lay blame on the self-serving actions of Bo and his family and provide enough culpability to end his political career, while avoiding broader allegations that could expose the impunity with which top Chinese officials are believed to operate before they fall from favor.

Prosecutors accused Bo of accepting bribes amounting to more than 20 million yuan ($3.3 million) when he was posted to the eastern city of Dalian from 1999 to 2012. They said he took the bribes either directly, through his wife, or through his son, Bo Guagua, from two entities: Dalian International Development Corp. Ltd and Dalian Shide Group Ltd, according to the court's reports of the proceedings.

He also was accused of embezzling 5 million yuan ($820,000) from a public construction project in a transaction that also involved his wife.

Additionally he was charged with abuse of power related to his alleged attempts in Chongqing to block an investigation Heywood's murder in late 2011, the court said.

A verdict of guilt is all but assured, because the outcome of such trials involving high-profile politicians in China are usually decided by backroom negotiations by politicians and handed down by the court. Bo's downfall also has been widely perceived as the result of his defeat in party infighting ahead of China's once-a-decade leadership transition last fall.

"Bo Xilai's faction fell out of grace during the power struggle among top leaders," said Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights lawyer based in Beijing. "In reality, it does not matter what he is charged with ... because this is it is a political trial, which does not represent the spirit of law."

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, confessed to killing Neil Heywood and was handed a suspended death sentence last year that will likely be commuted to life imprisonment. Bo's aide, Wang Lijun, was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment for making his thwarted defection bid and helping Gu cover up the murder.

Outside the court, one man held up a poster of Mao and said "What I support is not Bo Xilai the individual, but his ideas on sharing wealth," before police pushed him away in attempts to prevent reporters from communicating with onlookers.

That Bo enjoys residual popularity among some of the Chinese public underscores how effective the media-savvy politician was in portraying himself as a man of the people. He spoke often of tackling the burgeoning income inequality gap, and introduced housing and other social policies in Chongqing that made him beloved by the poor.

Bo mobilized people in Chongqing to sing communist anthems, campaigns that resonated with people who've felt increasingly alienated from a party and government seen as corrupt and morally bankrupt.

"Bo tapped into these ideas with the 'red songs,' and invoked a certain kind of camaraderie and unity that has been missing," said Dali Yang, head of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing. "He created in some way a moral universe that made people feel much more confident and hopeful in some ways, certainly in Chongqing."

Bo's Communist revival efforts had alarmed the consensus-minded elite in China's previous administration who were wary of the violent excesses of the Mao era and of any one politician gaining prominence. Nevertheless, the administration of current leader Xi has adopted hardline, Mao-like tactics including tight clampdowns on dissidents and the media and an ideological campaign urging cadres to purify themselves of corruption.

Analysts have noted that none of the charges against Bo appear to involve the widespread human rights abuses alleged to have been carried out during his unfettered rule as Chongqing party chief, including during his much-publicized crackdown on the city's mafia gangs.

Jinan resident Yu Ming, 46, questioned whether the trial would bring greater openness in China.

"The real questions are, did he not trample the law? Did he not violate human rights? We shouldn't just look at corruption alone," Yu said. "What we are more concerned about is, after the Bo Xilai case is over, what direction will China go in? Will we have human rights? Will we have the right to vote?"

Human Rights Watch alleged that Gaza's justice system is deeply flawed and that prisoners were executed in the past despite unfair trials based on forced confessions and violations of basic rights.

Ehab Ghussein, a government spokesman, on Tuesday denied the allegations, including complaints of the use of torture to obtain confessions, and said all those sentenced to death were given due process.

Gaza's attorney general, Ismail Jaber, has been quoted as saying that a number of executions are being planned, for the first time, in the presence of relatives of victims and members of the public, though he did not give dates.

"The law will take its course and no criminal will escape punishment," he said in remarks published on the Interior Ministry's website last week.

The Islamic militant Hamas seized power in Gaza from the forces of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in 2007. Its rule over Gaza, a crowded seaside territory on Israel's southwest flank, is not internationally recognized.

Human Rights Watch said Hamas authorities have executed 16 prisoners since 2010, most convicted of killings or spying for Israel. In addition, 16 prisoners are awaiting execution, the group said.

Of those, two have exhausted their appeals, including Hani Abu Aliyan, from the southern town of Khan Younis. He was convicted of sexually assaulting and killing a boy in 2000, when he himself was 14 years old, and of killing a friend in a dispute over money in 2009.

Abu Aliyan surrendered to police in Khan Younis after the 2009 killing, said his lawyer at the time, Ghazi Abu Warda. The lawyer alleged that while in custody, his client confessed to the 2000 killing under torture.

In May 2010, Abu Aliyan was sentenced separately for the 2000 and the 2009 killings, in the latter for "involuntary murder," and received a life term for each crime, Human Rights Watch said. The prosecutor's office appealed the sentences as too lenient, and an appeals court imposed the death penalty in both cases in September, Human Rights Watch said. Gaza's highest court upheld the decision in July.

Human Rights Watch urged the Gaza government not to execute Abu Aliyan and others on death row.

"Imposing the death penalty for a crime committed by a child makes the executions under Gaza's abusive justice system especially atrocious," said Joe Stork, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. He said only four countries Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen have executed child offenders in the past five years.

The newwas first spotted in the constellation Delphinus (The Dolphin) by Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki on Aug. 14 and quickly confirmed by other skywatchers soon after. Novas are stars that are undergoing a powerful eruption, causing them to brighten significantly, so that they appear suddenly in the night sky where previously no star was visible.

Since its discovery, this nova has brightened rapidly to become an object visible to the naked eye, though stargazers will need to be away from city lights in order to see it clearly. []

Just how frequently does a nova become bright enough to be seen without the use of ?

On average, new novas are detected about once every four or five years. Over the last 112 years, there have been 47 novas that have flared into naked-eye view. The majority of these 26 were quite dim and could only be positively identified by using a star chart or .

Novas thatbecome as bright as Nova Delphini are more readily visible.Since 1901 there have been 13 novas in this category,which occur about once every 10 years.

Even brighter objects, which shine about as much asand the other brightest stars in the sky, have been few. In fact, only six have appeared since 1901, meaning one occurs about every 20 years. However, we have not had one of these bright nova since 1975, so it seems we are overdue for another.

Then there are those novas that are super-bright, attaining a magnitude of zero or even brighter. In 112 years, we have had only two that have become as brilliant as that; on average, we get one about every 60 years.However, wehave not had a nova in this category since 1918, so certainly we are long overdue for a bright new star.

The brightest nova in recent years was Nova Scorpii, also known as V1280 Scorpii. It attained a peak brightness of magnitude +3.9 on Feb. 4, 2007.The brightest nova in the last 70 years was Nova Cygni, also known as V1500 Cygni. This star attained a peak brightness of magnitude +1.7 on Aug. 30, 1975.And since 1901, the brightest nova ever landing in the super-bright category was Nova Aquilae, also known as V603 Aquilae.It attained a peak brightness of magnitude -1.4 on June 9, 1918, virtually matching Sirius, the brightest star in the sky!

Editor's Note:If you snap an amazing picture of the new nova star explosion, or any other night sky view that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send photos, comments and your name and location to managing editor Tariq Malik at.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y.Follow us,and. Original article onSPACE.com.