Main news of September 4

WORLD

* Finance ministers comprising the BRIC union - Brazil, Russia, India and China - urged the international community on Friday not to curb anti-crisis strategies amid the unstable global economic situation

* Georgia officially opened a check point located on its border with Russia

* More than 3,200 people have died from swine flu worldwide, with the total number of officially confirmed cases reaching 271,000, Russia's consumer watchdog said on Friday citing a World Health Organization report

* Chinese police used tear gas to disperse protests that began on Thursday in Urumqi, the capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Xinhua said

* Police have begun an investigation into a series of explosions that killed at least seven people overnight at an ammunition factory in central Serbia, the country's interior minister said

* More than 25.000 people were left homeless after an earthquake which shook the southern part of Indonesia's West Java earlier this week, local media reported

* The pop singer Michael Jackson, who died in June at the age of 50, has been buried in the Forest Lawn cemetery in the Los Angeles suburb, Glendale, CNN reported

* Two astronauts completed on Friday an almost seven-hour spacewalk to secure a new fully loaded tank of space station coolant to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA reported

* Up to 90 people died in north Afghanistan when two fuel tankers exploded after they were hit by a NATO airstrike, the governor of the Kunduz province said

* Scores of people were killed in north Afghanistan when a fuel tanker exploded after it was hit by what is believed to have been a NATO airstrike, regional media

* North Korea has begun the final stage of uranium enrichment, a method of producing nuclear weapons, state media said

* The number of children hospitalized with food poisoning in Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea has risen to 144, local health authorities said

RUSSIA

* Two Moscow-based co-founders of a yacht importing company have been formally charged with large-scale smuggling, their defense lawyer said

* Gazprom confirmed on Friday that Ukraine had paid for Russian natural gas deliveries to the country for August

BUSINESS

* Talks on Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, partners in a yet-to-be-formed three-nation customs union, joining the World Trade Organization could resume in October, the Kremlin's WTO point man sai

SPORT

* Russia's Maria Sharapova has advanced to the third round of the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York after defeating on Thursday Christina McHale of the United States