September 2, 2009 (Wednesday)
- The 66th Venice International Film Festival gets underway. (BBC)
- A helicopter carrying Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy disappears during a flight in southern India. (ArabNews)
- Iolu Abil is elected the President of Vanuatu during the third round of the Vanuatuan presidential election. (RNZI) (Xinhua)
- Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis announces that he is to ask the president to dissolve parliament and call a general election for October. (BBC)
- Charles Gibson announces he will step down as anchor of World News and retire from ABC in January 2010. Diane Sawyer will replace him at ABC World News. (ABC News)
- British energy company BP says it has drilled one of the deepest wells ever in the oil and gas industry as it made a "giant" discovery in the Gulf of Mexico. (MarketWatch)
- A 7.3 magnitude earthquake occurs on at 14:55 local time on the Indonesian island of Java, killing at least 32 people. (Yahoo News) (Jakarta Post) (Reuters)
- Google's Gmail service is hit by an outage affecting the "majority" of its 150 million users. (BBC)
- A Chilean judge issues arrest warrants for 129 people for allegedly helping to purge critics of the country's former ruler General Augusto Pinochet. (BBC) (Bernama)
- Two car bombs explode in Athens and Salonika, damaging the Athens Stock Exchange and lightly wounding one woman. (RTÉ) (Reuters) (Athens News Agency)
- An Iraqi court sentences four security force personnel to death by hanging for their parts in a bank robbery which left eight security guards dead. (BBC) (Press TV)
- A Taliban blast kills Afghan deputy chief of intelligence Abdullah Laghmani. The blast shakes the city of Mihtarlam, 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Kabul in Laghman Province; it kills several government officials and wounds several civilians. (ABC)
- Two American journalists held by North Korea for illegal entry admit to crossing the border but claim North Korean guards arrested them on the Chinese side of the border and dragged them back into the country. (Reuters)
- The death certificate of American pop star and entertainer Michael Jackson is amended to reflect his cause of death as homicide via "injection by another". (BBC)
- Ennama Asfari, the co-president of a Committee for the Respect of Freedoms in Western Sahara, is jailed for four months for insulting a policeman. (IOL)
- Prime Minister of Burkina Faso Tertius Zongo confirms least three people were swept away by floods and thousands are left homeless in Ouagadougou and its suburbs. (IOL)
- A woman kills a man by jumping on top of him in Barcelona, Spain. (IOL)
- Sixteen Somalis drown after being forced overboard into the Gulf of Aden. (IOL)
- Malaysia reverses a ruling which had banned Muslims from attending a Black Eyed Peas concert in Kuala Lumpur. (BBC News)
- Two British boys planning to create a massacre in a high school in Manchester are on trial after wanting to emulate the Columbine High School massacre. (BBC News)
- A 3,700-year-old wall is discovered in east Jerusalem. (BBC) (USA Today) (CTV) (Xinhua)
- Miyuki Hatoyama, Japan's new first lady, speaks of riding a UFO to Venus, calling it "a very beautiful place" and "really green". (Reuters)
