February 4 - Unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo is shot dead by four plainclothes New York City police officers on an unrelated stake-out, enflaming race-relations in the city.
February 5 - Mike Tyson is sentenced to a year's imprisonment, fined $5,000, and ordered to serve 2 years probation and perform 200 hours of community service for the August 31, 1998 assault on two people after a car accident.
February 10 - Avalanches in the French Alps near Geneva kill at least 10.
February 24 - LaGrand Case: The State of Arizona executes Karl LaGrand, a German national involved in an armed robbery that led to a death. Karl's brother Walter is executed a week later, in spite of Germany's legal action in the International Court of Justice to attempt to save him.
February 27 - While trying to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon, Colin Prescot and Andy Elson set a new endurance record after being in a hot air balloon for 233 hours and 55 minutes.
March 1 - Hutu rebels kill eight tourists in Uganda.
March 3 - LaGrand case: The State of Arizona executes Walter LaGrand, a German national involved in an armed robbery that led to a death. Walter's brother Karl had been executed a week earlier; Germany had initiated legal action in the International Court of Justice to attempt to save Walter.
March 3 - Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones begin their attempt to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon without stopping. Their journey ended in success on March 20.
March 4 - In a military court, Captain Richard Ashby of the United States Marines is acquitted of the charge of reckless flying which resulted in the deaths of 20 skiers in the Italian Alps when his low-flying jet hit a gondola cable.
March 23 - Gunmen assassinate Paraguay's Vice President Luis Maria Argana.
March 24 - NATO launches air strikes in Yugoslavia which was refusing to sign a peace treaty. This marks the first time NATO attacked a sovereign country.
March 26 - A jury in Michigan finds Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder for administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man (the incident was videotaped and aired on September 17, 1998 edition of 60 Minutes).
May 2 - Norman J. Sirnic and Karen Sirnic are murdered by Angel Maturino Resendiz in a parsonage in Weimar, Texas. They were his fourth and fifth victims in his fourth incident.
May 6 - In New York, a parole board votes to release Amy Fisher who had been in prison for 7 years for shooting her lover's wife.
May 7 - A jury finds The Jenny Jones Show and Warner Bros liable in the shooting death of Scott Amedure after the show purposely deceived Jonathan Schmitz to appear on a secret same-sex crush episode. Shmitz later killed Amedure and the jury awarded Amedure's family US$25 million.
May 7 - Kosovo War: In Yugoslavia, three Chinese embassy workers are killed and 20 wounded when a NATO aircraft mistakenly bombs the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
May 7 - In Guinea-Bissau, President Joăo Bernardo Vieira is ousted in a military coup.
May 8 - Nancy Mace becomes the first female cadet to graduate from The Citadel military college.
June 4 - Josephine Konvicka was murdered in a barn in Fayette County, Texas by Angel Maturino Resendiz. The barn is very close to Weimar, where Norman J. Sirnic and Karen Sirnic were murdered by the same serial killer. Josephine was his seventh victim in his sixth incident.
June 15 - George Morber Senior and his grown daughter Carolyn Frederick are murdered in Gorham, Illinois by Angel Maturino Resendiz. They were his eighth and ninth victims in his seventh and final incident.
July 31 - NASA intentionally crashes the Lunar Prospector spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its mission to detect frozen water on the moon's surface.
October 27 - Gunmen open fire in the Armenian parliament killing Prime Minister Vazgan Sarkisian, Parliament Chairman Karen Demirchian and 6 other members.
October 31 - Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran Church leaders sign the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, ending a centuries-old doctrinal dispute over the nature of faith and salvation.
November 5 - Microsoft antitrust case: US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issues a preliminary ruling that softwaremaker Microsoft had "monopoly power" (on April 3, 2000 Jackson found that Microsoft violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act).
November 6 - Australians vote to keep the British queen as their head of state.
November 18 - In Jasper, Texas, 24-year old Shawn Allen Berry is sentenced to life in prison, becoming the third person convicted in the racially-motivated dragging death of James Byrd, Jr.
December 3 - NASA loses radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere.
December - The town council of Halfway, Oregon accepts an offer from the dot-com startup half.com to adopt the company name as its own.
December 12 - President Lt. General Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir of Sudan dismisses the National Assembly during an internal power struggle between him and speaker of the Parliament Hasan al-Turabi.
December 29 - Former BeatleGeorge Harrison is stabbed several times in the chest by an unknown assailant, who had broke into Harrison's home. Harrison's wife wrestled the knife out the assailant's hand before the police arrived. The man apparently believed that Harrison was the devil.
December 31 - Five hijackers, who had been holding 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines plane, leave the plane with two Islamic clerics that they had demanded be freed.
December 31 - Start Of Millennium Celebrations and countdown.
Fire in the Mont Blanc Tunnel kills 39 people closing the tunnel for 3 years.
May 3 - A Durham, North Carolina woman named Jennifer Briggs changes her name to Obi-Wan Kenobi Briggs in honor of the Star Wars character. Ms. Briggs wins $1000 from a local radio station for changing her name.