January 26 – Lacrosse player and coach Diane Whipple is killed by two Presa Canarios named Bane and Hera, owned by her neighbors and attorneys Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel.
March – The United States enters the early 2000s recession; the unemployment rate rises to 4.4%.
March 24 – Apple Computer releases the Mac OS X next-generation operating system, with version 10.0. It goes on to be the second-most used desktop operating system with a market share of roughly 10 percent.[5]
April 1 – A Chinese fighter jet collides with a U.S. EP-3E surveillance aircraft, forcing it to make an emergency landing in Hainan, China. The U.S. crew is detained for 10 days, and the F-8 Chinese pilot goes missing and is presumed dead.
April 19 – The multiple Tony Award-winning musical The Producers by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, opens on Broadway at the St. James Theatre.
April 21 – The small Kansas town of Hoisington is hit by an F4 tornado, destroying one-third of the city and killing one.
June 19 – A missile hits a soccer field in Tal Afar, Iraq, killing 23 and wounding 11. The Iraqi government claims it was an American-British airstrike; U.S. officials say it was actually an Iraqi missile that malfunctioned.[8]
August 1 – Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has a 2.5-short-ton (2,300 kg) monument of the Ten Commandments installed in the Rotunda of the Judiciary Building. He is later sued to have it removed, and is eventually removed from office.
September 10 – Donald Rumsfeld gives a speech regarding $2.3 trillion in Pentagon spending that cannot be accounted for, identifying the bureaucratic processes of the Pentagon as the biggest threat to America.[11]
November 5 – Andrew Bagby is murdered in Keystone State Park, Pennsylvania by his former partner Shirley Jane Turner. While awaiting trial and extraction from Canada, she gained custody of the couple's son who she then also murdered. The deaths later became the basis for the 2008 documentary Dear Zachary.[15]
November 13 – War on Terror: In the first such act since World War II, U.S. President George W. Bush signs an executive order allowing military tribunals against any foreigners suspected of having connections to terrorist acts or planned acts against the United States.
November 30 – Gary Ridgway, a.k.a. The Green River Killer, is arrested outside the truck factory where he had worked in Renton, Washington. His arrest marks the end of one of the longest running homicide investigations in US history.
^Baugess, James S.; DeBolt, Abbe Allen (2012). Encyclopedia of the Sixties: A Decade of Culture and Counterculture Volume 1. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. p. 260. ISBN978-0-31332-945-6.
^Bergan, Ronald (27 August 2001). "Kathleen Freeman". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 September 2023.