| 11 January 2001 | USA [physiology] | Scientists in the USA announce that they have created the world's first genetically modified monkey, a baby rhesus called ANDi. The achievement could hasten the development of new treatments for a range of human diseases. |
| 20 January 2001 | USA [elections] | George W Bush of the Republican Party is sworn in as the 43rd president of the USA. Outgoing president Bill Clinton leaves office with immunity from criminal prosecution for lying about his sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky. |
| 26 January 2001 | India [natural disasters] | The state of Gujarat in western India is devastated by an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, killing as many as 20,000 people. |
| 31 January 2001 | Netherlands Scotland [terrorism] | A Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands finds one of two Libyan suspects, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, guilty of murdering 270 people when a Pan-Am airliner blew up over Lockerbie in December 1988. His co-defendant is found not guilty. |
| February 2001 | [health and medicine] | The ‘first draft’ of the human genome sequence is unveiled by two rival teams of scientists. Results from the Human Genome Organization (an international public consortium) and Celera Genomics (a commercial organization) suggest that human beings have about 30,000 genes. |
| February 2001 | UK [public health] | An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a highly infectious virus that affects cloven-hoofed animals, spreads rapidly across farms in the UK, prompting a block on livestock movements and a European Union ban on British meat, milk, and livestock exports. |
| 22 February 2001 | [human rights] | At the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, sitting at The Hague in the Netherlands, mass rape is judged to be a war crime and a crime against humanity for the first time in legal history. |
| 25 February 2001 | Australia [births and deaths] | Donald Bradman, the Australian batsman considered to be the greatest cricketer of the 20th century, dies in Adelaide, Australia (92). |
| March 2001 | [ecology] | US president George W Bush's Republican administration declares that it will not implement the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change (which the USA signed, but did not ratify). The European Union, Canada, and Japan condemn the move. |
| 23 March 2001 | [space exploration] | After 15 years in space (many more than originally planned), Russia's Mir orbital station is deliberately crashed into the Pacific Ocean, disintegrating as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere. |
| April 2001 | [popular music] | Hear'Say become the first British pop music band to top the single and album charts at the same time with their debut releases ‘Pure and Simple’ and Popstars. |
| 10 April 2001 | Netherlands [medicine] | The Netherlands becomes the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia as the upper house of parliament gives final endorsement to legislation. |
| 19 April 2001 | South Africa [medicine] | A group of 39 multinational pharmaceutical firms abandon their court action against South Africa's government over the provision of generic drugs to combat AIDS. |
| 29 April 2001 | UK [statistics and demography] | The 10-yearly census in the UK takes place amid controversy about questions on ethnicity and nationality and reported bureaucratic failings. |
| 30 April 2001 | [space exploration] | A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying the first space tourist, US financier Dennis Tito, docks with the International Space Station. Tito pays US$20 million for the privilege. |
| 7 May 2001 | [crime and punishment] | Ronnie Biggs, the UK's most famous fugitive who took part in the 1963 ‘Great Train Robbery’ and subsequently escaped from prison to exile in Brazil, returns home in ill health to arrest in England at the expense of UK tabloid newspaper The Sun. |
| 7 June 2001 | UK [elections] | In a general election in the UK, the Labour Party retains power in its second consecutive landslide victory. Labour wins 413 seats in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party 166, the Liberal Democrats 52 and others 28. The Ulster Unionist Party loses three of its nine seats to the hardline Democratic Unionists. Voter turnout is only 59%, lower than at any time since 1918. |
| 7 June 2001 | Ireland [international organizations] | European Union (EU) plans for future enlargement are thrown into confusion as voters in a referendum in the Republic of Ireland (a member state) reject the Treaty of Nice, which was signed by the governments of the existing EU countries in December 2000. |
| 11 June 2001 | USA [terrorism] | Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted killing 168 people in the Oklahoma bomb atrocity in 1995, is executed by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana. |
| 27 June 2001 | USA [births and deaths] | Jack Lemmon, US Academy Award-winning actor and comedian who starred in such memorable films such as Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), and The Odd Couple (1968), dies in Los Angeles, California (76). |
| 28 June 2001 | USA [business and economics] | Finding in favour of software giant Microsoft, a US appeals court overturns an earlier court decision that the group should be broken up into separate companies. However, the court agrees that Microsoft has illegally maintained its computer operating system monopoly. |
| 29 June 2001 | Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Netherlands [political events] | Deposed Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Miloševic is extradited to the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands, to face charges of atrocities and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. The move splits the federal Yugoslav government, as Prime Minister Zoran Zizic and his Montenegrin allies resign. |
| 9 July 2001 | Chile [law and government] | In Chile, the kidnapping and murder case against former military dictator Augusto Pinochet collapses as a court rules he is mentally unfit to face trial, bringing to an end lengthy efforts to try him for human rights abuses. |
| 13 July 2001 | [Olympic Games] | The International Olympic Committee awards Beijing, China, the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, ahead of Toronto, Canada; Paris, France; and Istanbul, Turkey. The decision prompts criticism around the world because of China's record on human rights. |
| 16 July - 23 July 2001 | Germany [ecology] | At a major conference on climate control in Bonn, Germany, 186 states – not including the USA – reach agreement on implementing the 1997 Kyoto protocol on global warming. |
| August 2001 | [medicine] | The results of an international medical study indicate that a simple combination therapy involving aspirin and a blood-thinning drug could represent the biggest breakthrough against heart disease in 20 years. |
| 2 August 2001 | Netherlands [crime and punishment] | The United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands, sentences Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian Serb general who oversaw the 1995 massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica, to a record 46 years in prison for genocide. |
| 20 August 2001 | England [births and deaths] | Fred(erick) Hoyle, English astronomer, scientist, and science fiction writer, dies in Bournemouth, England (86). |
| September 2001 | Japan [animal husbandry] | Asia's first suspected case of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease) is reported on a farm in Chiba, near Tokyo in Japan. |
| September 2001 | UK [animal husbandry] | In the UK the 2,000th confirmed case of foot and mouth disease is recorded. It becomes the world's worst outbreak in both duration and number of farm animals slaughtered. |
| 11 September 2001 | USA [terrorism] | In the world's worst-ever terrorist atrocity, Islamic extremists launch suicide attacks on landmarks in the USA using hijacked civil airliners. Two aircraft are flown into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, which subsequently collapse, and another hits the Pentagon (defence department) in Washington, DC. A fourth jet crashes in Pennsylvania before reaching any specific target. Around 3,000 people are thought to have been killed in the attacks and ensuing devastation. |
| 11 September - 30 September 2001 | [terrorism] | The US government calls the 11 September terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, an act of war and pledges military retaliation against known terrorist networks and their state sponsors. With its allies' backing, US forces begin to concentrate around Afghanistan where the chief suspect, Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization, are thought to enjoy the protection of the hard-line Islamic Taliban regime. |
| October 2001 | USA [terrorism] | In the USA fear of biological terrorism spreads as cases of exposure to anthrax by mail are confirmed in Florida, New York, and in Washington, DC, where a contaminated letter is sent to the leader of the Senate Tom Daschle and the House of Representatives is temporarily closed. |
| 7 October - 31 October 2001 | Afghanistan [War on Terrorism (2001– )] | Claiming conclusive evidence that Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network were behind the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, the US and UK launch sustained air attacks against targets controlled by the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan for refusing to surrender the terrorist leader. |
| 7 October 2001 | UK [business and economics] | At the UK government's instigation Railtrack, the owner and operator of Britain's railway network, is declared bankrupt and put into administration. |
| 25 October 2001 | [business and economics] | Microsoft, the world's largest software company, launches Windows XP, a new version of its dominant computer operating system. |
| November 2001 | [business and economics] | US oil companies Phillips Petroleum and Conoco announce a US$15 billion merger, creating the world's sixth-largest private oil firm. |
| November 2001 | Afghanistan [War on Terrorism (2001– )] | Supported by the continuing US air campaign in Afghanistan, opposition Northern Alliance forces make rapid territorial gains against the fundamentalist Taliban regime, which only retains Kandahar by the end of the month. The deployment of US ground troops begins, but the location of the al-Qaeda terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden, remains uncertain. The United Nations calls a meeting of rival Afghan factions in Bonn, Germany, to establish an interim government. International concerns are voiced over the killing of captured Taliban fighters near Mazar-e Sharif. |
| 1 November 2001 | England [archaeology] | Archaeologists announce the discovery near Thirsk in North Yorkshire, England, of one of the largest prehistoric hill forts in Britain. |
| 12 November 2001 | USA [transport disasters] | The US city of New York suffers further tragedy in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 11 September as an American Airlines passenger aircraft crashes into the residential neighbourhood of Queens, killing about 265 people. |
| 25 November 2001 | USA [physiology] | Advanced Cell Technology, a US biotechnology company based in Massachusetts, announces that it has successfully created a human embryo through cloning, for the purpose of developing stem cells. |
| 29 November 2001 | USA [births and deaths] | George Harrison, English musician, songwriter, and film producer, and member of the legendary Beatles pop group of the 1960s, dies in Los Angeles, California (58). |
| December 2001 | Afghanistan [War on Terrorism (2001– )] | As the USA maintains its air campaign in Afghanistan against pockets of Taliban and al-Qaeda resistance, other Afghan ethnic factions agree at a meeting in Bonn, Germany, on a new interim government which is subsequently inaugurated under the leadership of Hamid Karzai, a Pathan (or Pashtun) chief. A multinational peacekeeping force begins to deploy in the capital, Kabul, but al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden continues to evade capture. |
| 11 December 2001 | [trade] | China formally joins the World Trade Organization (WTO) after 15 years of negotiations. |
| 13 December 2001 | [treaties] | US president George W Bush announces his intention to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, which has been the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence since 1972. |
| 15 December 2001 | Italy [buildings] | The Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy reopens to tourists after nearly 12 years of restoration work to reduce the monument's famous lean and make it structurally safe. |
