January 23 - Mir Aimal Kasi receives the death sentence for a 1993 assault rifle attack outside CIA headquarters that killed two and wounded three others.
March 13 - India's Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
March 18 - The tail of a RussianAn-24 charter plane breaks off while en-route to Turkey causing the plane to crash killing all 50 on board and later the grounding of all An-24s.
April 22 - A 126-day hostage crisis at the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima, Peru ends after government commandos storm and capture the building rescuing 71 hostages. One hostage dies of a heart attack, two soldiers are killed from rebel fire and all 14 Tupac Amaru rebels are slain
May 16 - US President Bill Clinton issues a formal apology to the surviving victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and their families, 25 years after the 40 year "study" was exposed by reporter Jean Heller .
June - Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraqi military escorts on board an UNSCOM helicopter try to physically prevent the UNSCOM pilot from flying the helicopter in the direction of its planned destination, threatening the safety of the aircraft and their crews.
June 7 - A computer user known as "_eci" published his Microsoft C source code on a Windows 95 and Windows NT exploit, which would later become WinNuke. The source code gets wide distribution across the internet, and Microsoft is forced to release a security patch.
June 10 - Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot orders the killing of his defense chief Son Sen and 11 of Sen's family members before Pol Pot flees his northern stronghold (the news did not reach outside Cambodia for three days)
August 29 - Christopher Maier of Lexington, Kentucky is bludgeoned to death by serial killer Angel Maturino Resendiz. Angel also rapes and beats Christopher's girlfriend, who survives. This is the first of a string of murders that Angel commits.
August 31 - Diana, Princess of Wales is taken to a hospital after a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris. She is pronounced dead at 4:00 the next morning.
September 13 - Iraq disarmament crisis: An Iraqi military officer attacks an UNSCOM weapons inspector on board an UNSCOM helicopter while the inspector was attempting to take photographs of unauthorized movement of Iraqi vehicles inside a site designated for inspection
September 17 - Iraq disarmament crisis: While waiting for access to a site, UNSCOM inspectors witness and videotape Iraqi guards moving files, burning documents, and dumping waste cans into a nearby river
September 25 - Iraq disarmament crisis: UNSCOM inspector Dr. Diane Seaman catches several Iraqi men sneaking out the back door of an inspection site with log books for the creation of prohibited bacteria and chemicals.
September 26 - 234 die in air crash in Indonesia. Probable cause is the smoke rising from numerous forest fires in the area
October 2 – UK scientists Moira Bruce and John Collinge with their colleagues independently show that the new variant form of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is the same disease as BSE or "mad-cow disease "
October 4 - One million men gather for Promise Keepers' Stand in the Gap event in Washington DC.
November 20 - Boeing 727 of Portuguese TAP airline crashes just before landing in Funchal airport in Madeira - 123 dead
November 24 - Following a 554.26 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), officials at the New York Stock Exchange for the first time invoke the "circuit breaker" rule to stop trading (this was a very controversial move and prompted a quick change in the rule; trading stops will only occur when the DJIA drops at least 10 or 20 percent).
December 29 - Hong Kong begins to kill all the chickens within its territory (1.25 million) to stop the spread of a potentially deadly influenza strain
December 30 - In the worst incident in Algeria's insurgency, the Wilaya of Relizane massacres of December 30, 1997, 400 people are killed from four villages in the wilaya of Relizane: Khrouba (176 deaths), Sahnoun (113 deaths), El-Abadel (73 deaths), and Ouled-Tayeb (50 deaths). Six days later they would be followed by another set of local massacres.
unknown dates
Miami police arrests Russian criminal who tries to sell a Russian submarine to the Columbian drug cartels
The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997.
The murder of JonBenét Ramsey dominates the news in the United States.
June 6 - Actress Farrah Fawcett makes a bizarre appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. Fawcett tells long, rambling stories without a point, fails to understand simple questions, and gets easily distracted by things like blinking lights on the set.
