There was that Chinese Spy Plane standoff, though that was more or less over by mid-summer.
Other events over the last decade more or less randomly from the top of my head:
The USS Cole bombing.
Elian Gonzales just barely makes the cut.
Jim Jeffords defects from GOP to give the Dems control of the US Senate for a couple weeks.
The failure of the Peace Process and beginning of the Second Inifada in Israel/Palestine.
Pluto gets de-planeted.
McCain suspends/unsuspends/resuspends/half-suspends Presidential campaign to deal with economy.
Human Genome sequence sequenced
SCOTUS decides sodomy is legal!!
Europe gets a unified currency.
Insert your own favorite weird Silvio Berlisconi scandal here
Russians go old-school and use radioactive isotopes to take out defectors.
Al Franken Decade begins with (extremely drawn out) election of Al Franken to the US Senate.
Butterstick!!
Health Care reform goes from inevitable to dead to passed in the US Congress.
Meanace to Society Martha Stewart does hard-time for Insider tax trading.
Agree with the OP, it has felt like kind of a crazier decade then the previous two. Not exactly more eventful, just more…weird.
In other words, the shit we occupied ourselves with when we didn’t have jack to worry about. The summer of 2001 was just gloriously boring for most Americans.
Some from my list:
The Chinese product scares, including those beads that turned into roofies when ingested. Those incidents got a lot of people going.
The mainstream media’s final acceptance that the Internet could be used as a source beyond “Ooh, Internet! Weird! Threat or menace?” fluff. In specific, I’m talking about the discovery that the Bush National Guard memos were forged, the fact they were forced to acknowledge the existence of Ron Paul, and, of course, a lot of Obama’s campaign. Neither of the first two things would have happened at all without the Internet, and Obama would have been pressed to get the same votes and funding without his netroots.
Tied to the above: Your newspaper’s dead. Get over it.
I was going to mention everything “Post-9/11”, including the PATRIOT Act, but similar things (and worse) happened during World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. Even the huge surge of patriotism was pretty similar to what happened a decade previous, during the Gulf War.
Finally, social networking ate some peoples’ brains. Privacy may or may not get redefined, but, more importantly, it’s now impossible to ignore the possibility, even if you’re CNN.
The Dot-Com Crash. It looks like the market crash happened in mid-March of 2000, so it’s slightly outside of our ten-year window by a couple months, but the effects would still be there.
Eh, I never suspected he did. It would have taken balls of fucking steel (something I don’t ever remember Condit having) to start an affair with some twentysomething college girl and then have her bumped off when she started causing trouble. He was just probably one of the unluckiest guys in the world.