Facing a devastating combination of yellow fever, relentless guerrilla warfare, and the advancing forces of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, French General Rochambeau agreed to evacuate Cap-Français, the last major French holdout on the island. The collapse of Napoleon's expeditionary force paved the way for the formal declaration of Haitian independence just weeks later, on January 1, 1804, making Haiti the first nation born of a successful slave revolt.
After less than a year on the throne, Edward VIII abdicated rather than abandon his plan to marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson, whom the Church of England and government refused to accept as queen. His younger brother became George VI, and Edward took the title Duke of Windsor. Broadcasting to the nation days later, he declared he found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility without the help and support of the woman he loved.
The UN General Assembly voted to establish the International Children's Emergency Fund, later shortened to UNICEF, to deliver food, clothing, and medical aid to millions of children left starving and displaced across postwar Europe and China. Polish physician and public health pioneer Ludwik Rajchman is widely credited as its founding force, pushing the resolution through amid postwar scarcity and diplomatic wrangling over funding.
Aphra Behn, celebrated Restoration-era playwright, poet, and novelist, died in London, having built an unprecedented career as a professional woman writer in an era when few women published under their own names. Her novel Oroonoko, an early and influential fictional account of an enslaved African prince, and her many staged comedies made her one of the most prolific and commercially successful English dramatists of the 1670s and 1680s.
Commander Eugene Cernan and geologist Harrison Schmitt landed Challenger in a mountain-ringed valley chosen for its promise of diverse rock samples, while Ronald Evans orbited above in the command module. Schmitt, the only professional scientist to walk on the Moon, helped the pair collect 110 kilograms of rock and soil, including the famous orange volcanic glass, during three moonwalks over the following three days.
After more than a week of tense, sleep-deprived negotiations, delegates at the third UN Climate Change Conference adopted the Kyoto Protocol, committing industrialized nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an average of about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. It marked the first time countries agreed to legally binding limits on carbon emissions, though the United States, the largest emitter at the time, later declined to ratify it.