This Day in History

1982
Israel completes its withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula per the Camp David Accords.

1983
American schoolgirl Samantha Smith is invited to visit the Soviet Union by its leader Yuri Andropov after he read her letter in which she expressed fears about nuclear war.

1988
In Israel, John Demjanuk is sentenced to death for war crimes committed in World War II.

2007
Boris Yeltsin's funeral the first to be sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church for a head of state since the funeral of Emperor Alexander III in 1894.