This day in history

► In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named general of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

► In 1909, French aviator Louis Bleriot became the first person to fly an airplane across the English Channel, traveling from Calais, France, to Dover in 37 minutes.

► In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States in retaliation for Japan’s occupation of southern Indochina.

► In 1956, the Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off Nantucket late at night and began sinking; at least 51 people were killed.

► In 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space.

► In 1986, movie director Vincente Minnelli died in Los Angeles at 83.

► In 2000, a New York-bound Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground; it was the first-ever crash of the supersonic jet.

► In 2006, Israeli troops sealed off a Hezbollah stronghold and widened their control of southern Lebanon; an Israeli airstrike hit a UN border outpost, killing four observers. President George W. Bush was visited at the White House by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said he and Bush agreed that training and better arming Iraqi forces as quickly as possible was central to efforts to stabilizing his country.

► In 2010, The online whistleblower Wikileaks posted 90,000 leaked US military records that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.