Flashback

Today is Saturday, July 16, the 197th day of 2005. There are 168 days left in the year.

Today’s highlight in history: On July 16, 1945, the United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb, in the desert of Alamogordo, N.M.

Ten years ago: William Barloon and David Daliberti, the two Americans who were imprisoned in Iraq for crossing the border from Kuwait four months earlier, were released.

Five years ago: Families and friends of the victims of the TWA Flight 800 explosion broke ground for a new memorial on the Long Island shore not far from where the plane went down, killing all 230 people on board.

One year ago: Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge in New York for lying about a stock sale. Some 90 children were killed in a school fire in southern India. Former Georgia Gov. George Busbee died in Savannah at age 76.

On this date: In 1790, the District of Columbia was established as the seat of the United States government.

In 1862, David G. Farragut became the first rear admiral in the United States Navy.

In 1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, his empress and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks.

In 1935, the first parking meters were installed, in Oklahoma City.

In 1951, the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger was first published.

In 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

In 1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of President Nixon’s secret taping system.

In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.

In 1980, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Detroit.

In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.