Interstate 470 (I-470) is a 10.63-mile-long (17.1-kilometer) auxiliary Interstate Highway of I-70 that bypasses the city of Wheeling, West Virginia, in the United States. It is the only auxiliary Interstate Highway in West Virginia. The western terminus of I-470 is an interchange with I-70 in Richland Township, Ohio. Passing southeast through rural Belmont County, I-470 crosses the Ohio River on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge, entering Ohio County, West Virginia, at a complex three-level diamond interchange with concurrent highways U.S. Route 250 and West Virginia Route 2. After turning east towards Bethlehem, it terminates at I-70 in West Virginia near Elm Grove. The freeway was built between 1975 and 1983. On average, between 25,500 and 37,840 vehicles use the highway daily. The West Virginia portion of I-470 has been named the USS West Virginia Memorial Highway since December 2000, commemorating the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Full article...)

Hakea pulvinifera

• ... that the shrub Hakea pulvinifera (pictured) was first described in 1962, believed extinct in 1971, and rediscovered in 1988?
• ... that when the student Li Xifan published articles criticizing the scholar Yu Pingbo, Mao Zedong praised the "nobody" Li and launched an attack on the "bigwig" Yu?
• ... that "House of the King" by Focus has been a theme tune on British television twice?
• ... that chef Moshe Basson forages for wild plants and herbs in the Jerusalem hills to use in his traditional regional cuisine at The Eucalyptus restaurant?
• ... that Ameenpur Lake is both the first water body and the first urban environment in India to be declared a Biodiversity Heritage Site?
• ... that Latvian artist Rūdolfs Pērle was sent to the Caucasus front in World War I as an expert on observation balloons?
• ... that an Armenian church in Istanbul was demolished in 1958 and rebuilt years later half as wide, to make room for the street?
• ... that Journal Herald columnist Marj Heyduck was photographed in a different hat for each of her daily columns, totaling more than 2,500 different hats?

Christmas market in Strasbourg

• Nine people are killed when a high-speed train collides with a locomotive in Ankara, Turkey.
• Two days after a shooting at the Christmas market (pictured in 2014) in Strasbourg, France, in which four people died, French police kill the suspected perpetrator.
• Scientists announce that Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space, becoming the second man-made object to do so.
• In South American association football, the Copa Libertadores concludes with River Plate defeating Boca Juniors in the finals.

December 16: National Day in Bahrain; Day of Reconciliation in South Africa

• 1653 – Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England.
• 1893 – Czech composer Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony (audio featured) premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
• 1918 – Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas declared the formation of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, a puppet state created by Soviet Russia to justify the Lithuanian–Soviet War.
• 1938 – Adolf Hitler instituted the Cross of Honour of the German Mother as an order of merit for German mothers.
• 2014 – A hostage crisis in a Lindt chocolate café in Sydney, Australia, came to an end when police stormed the building, killing the perpetrator, but also one of the hostages.

Nathaniel Fiennes (d. 1669) · Stuart Donaldson (b. 1812) · H. D. Kumaraswamy (b. 1959)