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...)

A murder stone

• ... that murder stones (example pictured) were historically erected in the United Kingdom to mark the locations of unlawful killings?
• ... that gymnast Pierre Payssé, who won two gold medals at the 1906 Intercalated Games, later helped organise women's football matches?
• ... that the Kenya Coast Guard Service commissioned its first vessel last month?
• ... that Roz Young's column appeared opposite the editorial page in the Dayton Daily News at a time when most women writers were relegated to the women's pages?
• ... that the existence of the Industrial Relations Court of Australia was so brief that Chief Justice Robert French characterized it as "The tide went in, the tide went out."?
• ... that with an average age of 14.4 years, Sexy Zone became the youngest music act to top the weekly Oricon Singles Chart with its eponymously named debut single?
• ... that the eleven-armed starfish Coscinasterias muricata can reproduce by binary fission, splitting apart to make two new individuals?
• ... that Eratosthenes, the head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, calculated the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy in the third century BC?

Christmas market in Strasbourg

• The Balangiga bells, taken by US Army soldiers from the Philippines in 1901 as war trophies, are repatriated to Balangiga.
• 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 artificial object to do so.

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)