Lori Mehmen/AP

17 miles long, 1.3 miles wide.

A day after the tornado that devastated Moore, Oklahoma, was classified as an EF4, the National Weather Service upgraded its status to a scale-topping EF5, which the tornado achieved with winds over 200 miles per hour. The Weather Service said the storm's path was 17 miles long and 1.3 miles wide. Of 1,000 tornadoes to hit the U.S. each year, only about one achieves EF5 status. As the storm's power rose on the scales, its human toll was lowered: after having reported as many as 91 dead Monday night, officials revised the death count to 24. 

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David Karp on Monday in New York. (Frank Franklin II/AP)

Homeschooled so he could focus on computers.

Before he created Tumblr—a micro-blogging platform acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion—David Karp was a high-school dropout. Bored with his classes at Bronx High School of Science, the bright teenager decided to opt for homeschooling. His mom, Barbara Ackerman, says it was the best decision he ever made. “It became very clear that David needed the space to live his passion. Which was computers,” Ackerman says. Now 26, with neither a high-school diploma or a college degree, Karp is a newly made billionaire. Currently living with his girlfriend in a $1.6 million loft in Brooklyn, the tall, slight brunet still entertains the thought of going to college one day. “At least I should be able to afford it,” he quips.

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Student Matthew Royer. (Pennsylvania State Police/AP)

On his way home for summer vacation.

A 21-year-old student from the University of Rhode Island went missing this week on his way home to Skippack Township, Pa.—where he planned to spend his summer vacation with his family. Matthew Royer was reportedly last seen on campus May 16, the day he left. He sent a text message to his mom before leaving telling her that he had overslept. According to surveillance footage found on his route, he stopped for gas twice on the way. The college junior was planning to work at a golf course near his home. When he didn’t show, his parents called the police.

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Chip Somodevilla/Getty

While training in a counterterrorism operation.

An FBI official shed additional light Monday night on the deaths of two FBI agents who were killed while training Friday. The spokeswoman says Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw fell to their death during a counterterrorism exercise, when the helicopter from which they were “fast-roping” ran into difficulty, dropping them a “significant distance” from the ship below. A formal cause of death for the two will likely not be announced for weeks. The two men were members of the bureau’s elite rescue team—the same one that saved the 5-year-old boy who was trapped for days inside an Alabama bunker. "They're really the best of the best as far as civilians,” said Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI hostage negotiator.

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Tornado in Moore, Okla. on Monday. (Alonzo Adams/AP)

For central/east Texas and central Arkansas.

As the nation watches the town of Moore, Okla., desperately search for survivors, meteorologists warn that the severe weather may not be over. Officials say that 9.5 million people—from Texas to Arkansas—remain under the threat of potentially catastrophic tornadoes. In an announcement Tuesday morning, Weather Channel meteorologist Kevin Roth delivered a warning to residents of central/east Texas and central Arkansas, where the storm is heading. “Another day of large and devastating tornadoes is possible,” he said. By Tuesday morning, thunderstorms were already wreaking havoc in Arkansas, with winds up to 60 miles per hour.

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Part of why the State Department has taken the brunt of the political blame for the Benghazi attack, writes Eli Lake, is that clandestine services by definition have very little public oversight.

At a secret February ceremony at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the chief of the CIA’s base in Benghazi the night of the 9/11 anniversary attacks there was awarded one of the agency’s highest intelligence medals, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

The honor given behind closed doors to “Bob,” the officer who was in charge of the Benghazi intelligence annex and CIA base that was attacked in the early morning of September 12, 2012 and then abandoned for nearly three weeks, illustrates the murky lines of command that preceded the attack, and helped make it a politically volatile issue. While the State Department was responsible for elements of the security for the diplomatic mission at Benghazi, the mission itself was used primarily for intelligence activities and most the U.S. officials there and at the nearby annex were CIA officers who used State Department cover.

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Suburbs have more poor people mainly because they have more people, write Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox.

In the wake of the post-2008 housing bust, suburbia has become associated with many of the same ills long associated with cities, as our urban-based press corps and cultural elite cheerfully sneer at each new sign of decline, most recently a study released Monday by the Brookings Institution—which has become something of a Vatican for anti-suburban theology—trumpeting the news that there are now 1 million more poor people in America’s suburbs than in its cities.

America’s suburbs, noted one British journalist, are becoming “ghost towns” as middle-class former suburbanites migrate to the central core. That’s simply untrue: both the 2010 Census and other more recent analyses demonstrate that America is becoming steadily more suburban: 44 million Americans live in America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in their suburbs. In other words, nearly three quarters of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs, not core cities.

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The three-term mayor was in Las Vegas for a conference, awaiting the long, sad journey home. He’s been through deadly tornadoes and knows the heartache Oklahomans are facing.

When the mile-wide twister came down just outside his town, Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett was watching the devastation on television, just like the rest of America.

The three-term mayor was stuck at an economic-development conference in Las Vegas—the last place that any chief executive wants to be caught when disaster visits his city.

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In 1999, the Oklahoma town was hit with a tornado that clocked the highest winds ever on Earth—and it followed an eerily similar path to Monday’s twister. By Eliza Shapiro.

Is Moore, Oklahoma, the unluckiest town in America?

The suburb of Oklahoma City (population 55,000) was hit Monday with its fifth massive tornado in just 15 years. Early images of Moore on Monday afternoon showed horrifying scenes: blocks of flattened homes and debris, demolished hospitals and elementary schools, and burning buildings. The twister was recorded as a F4 tornado, the second-highest intensity on the Fujita scale.

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