Blog Posts by Chris Wilson, Yahoo! News

The 100 pages of emails that the White House released on Wednesday, which cover the administration's crafting of its talking points about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, do not contain any clear indications of a political cover-up.

But they do indicate that the CIA, FBI, State Department and the White House operate with the same sort of office drudgery as workplaces across America. There are the same cascading CC lists, the guy who insists on formally addressing every email message to "Colleagues" and the incessant looping in of one more person as a decision impends.

The following interactive arranges the emails as a typical inbox, in date order. For the sake of simplicity, every email is included in one inbox instead of separate ones for different people. You can click the "From" or "Thread" bars to sort by those fields instead.

Letters in square brackets indicate that a person's name was redacted and replaced by a handwritten acronym representing the organization he or

By Chris Wilson

Jump to the interactive map of firearm ads in the Chicago region below.

At one point last January, Brad Dixon says he was entertaining so many offers for his collection of assault rifles, shotguns and ammunition that he was getting a new text message every 10 minutes.

Dixon, a 26-year-old volunteer firefighter in Mebane, N.C., is a prolific user of ArmsList.com, the premier website for private sales and trades of firearms. During a recent surge in demand for rifles and high-capacity magazines, Dixon was able to sell his AR-15s for $1,300 or more apiece, garnering profits of hundreds or even thousands of dollars on each sale. (Dixon assembled some of the weapons himself, and sold others unused in the original box.) During the height of a recent run on AR-15s and extended clips, driven by a fear that Washington might ban them, a government issue 30-round magazine for this military-style rifle, normally about $12, could go for $45—bullets not included.

“I’ll be honest, I’ve

On Wednesday, the Census Bureau released its biannual study of voting patterns in federal elections, which included a remarkable finding: African-American voter turnout surpassed that of white, non-Hispanic voters in 2012 for the first time in recent memory, perhaps ever.

USA Today ran this news on the front page, and the report received write-ups in every other major national newspaper. There's only one problem: That landmark may have been passed four years ago. Or maybe not at all.

The uncertainty stems from the fact that the data the census used to create this report has what several experts consider a major hole in it: Data on whether people voted is collected every other November in a supplement to the Current Population Survey, a regular government survey of about 60,000 households. If respondents decline to say whether or not they voted, or if the interviewer does not ask, it is assumed that they did not vote.

According to detailed tables released yesterday, 61.8 percent of those surveyed said they voted, 25.4 percent said they did not, and 12.8 percent did not respond. The census figures combine the second two categories.

By Chris Wilson

There's an old joke in math circles about Richard Nixon that goes like this:

"In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection."

(A derivative, one recalls, is a rate of change of a value.Nixon was saying that the rising price of goods and services—inflation, our first derivative—was itself rising—second derivative—but that the rate at which it was increasing was on the decline—third derivative.)

Historians (Wikipedia) trace this observation to the October 1996 edition of the "Notices of the American Mathematical Society," in which editor Hugo Rossi wondered if voters fell for it:

"Was President Nixon telling us that the economy was getting better? Did his listeners understand that in fact the inflation rate was still increasing and thus the economy still worsening?"

When it comes to economic data, there is almost

When Max Baucus announced on Tuesday that he will retire from the Senate in 2014, he queued up in the long line of veteran senators to leave the upper chamber since President Obama took office.

The flight of the old-timers is neatly captured by a pair of simple statistics: When the 110th Congress convened on Jan. 3, 2007,the 100 senators had a combined 1,328 years of experience in the United States Senate. When the 113th Congress convened last January, that figure had fallen to 1,040.

Baucus, D-Mont., is the sixth veteran Democratic senator to head for the exits rather than run for reelection next year. Even if every other current senator stays put, the 114th session of the Senate will have fewer than 1,000 combined years of incumbency for the first time since 1985.

New candidates for Congress routinely cast their opponents’ tenure in Washington as a negative, and run on the fiction that one can be a useful lawmaker without participating in the legislative process. To those sympathetic

Federal authorities unsealed a 10-page criminal complaint against Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev today, outlining the events leading up to the twin explosions in minute-by-minute detail.

The author, Special Agent Daniel R. Genck of the FBI's Boston Field Office, pieced together the events from the footage of several different security cameras that captured Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the minutes before the bombing. Tamerlan was killed in a firefight with police early Friday morning.

The complaint, for example, suggests that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have activated the first bomb via cell phone:

Approximately 30 seconds before the first explosion, [Dzhokhar Tsarnaev] lifts his phone to his ear as if he is speaking on his cell phone, and keeps it there for approximately 18 seconds. A few seconds after he finishes the call, the large crowd of people around him can be seen reacting to the first explosion. Virtually every head turns to the east (towards the

Amid the chaos surrounding the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, the Senate is pushing forward on a scheduled series of votes on amendments to S.649, the gun control bill known as the "Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013."

There are 14 proposed amendments to the bill, including the one that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is frantically pitching to conservatives. That amendment's fate appears to hinge on one or two votes.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday he would vote for a separate amendment sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., which would ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

In the following interactive, you can view how each of the 14 amendments would specifically add or replace language to the original bills. Senators who have submitted multiple amendments, like Feinstein, appear twice on the list.

Click a senator's face to see his or her amendment.

Nearly 6,000 Boston Marathon entrants were still on the course when a pair of bombs detonated at 2:50 PM, according to a Yahoo News analysis of the time splits for each of the 23,200 contestants.

Of those still running, 1,400 were within two kilometers of finishing the 42-kilometer (26-mile) course when the detonations occurred. All told, 4,450 people made it to the 40-kilometer mark but did not officially complete the last two kilometers, mostly due to the blast. The popular marathon was staggered into three waves, so some entrants did not begin until 10:20 a.m. or 10:40 a.m.

The interactive map above of the Boston Marathon route visualizes how many runners were at each kilometer marker over the course of the race. Click "Play" to animate the graphic or use the arrow buttons to advance it manually.