Last November, a series of fires began to plague the small California city of Brawley. The first fire gutted a large vacant two-story office building. Soon after that, a furniture store, a woman’s gym, a historic theater, and a restaurant were set on fire. On Easter Sunday, a parking structure and a flower shop were also torched. Next came a 99-cent store, and then, last Tuesday, the A Plus Furniture on Main Street was burned to the ground.

In total, more than 10 fires have broken out in Brawley’s downtown core over the last few months, and police and fire officials are trying to determine if the pyrotechnics are the work of a serial arsonist.

Carlos Arredondo was in the bleachers by the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the first bomb went off directly across the street.

“Loud,” he says. “The fireball that came out. Also the smoke.”

Watching the images of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing on CNN International and the BBC, former FBI counterterrorism investigator Mark Rossini thought he noticed a disquieting connection.

“This has the hallmarks of a Madrid-style event in many respects,” Rossini told The Daily Beast from Paris, where he was visiting on business for his private security consulting firm. “We don’t know who the bombers are, but I assume it was more than one. It’s just my gut that there might have been two people involved. And allegedly, a third device has been found.”

The pictures were horrifying, the experts measured, the anchors somber.

The bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday afternoon sent the television networks scrambling to cover a stunning act of terrorism that seemed almost a throwback to an era when such attacks were common.

Law-enforcement officials say they have no doubt that the explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon this afternoon were bombs, possibly placed in mailboxes or garbage cans, or hidden in some other fashion. Officials at the scene say two people are dead, including an 8-year-old, and some 100 are injured. Later, officials confirmed that a third explosion at the John F. Kennedy museum in Boston was probably linked to the attack. The Associated Press reports that two more explosive devices have been found on the marathon route and are being dismantled.

As rescue workers, bystanders, and runners rushed to try to help the wounded in the immediate aftermath, Boston closed its airport and shut down cellphone service. Several cities put their police forces on alert.

Whew! All 21 categories of the Pulitzer Prizes for 2013 were awarded on Monday, assuaging fears of a repeat of 2012 when the fiction prize was not given. The New York Times won four prizes, for investigative reporting, explanatory reporting, international reporting, and feature writing. The public service award was awarded to The Sun Sentinel for its coverage of off-duty police officers who recklessly speed and endanger the lives of citizens. The fiction prize was awarded to Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son, set in North Korea, and the biography award went to Tom Reiss’s The Black Count, about Alexander Dumas’s father, who was born to black slaves in Haiti.

In a surprise win, Brooklyn’s small online organization InsideClimate News won for national reporting about flawed regulation of the nation’s oil pipelines.

The prime suspect in the killings of the Kaufman County district attorney, his wife, and a deputy prosecutor was until 11 months ago a respected justice of the peace known to ride to work with his briefcase on a Segway.

On weekends, 46-year-old Eric Williams would zip around the North Texas town of Kaufman in the Segway clad in fatigues from his other life as an officer in the Texas Guard.

At 11, Audrie Pott of California was in the color guard of the only middle-school band to march in President Obama’s first inaugural parade.

“The president’s young daughters waved and cheered loudest for [this] group as all the other performers were so much older,” says a Pott family online posting about the Redwood Middle School’s moment in history.

In Philadelphia, Dr. Kermit Gosnell stands accused of gruesome crimes. When police raided his abortion clinic in 2010, they said they found the remains of late-term fetuses he’d allegedly delivered before cutting their spinal cords with scissors. Prosecutors called his abortion clinic a “baby charnel house,” and the 2011 grand-jury report is a deeply disturbing account of alleged murder and abuse. His trial started on March 18, but the story recently exploded onto the national stage, thanks in part to a growing chorus of media self-criticism. Here’s The Daily Beast’s guide to the story and the media controversy.

Just how bad was Gosnell’s clinic?