Hosni Mubarak, the 84-year-old Egyptian leader ousted in the Arab Spring last year was sentenced to life in prison Saturday in a verdict that was received with joy by many of his countrymen. Mubarak reportedly suffered a "health crisis" after the sentencing en route to the jail and was being treated in a military helicopter. Mubarak, along with Habib al-Adly, the government’s former interior minister, was sentenced for complicity in the killing of protesters during a popular uprising in Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011. Mubarak and his sons were acquitted on separate corruption charges. Judge Ahmed Refaat spoke at the culmination of the 10-month trial, saying that Mubarak’s rule had been “30 years of darkness” for Egypt, and that last year’s protesters were “the sons of the nation who rose up peacefully for freedom and justice.” Thousands protested the sentence in Alexandria, while Cairo protests were said to be more celebratory.

The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history is currently spreading across the wilderness of the southwestern part of the state. The Whitewater-Baldy fire is being contained by more than 1,200 firefighters and has already crossed 354 square miles of the region. Fire managers are using the fire to test the results of decades of work attempting to allow fire to resume its natural role on the landscape. The strategy at Gila National Forest, where the fire is burning, is to allow it to spread as long as conditions allow. “The fact that this is wilderness and the wilderness of the Gila has seen a lot of fires, we are comfortable with allowing it to burn. What we do is monitor it and help steer it around to keep some of the impacts lower than they would otherwise be on their own,” said Danny Montoya, an operations section chief with the Southwest Incident Management Team.

Fighting erupted between groups for and against the Syrian government Saturday afternoon in Tripoli, Lebanon. A dozen were killed in the violence, and more than 50 were injured. Interior Minister Marwan Charbel has announced a ceasefire and said national security forces will occupy the area beginning early Sunday morning. Thousands of refugees have been fleeing violence in Syria and entering Lebanon, and the country’s leading political parties have been divided on the issue.

Making friends on the global scale isn’t always about being nice. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta outlined a new Navy policy on Saturday in Singapore that he said will bring more U.S. ships to the Asia-Pacific region over the coming decade. Panetta said the move, which will place six aircraft carriers permanently within the region and 60 percent of the total U.S. fleet there by 2020, was not designed to contain the growing influence China exerts internationally. But a stronger U.S. military presence in the region could help advance America’s relations with the Asian country, Panetta said. “We’re not naive about the relationship and neither is China,” Panetta said Saturday at a security forum. “We also both understand that there is really no other alternative but for both of us to engage and to improve our communications ... That’s the kind of mature relationships that we ultimately have to have with China.”

The actress who played Karen McKluskey, the nosy neighbor in the hit drama Desperate Housewives, passed away after a battle with lung cancer on Friday. Kathryn Joosten won two Emmys for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, and in an eerie parallel, her character had died on the show’s season finale three weeks ago. Joosten was first diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001 and saw the cancer return in 2009. She was an advocate for research on and awareness of the disease.

And they’re off! Queen Elizabeth II marked the beginning of her Diamond Jubilee weekend with a stop at the Epsom Derby, one of England’s premier horseracing events. The more than 200-year-old tradition draws crowds of 200,000 annually, and holds special resonance for the queen, who had her first official engagement at the derby after her coronation in 1953. The queen is well-known as a racing enthusiast, but she’s much more than a spectator: the monarch owns and breeds her own stock of horses. “She adores breeding racehorses,” John Warren, the queen’s racing manager, told reporters. Celebrations marking the 60^th anniversary of the queen’s reign will continue throughout the weekend, and include a 1,000-boat parade down the River Thames on Sunday.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney saw little change in his personal worth over the past year, according to a report filed Friday. The Bain Capital founder and former Massachusetts governor sits atop a fortune of as much as $250 million, much of it locked up in two blind trusts that were set up in 2003, before he took office in the Bay State. Many of the holdings in the trust date back to Romney’s Bain days and are the source of much of his overall worth. Over the past year, Romney’s investment fund managers did take steps to divest substantial stock holdings, bringing his cash assets to more than $6.4 million. His fund managers sold off shares in Coca-Cola and Apple, among other major companies, while retaining stock in Ford Motor Co. and Marriott.

Thousands of Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo and Alexandria on Saturday after former president Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life imprisonment for his complicity in the killing of protesters last year. Mubarak was acquitted along with his sons on other corruption charges. Crowds of protesters swelled in Tahrir Square, the ideological home base of the popular uprising that last year removed Mubarak from power. The Muslim Brotherhood and other groups called for protests over the acquittals. Mubarak, who reportedly suffered a “health crisis” in a helicopter after being removed from his sentencing hearing, could have faced the death penalty for the charges related to the killing of protesters. Pro-democracy advocates in the country say they would like to see Mubarak face charges extending beyond his conduct during the uprising.

New technology may have helped to wipe away some of the mystery from the unexplained disappearance of flying pioneer Amelia Earhart 75 years ago. Findings released by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) on Friday indicated that the daring female pilot and her navigator, Fred Noonan, set down at deserted Gardner Island in the Pacific, from where they tried to radio for help. “Amelia Earhart did not simply vanish on July 2, 1937,” Richard Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told reporters. “Radio distress calls believed to have been sent from the missing plane dominated the headlines and drove much of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy search.” Researchers plan to use submersibles to search for Earhart’s plane in the area around the island.

O’s getting into e-books. “This is way different from the old book club,” Winfrey said in a video announcing her new club that was posted on her website Friday. “This time it’s an interactive, online club for our digital world.” The new project will be a collaboration between the OWN network and O Magazine, and will kick-off with Wild, a memoir by Cheryl Strayed. Whether or not the club succeeds will be a sign of Oprah’s continued influence, which could once catapult a book to the top of the bestseller list in a matter of hours. For more than a decade Winfrey would feature titles of her choosing on her show, but excitement over Oprah’s picks had begun to decline by the time she went off the air in 2011.

Widely respected as one of the country’s premier public-university systems, California’s schools are under siege. “I’d be lying if I said what we offer students hasn’t been changed and that there hasn’t been a degradation of the learning environment,” said Timothy White, chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. At the root of the trouble is California’s continuing budget woes, which may force the state to shutter programs or even entire schools if new tax increases aren’t improved to compensate. Despite rising matriculation numbers, schools are strapped when it comes to the resources they can offer those students. “We’re not cutting into muscle or tissue,” Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters, “We’re cutting into artery.”

That’s one for the books. Johan Santana pitched through the St. Louis Cardinals’ lineup during Friday’s game, resulting in the first no-hitter in history for the Mets. The resulting 8-0 score marked the end of a no-hitter drought since 8,019 games ago when the team was inaugurated in 1962. Santana, who spent all of last season on the bench recovering from shoulder surgery, described his record game as “the greatest feeling ever.”

Prizefighter Floyd Mayweather Jr., sentenced in December after pleading guilty to domestic violence against his ex-girlfriend, has begun his three-month jail term. Mayweather’s friend, the rapper 50 Cent, appeared with the boxer at court in Las Vegas, and said that the brawler would be “all right” behind bars. The boxing champion’s attack on Josie Harris took place in 2010, and occurred with two of the couple’s children present. His sentence was delayed so that he could face Miguel Cotto in the ring early in May, a fight Mayweather won, reportedly netting a purse totaling $32 million.

A website attached to the U.S. State Department published photos Friday that it said showed mass graves dug near the Syrian town of Houla, where more than 100 Syrians were killed last week. The website says that the photos were taken by a commercial satellite and seem to show artillery and military helicopters located near three Syrian towns, including Huola and Homs. Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have responded with brutal force to the 14-month opposition to his reign, claiming more than 10,000 lives according to the United Nations. Bashar Jaafari, Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., reportedly did not have an immediate answer when confronted with the photographs.

Stuxnet is a new kind of weapon, and it has experts worried. After a report in The New York Times on Friday revealed that a joint operation by U.S. and Israeli intelligent forces used Stuxnet to sabotage Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, the cybersecurity community began to fret over whether or not the Islamic Republic may be able to turn the gun back on the United States. “In some ways, I do feel as though we’ve been living in a glass house for years and now we’ve decided we’re going to invent rocks,” former NSA official Stewart Baker told reporters. According to the Times story, Obama made the decision to continue the Stuxnet program after the bug leaked to computers internationally in 2010.

Mitt Romney doesn’t talk much about his time as governor of the Bay State. CBS News reported Saturday that in 2003 Romney quietly defanged the state’s affirmative-action legislation, and didn’t say a word about it to lawmakers until they found out on their own two months later. “It was done under the radar and there was a big backlash,” said Michael Curry, president of the Boston branch of the NAACP. “It was clear Romney really did not have an appreciation for the affirmative-action policies long in place.” Critics said that Romney’s move destroyed years of advances for women and minorities, and after saying he’d consult with an advisory panel on the matter, Romney ended up dropping his changes completely.

A 2-year-old boy has the bird flu, the first incident of the deadly virus reported by Hong Kong public health officials in 18 months. The boy is said to be in serious condition after testing positive for the H5N1 strain, leading city officials to raise the alert level to "serious." The boy came in contact with a duck in mid-May, and developed a fever and running nose a few days later. His parents have not developed any symptoms, officials said, but are being quarantined at the same hospital where their son is being treated.

British and American troops freed aid workers from Swiss organization Medair who had been held hostage for more than 10 days in northern Afghanistan. A British nutritionist, a Kenyan medic, and two Afghans were kidnapped after traveling by horseback to a remote, mountainous province. British Prime Minister David Cameron called the rescue “extraordinarily brave” and “breathtaking.” Five kidnappers, who had demanded a prisoner release, an $11 million ransom, and an end to foreign-aid workers in the Badakhshan region, were killed in the raid that took place late Friday night local time. Police say the kidnappers were a criminal group with possible ties to the Taliban.

Barack Obama’s campaign has long known that he has to reassure Americans about their job prospects if he wants to keep his own. That pitch got harder to make Friday when May’s job numbers showed only 69,000 new positions were created last month, driving a rise in unemployment to 8.2 percent. Responding to the numbers Friday in Minnesota, Obama said the economy is “not growing as fast as we want it to grow,” but that “we will come back stronger; we do have better days ahead.” The GOP reads the economic tea leaves a little differently, saying Obama has to put forward a new strategy if he hopes to convince the American public that he’s serious about job creation.

“The specter of an all-out war, with an alarming sectarian dimension, grows by the day,” special United Nations envoy Kofi Annan warned members of the Arab League regarding Syria on Saturday. It’s the closest the former U.N. secretary-general has come to crying havoc as the county’s 14-month uprising continues to result in more deaths as violent actions are taken by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. Annan has watched the fragile threads of a U.N.-backed peace plan disintegrate before his eyes in recent weeks, with violence continuing virtually unabated in the country despite the presence of international monitors. Meanwhile, clashes between pro- and anti-Assad demonstrators in Lebanon resulted in at least six deaths Saturday.