You get the feeling they wanted this to happen: President Obama formally ordered the sweeping budget cuts known as the “sequester” into effect late Friday night after a final attempt to find common ground between the two parties failed. The $85 billion in cuts to government spending will hit everything from Medicare to the defense budget, and could send the country into a second recession. The cuts go into effect because Obama and Republican leadership couldn’t reach an agreement to stop them: Obama insisted on higher tax revenues while the GOP refused to accept even slight tax increases. The same old story, this time without a last-second happy ending.

Chad's military claimed victory Saturday, saying it killed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the mastermind behind the seizure of an Algerian gas plant that killed 37 hostages in January. The Chadian army says it located a base in Mali and killed several terrorists, including Belmokhtar. The French defense minister said he could not confirm the report but said French forces are seeking confimration of the killing. Chad is fighting against Islamist militants in Mali as part of an international force led by France. 

Here's a tragic example of NATO doing more harm than good in Afghanistan. Two young brothers collecting firewood were accidentally killed by fire from a NATO hellicopter, officals confirmed Saturday. The two boys, Toor Jan, 11, and Andul Wodood, 12, were walking their donkeys when the hellicopter opened fire on them, supposedly thinking they were insurgent forces.  “I offer my personal apology and condolences to the family of the boys who were killed,” General Dunford said. “We take full responsibility for this tragedy.” The episode is the second airstike to accidentally kill civilians in Afghanistan since Dunford took command in February. 

During oral arguments Wednesday for a case on the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John Roberts ripped into Obama Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, claiming he didn’t know his facts when it came to how the law applied to Massachusetts and Mississippi. Roberts used census data taken from a lower-court opinion to insist that Mississippi had a higher black-voter turnout rate than Massachusetts. It turns out those numbers are unreliable, and, according to the Census Bureau, make no sense for state-by-state comparisons. Basically Roberts ignored the high margin of error in the data, and—probably without realizing it—made a dubious assertion into a fact.

Authorities are still trying to recover the body of Jeff Bush, the Florida man believed dead after a sinkhole opened up beneath his room Thursday night. Rescuers say they can't venture into the sinkhole itself to uncover the body, since it is too dangerous. Even worse, the hole is still expanding, and the house could collapse at anytime. "Until we know where it's safe to bring the equipment, we really are just handicapped and paralyzed, and can't really do a whole lot more than sit and wait,"County Fire Chief Ron Rogers told reporters Friday. "It's a tough situation. It's even tougher for the family."

Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum are documenting for the first time the scale of the horror that radiated from Germany in the 1940s, and have uncovered that there were far more slave labor camps and other detention centers than previously known. Researches have identified 42,500 camps, reaching from France to Russia, where Jews and other persecuted groups were held for slave labor to fuel the Nazi army and where pregnant women were forced to have abortions and have sex with German military personnel. But the sheer number of sites shocked Holocaust researchers, who at first didn’t believe their ears. “The numbers are just so much higher than we originally thought,” the institute’s director said.

We may be obsessed with shows about sharks hurting us, but, really, it’s we humans who are hurting sharks. According to a new report in the journal Marine Policy, a staggering 100 million sharks are being killed by humans each year. The main reason? The demand for shark-fin soup in China. Researchers say the rate of killing endangers the fish, especially because they reproduce later in life. “They are not reproducing fast enough to keep up with the rate we are pulling them out of the ocean,” one researcher said. 

Out with the old, in with the somewhat new. So goes NBC's thinking on late night programming, sources told the Hollywood Reporter Saturday. The network is reportedly moving towards announcing in May that they will phase Jay Leno out, and move Jimmy Fallon into the coveted 11:35 pm timeslot for the 2013-2014 season. Leno is currently under contract through 2014."Kimmel has done extremely well," a network veteran told The Hollywood Reporter. "Jay wins overall, but on any given night, it's neck-and-neck in 18-49. I understand where they might have fear and also feel that they own the solution [in Fallon.]"

Seems like even her lawyer thinks he's above the law. Lindsey Lohan's attorney got a talking-to from the judge on her criminal case Friday. Judge James Dabney questioned whether the star's attorney, Mark Heller, is fit to be her sole legal council. "I'm somewhat concerned whether you have sufficient guidance from local counsel," the judge told Lohan after Heller filed a "bill of particulars" -- a motion that isn't valid in California. Lohan faces criminal charges after she allegedly lied about driving the car that crashed into a car on the Pacific Coast Highway last year. Judge Dabney rejected Heller's motion to delay the case, and a trial date was set for March 18. 

Cute name, not so cute behavior. “Queen-bee syndrome,” a term coined in the 1970s to describe women in positions of power who try to keep other women down, is alive and well today, a Wall Street Journal op-ed points out. If you’re a woman who’s ever worked in an office, that likely comes as no surprise. But here’s some evidence for the rest of you: a 2011 survey of working women by the American Management Association found that 95 percent of them believed they had been undermined by another woman at some point in their careers. And a 2008 University of Toronto study found that women with female bosses reported more symptoms of physical and psychological stress than did those working under male superiors. Women in positions of power might be well advised to recall Madeleine Albright’s famous warning: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Syrian rebels say they would love America's aid—just not the kind it's offering. "We don't want food and drink and we don't want bandages. When we're wounded, we want to die. The only thing we want is weapons," Gen. Salim Idris, chief of staff of the Syrian opposition's Supreme Military Council told The Associated Press Friday. The United States pledged an additional $60 million in assistance in "nonlethal aid" to Syrian rebels Thursday, but many rebel leaders are expressing that they are in "desperate" need for actual weapons. "The whole world knows what we need," Idris said, "and yet they watch as the Syrian people are slaughtered."

The technology giant's $1 billion payout from a patent win over Samsung will be a lot smaller. On Friday, a federal judge overturned a jury’s ruling on roughly half of the devices in the dispute, cutting the award almost in half to $598.9 million. The judge also denied Apple a permanent injunction against Samsung products.

News provided by the Venezuelan government must always be taken with a grain of salt. With that in mind, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolás Maduro announced on television Thursday that President Hugo Chávez is “battling for his health, for his life.” Chávez, who has not made a public appearance since undergoing cancer surgery in Cuba in December, is reportedly running the country from a Venezuelan hospital, writing orders and taking meetings from his bed as he is breathing through a tracheal tube. “Our commander is sick because gave his life for those who don’t have anything,” said Maduro, who is Chávez’s choice for his successor.

Well, he did say, "I'll be back." Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning to bodybuilding—albeit in only an editorial capacity. The former Governator has been tapped as executive editor for both Muscle Fitness and Flex magazines, to which he will contribute monthly columns and dish out all the personal and professional insight he can totally recall. In case you've forgotten the inexpendable man's credentials in the area, he's a 7-time Mr. Olympia champion and has been on the cover of both the aforementioned magazines more than 60 times.

The White House’s digital team has clarified the president’s “Jedi mind meld” sequester slip-up with a Star Wars–Star Trek meme that deserves serious props. Sci-fi nerds across the country jabbed Obama for mixing his references this morning when he said he can’t perform a “Jedi mind meld” (rather than a Jedi mind trick or a Vulcan mind meld) to get Republicans to agree to a sequester deal. Hours later, the White House released a clever meme on Facebook and Twitter indicating what the president meant, correctly referencing both sci-fi franchises: “These cuts aren’t the solutions Americans are looking for,” the first part reads. “To deny the facts would be illogical.” Clever, are you.