It's a landmark in the controversial, 30-year-old field of fetal surgery: Surgeons are reporting success in treating a common, serious birth defect called spina bifida — before birth.
Spina bifida is a hole in the spine that sometimes allows a loop of the naked spinal cord to protrude outside the body. Such neural-tube defects are down 30 percent because more expectant mothers are taking folic acid pills and dietary supplements. But about 1,500 babies are born with spina bifida every year, and many are destined to have severe lifelong disabilities.




In December 2003, security forces boarded a bus in Macedonia and snatched a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. For the next five months, el-Masri was a ghost. Only a select group of CIA officers knew he had been whisked to a secret prison for interrogation in Afghanistan. But he was the wrong guy.
At least seven people have been killed in three near-simultaneous car bombings in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Dozens of bystanders were also injured as the blasts, which detonated around 10:25am local time, tore through the offices of Kurdish internal security forces - as well as targeting a police patrol and a senior police officer's convoy.
Problems for The church of Scientology seem to be going from bad to worse according to a report in The New Yorker, After being under an FBI microscope for sometime, the church and some of it’s more prominent members are being investigated by the federal government for human trafficking and labor law violations.
Six months ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States had little hard evidence and relied heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment in assessing what it knew about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, according to declassified U.S. intellilgence report.





























