Eva Peron, the glamorous first lady of Argentina in the 1940s and 50s, may have been given a secret lobotomy shortly before her death at age 33, scientific researchers said in a new report.

The study, published on the website of the academic journal World Neurosurgery, adds a new twist to the existing enigmas over Peron's agonizing death and subsequent burials.

A 9-year-old autistic boy who misbehaved at school was stuffed into a duffel bag and the drawstring pulled tight, according to his mother, who said she found him wiggling inside as a teacher's aide stood by.

The mother of fourth-grader Christopher Baker said her son called out to her when she walked up to him in the bag Dec. 14. The case has spurred an online petition calling for the firing of school employees responsible.

Walmart has pulled infant formula from the shelves of its 3,000 stores after two babies in Missouri got sick and one of them died, the retailer said Thursday.

Health officials have not yet determined whether the bacterial infection which sickened the newborns was linked to the powdered formula, but Walmart said it was pulling the product "out of an abundance of caution."

France's health ministry has said there is no cancer risk from breast implants made by local firm Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) but has recommended that women with the implants have them removed after eight cases of cancer.

Women with PIP implants "do not have a higher risk of cancer than women who have implants manufactured by other firms", a statement said but added there were "well-established risks of ruptures."

A two-headed baby born in Brazil this week is actually a set of conjoined twins sharing one body because of a rare birth defect, doctors said Thursday.

The twins, born on Monday and named Jesus and Emanuel in honor of the upcoming Christmas holiday, have distinct brains and spinal cords but share internal organs, appearing as a single baby with two heads.

A landmark clinical trial that showed HIV drugs can be as effective as condoms in preventing transmission of the virus that causes AIDS was declared Science magazine's breakthrough of the year on Thursday.

Other top achievements of 2011 included a Japanese spacecraft's return to Earth with dust from an asteroid, progress toward a malaria vaccine and discoveries about modern humans' gene links to cavemen.

The journal Science is retracting a research paper suggesting that chronic fatigue syndrome may be caused by a particular virus.

The paper was published in 2009. The authors reported finding a virus called XMRV in blood cells from patients with the syndrome. But follow-up studies found no such connection.

Taiwanese authorities said Thursday they had slaughtered nearly 1,000 pigs following the island's worst outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in more than 14 years.

The pigs were culled earlier this week at a farm in the southern city of Tainan after showing symptoms of the disease.

Philip Morris International's decision to slash the price of its best-selling Marlboro brand by 40 percent in Senegal has left health officials and activists fuming and sparked calls to toughen tobacco laws.

PMI, when contacted by AFP, refused to explain the shock decision to cut the prices of Marlboro -- the world's top-selling cigarette sold in some 180 countries -- to 400 CFA francs (61 euro cents, 79 US cents) from 650 CFA francs.

Health authorities sought Wednesday to reassure 50,000 British women who have breast implants made by a French company at the heart of a cancer scare, saying there was no evidence of a link to the disease.

France has said up to 30,000 women there may need to remove defective implants produced by the Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) company amid cancer fears, even though no "causal link" to the disease had yet been established.