Hopeful Start for First Uterus Transplant Surgery in U.S.

CLEVELAND — Just minutes after the patient’s name was placed on the waiting list for a transplant, details about a matching donor popped up.

“I was shocked,” said Dr. Andreas G. Tzakis, the director of solid organ transplantation at theCleveland Clinic’s hospital in Weston, Fla. “I really considered it an act of God.”

Less than 24 hours later, on Feb. 24, the patient, a 26-year-old woman from Texas, became the first in the United States to receive a uterus transplant, in a nine-hour operation here at the Cleveland Clinic. Born without a uterus, she hopes the transplant will enable her to become pregnant and give birth.

Ted Cruz Fights in Texas, Hoping It Won’t Be His Alamo

HOUSTON — Senator Ted Cruz cannot stop talking about the Alamo.

He is always eager to twang, delivering his best stump-speech impression of a West Texas farmer. He boasted recently that he knew how to “shoot me a bird.”

“I cannot wait to get home,” he told voters in Nevada, unsubtly, after a disappointing third-place finish in the caucuses there, “to the great state of Texas.”

How Sylvester Stallone Faced His Fears for ‘Creed’

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — There are downsides to being a longtime action-movie hero, as Sylvester Stallone has found out: He’s had four back operations, two shoulder surgeries and a spinal fusion, that one after he fractured his neck filming “The Expendables.” Over the years, expectations of his assumed athletic prowess grew so high that he stopped wanting to play golf or basketball with anyone. When opinions about his acting abilities hit their nadir, around the time he won a Razzie for worst actor of the century in 2000, he half-agreed with his harshest detractors.