Recently developed tunable high-brilliance, hard x-ray sources provide the a new tool to selectively probe the inner shells of atoms. The high brilliance provides opportunities to study x-ray processes in free atoms with increased precision, and thus provide stringent tests of existing theories. This talk will review recent experiments in scattering and photoabsorption which explore the limits to current theoretical methods employing the impulse, dipole and independent particle approximations. In addition, prospects and experiments to alter the x-ray photoionization and Auger decay channels using strong fields from a laser will be discussed.