A lesbian couple will make gay history by becoming the first legal Indian same-sex marriage accepted by the Coquille Tribe. The soon-to-be wed couple, Kitzen Doyle and Jeni Branting, had been in a committed lesbian relationship since high school.

Newly elected Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo named a former slave as his Minister for Indigenous Affair. Margarita Mbywangi, 46, an Ache tribal chief, was captured in the jungle when she was four and sold several times as a slave to owners of large lands. Fortunately, her masters send her to school which enabled her to learn to read and write.

A man lying amongst corpses in a morgue startled medical examiners when he sat up and asked for a drink of water. Mange Ram, 19, was picked up along with the dead after a stampede at a religious pilgrimage claimed over 100 lives. He told reporters that he awoke surrounded by "a row of bodies," after being crushed under the weight of those involved in the stampede and losing consciousness.

The future of an infant born of an Indian surrogate mother is uncertain as her biological parents, a Japanese couple, divorced after conception. Abandoned by her Japanese and the Indian mother, the baby is now under her grandmother's care in a hospital in Jaipur, in western Rajasthan state.

A 23-year-old man from New Delhi who was admitted to an Indian hospital after a five-feet-long iron rod went through his chest has survived the accident. Calling it the "rarest of the rare surgeries," doctors of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) saved the life of a young executive, Supratim Dutta, whose chest, lungs, stomach and liver were pierced by an iron bar.