Vietnamese women looking to avoid the social stigma of having a child out of wedlock are increasingly turning to grooms-for-hire businesses that specialize in throwing fake weddings complete with fake grooms and guests for a hefty fee.

Becoming pregnant before marriage is usually frowned upon in Vietnam, particularly in the northern parts of the country, where traditional social norms are still very strong. With over 300,000 abortions recorded every year, Vietnam’s abortion rate ranks fifth globally and first in Asia. Data shows that most of these pregnancy terminations are caused by social pressure, as 20 to 30 percent of women seeking abortion are not married, while most of the rest are young students. But what happens when a mother wants to keep the baby while at the same time avoid disgracing herself and her family? Well, that’s where the grooms-for-hire businesses come in.

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A man in Liuzhou, China’s Guanxi Autonomous Region, recently made national news headlines after getting his arm stuck in a squat toilet while trying to retrieve his iPhone 8.

The man, surnamed Tang, had been drinking with some friends at a local hotel’s cafe, last weekend. At one point he had to go to the bathroom and apparently decided that checking his phone while relieving himself in a squat toilet was a good idea. It never is, particularly if you’ve bee drinking. As you’ve probably already anticipated, Tang fumbled, and dropped his new iPhone 8 in the toilet.

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Five years ago, a compassionate Shanghai policeman took on the role of son to help comfort an elderly couple he had never met before. They had lost their own son in a tragic accident 15 years ago, and the policeman’s similar appearance helped comfort them.

In 2003, Liang Qiaoying and her son, Liang Yu, from North China’s Shanxi province, were exposed to poison gas, during a freak accident. The woman survived, but her young son did not. Liang, a former schoolteacher, was left paralyzed and mentally impaired following the accident, and her husband, Xia Zhanhai, could not bear to tell her the truth about their son. Instead, whenever his wife asked to see Liang Yu, he kept saying that he had gone to work in another city.

In 2010, while watching a television show about police work in Shanghai, Xia Zhanhai was stunned to see an officer that looked just like his deceased son. He immediately knew that the young man was the answer to making his wife smile again, but he had know idea how to get in touch with him. He hadn’t caught his name, and all he had to go by was that he was stationed in Pudong, 1,500 km away. But that wasn’t going to stop him.

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A Thai family received the shock of their lives this month when the man they had cremated 7 months before casually waked through the front door as if nothing had happened.

Sakorn Sacheewa, a 44-year-old man from Thailand’s Si Ka Ket province, returned home after two years working on a fishing boat, in a different part of the country. He had never once contacted his family during that time, so he didn’t really expect the warmest of receptions, but being treated as a ghost never crossed his mind either. Only that’s exactly how his family reacted when he walked through the door on December 17, touching him to make sure he was real. He later found out that to them he had been dead for 7 months.

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An Indian driver has received the Manush Sanman award for not honking once in the past 18 years. It may seem a strange award, but India is well known for the chaos of its roads, and the typical driver’s almost constant use of the car horn. Dipak Das, a Kolkata-based driver, believes that India can change this and eventually achieve peaceful, quiet roads.

Honking is a huge part of the driving experience in India, as people pretty much use them as an alternative to side mirrors. Some cars don’t even have side mirrors, while others have them folded, as to extend them outward could lead to collisions with other vehicles. Instead, Indian motorists honk incessantly to avoid collisions on the road where traffic is chaotic and so dense that cars appear just about to bump into each other at all times. Drivers honk to indicate that they’re about to make a pass or to indicate that another driver is too close. This creates unbearable noise pollution that many consider hugely detrimental to Indian society.

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A woman in Thailand was left unable to recognize her 22-year-old son after he underwent a drastic plastic surgery makeover in South Korea for a popular television show. Looking at the man’s before and after pictures, who can really blame her?

Noppajit Monlin, a 22-year-old factory worker from Thailand, had always been ashamed of his twisted jaw, blemished complexion and his other facial imperfections. At work, he avoided his colleagues as much as possible, eating his lunch alone, instead of joining them, for fear of being laughed at or having to put up with their stares. So when he got selected for the Thai edition of “Let Me In”, a popular South Korean TV show that focuses on extreme plastic surgery transformations, he knew he had a chance to drastically change his life for the better.

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A peculiar beauty trend has taken off in East Asia, and it is proving to be cause for concern. Women are inserting a small set of pegs, called “nose lifter”, into their nostrils in order to make their nose look more European. Western noses are apparently considered more attractive as they’re sharper and pointier.

The Nose Lifter set consists of two curved silicone pegs, measuring two to three centimeters long, and a hook for adjusting. The pegs are inserted into the nostril and then adjusted to a 45-degree angle. The result is an instant nose job without invasive and expensive surgery. The trend started two years ago in South Korea but has since spread across East Asia after being adopted by prominent YouTube beauty vloggers like Raiza Contawi.

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A 44-year-old Thai man reportedly died of hypothermia after going to bed on a cold floor with three electric fans flowing air at him all through the night.

Sobthawee Boonkua, from Tambon Nai Muang, in Thailand’s Chaiyaphum province, had gone to look after his 86-year-old mother, at a relative’s house, and decided to spend the night. Fearing that he wouldn’t be able to get a good night’s sleep due to the heat in the poorly ventilated room, the 44-year-old decided to sleep on the floor and plug in no less than three electric fans to keep cool. Unfortunately, he didn’t take into consideration Chaiyaphum’s drastic drop in temperature at night, and the problems his body would have adjusting to it.

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A Thai woman who got stood up at the altar by her boyfriend of six years is now suing him for moral and financial damages. In his defence, the man said he never showed up at his own wedding because he couldn’t afford to pay the dowry set by her family.

26-year-old Boonyang Sawatdee and his long-time girlfriend, Arunee Jaengkrachang, 24, were supposed to get married in the bride’s home village of Khao Din, Thailand’s Kabin Buri district, on October 22, but the groom never showed up. The day before the wedding, the couple met with the bride’s parents to make the final preparations for the wedding party and the groom showed no symptoms of “cold feet”, but on Sunday morning, he failed to show up at the agreed time, and so did all of his relatives, which really made everyone suspicious.

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Polygamy, the practice of taking several wives, is legal in Indonesia, but it usually implies marrying one woman at a time. However, one impatient polygamist decided to beat the system by marrying two ladies at the same time and even sent out bizarre wedding invitations where he can be seen posing with both his brides-to-be.

The unique wedding invitation has been doing the rounds on Indonesian social media for the past week, with the vast majority of users condemning the event for being degrading to the two women. Interestingly, even polygamists are against it, as most of them believe that a Muslim man must learn to live with one woman before taking second wives. Some made fun about how the wedding night would play out, while a few just thought it was just a prank. It isn’t.

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One look at Puspa Dewi is all it takes to understand why people often confuse her with her two sons’ girlfriends. At age 50, the Instagram star looks a lot better than most women in their 30s.

Puspa Dewi, an entrepreneur and mother-of-two from Jakarta, Indonesia, recently celebrated her 50th birthday, but you’d have a heart time guessing her age just by looking at the photos she uploads on Instagram. She doesn’t look a day over 30, in fact, she could easily pass for a woman in her early 20s. When she poses with her two teenage sons, people (that includes me) can’t believe that she is their mother, and not their girlfriend.

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It’s no secret that Japanese men have a thing for maids, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some businesses try to use their popularity as an advantage over the competition. Like this new programming school in Shibuya, Tokyo, that is trying to attract male students by having cute maids studying alongside them.

MadeInMaidFamily is one of many trade schools in Tokyo, so its founders knew that they had to come up with something special to give them an edge in a very competitive market. Their solution – cute maids to keep male students coming back and motivate them to hone their programming skills. The lessons are designed to encourage interaction between students with the maids asking and offering help to the guys.

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Polygamy is illegal in Thailand, but that didn’t stop a modern-day Casanova from taking a whopping 120 wives and having 28 children with them. What’s even more unusual is that the women all know about each other and are fine with the arrangement.

Tambon Prasert, the head of Phromnee district, in Thailand’s Nakorn Nayok province, some 90 km  from Bangkok, was recently forced to admit that he had illegally taken over 100 wives, after reporters were tipped off about it by anonymous sources. The 58-year-old local politician and owner of a successful construction business, recently welcomed members of the media into his home to shed some light on his family life, after they traveled to Phromnee to confirm their leads. Asked if it was true that he had more than 100 wives all across the country, Prasert matter-of-factly said “I have 120 wives and 28 sons and daughters”.

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Police in Thailand are looking for a serial scammer who has apparently married at least eight men in the last two years, disappearing from their lives completely right after collecting the dowry money from their families.

The real-life “runaway bride”, 32-year-old Jariyaporn “Nammon” Buayai, had apparently been called out as a scammer on social media a long time ago, but she only appeared on the radar of law enforcement a few days ago, after one of her victims filed a formal complaint against her. Prasarn Tiamyam, 32, claims that he recently saw a Facebook post warning Thai men to stay away from Nammon, and recognized her as the woman he married two years ago, after she told him she had gotten pregnant. She had disappeared days after the wedding, with a dowry of THB 200,000 ($6,000) and never came back.

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Bai Yan, a kindhearted police dog handler from Hangzhou, recently melted the hearts of millions of Chinese after it was reported that he had spent the last 7 years and around 1 million yuan ($150,000) on a retirement home for police dogs, where his former “comrades in arms” could live out their golden years in peace.

55-year-old Bai has been working as a police dog handler since 2004, during which time he has trained around 30 canines. Spending so much time with the animals, he became very attached to them, and having seen how some retired police dogs ended up, he knew he had to do something about it. The trainer recently told Chinese media that one of the things that convinced him to open a retirement home for police dogs was seeing  an old police dog who had been completely neglected by his new owner lying in the dirt with a chain around its neck and a bowl of spoiled food in front of him. Retired police dogs are usually put up for adoption with the general public, and there is very little vetting of potential owners.

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