Week of Oct. 11, 2025

FRANCE

You’ll really want to lick these stamps. Life is butter in France, whose postal service, La Poste, introduced nearly 600,000 stamps that smell like butter croissants in celebration of the “emblem of French gastronomy.” The savory stamp costs €2.10, one euro more than the average cost of a croissant there.

INDIA

A second airport has opened in Mumbai, one of the most crowded cities in the world, after nearly 20 years of delays. Navi Mumbai International Airport will now welcome 20 million passengers annually, which takes the burden off of what was Mumbai’s only existing airport, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International, which serves more than 54 million travelers per year. By 2032, Navi Mumbai is slated to consist of four terminals which can take in a total of 90 million passengers a year. For the massive project, the city had to flatten hills, divert rivers and bridge creeks.

JAPAN

They’re hitting the books, but not the hay. Japan’s teachers had the longest average working hours among all the countries participating in a 2024 survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Elementary school teachers in Japan worked an average of 52.1 hours per week, the longest among 16 countries participating in the survey, and its junior high school teachers clocked in 55.1 hours, the longest among 55 participating countries. The Land of the Rising Sun, which apparently is filled with early risers, has ranked the highest since it began participating in the OECD survey, which is done once every five or six years.

PORTUGAL

Cristiano Ronaldo earned the title of soccer’s first-ever billionaire player, with a net worth of a staggering $1.4 billion. The 40-year-old, born to a poor family in Madeira, earned the crown after he signed a two-year contract earlier this year with Saudi Arabian soccer club Al Nassr worth around $700 million. The former Real Madrid, Manchester United and Juventus star became the highest paid player in the history of the sport in 2023, when he earned an annual salary of around $200 million.

AUSTRALIA

Seven baby numbats, an endangered species of marsupials, were spotted at two wildlife sanctuaries in New South Wales, giving conservation workers hope the population is recovering. Numbats were once found across much of Australia, but by the 1970s disappeared from most regions because of predators such as foxes and cats, as well as habitat destruction.

With Wires