Reuters Life!

CANBERRA (Reuters Life!) - Looking to work overseas? Head to Canada, Australia or Thailand, according to an annual global survey which found recession-hit Britain was one of the worst locations to live for expatriates.

BEIJING (Reuters) - The price of garlic in China has nearly quadrupled since March, propelled by its very pungency to rank ahead of gold and stocks as the country's best-performing asset this year.

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Haruki Murakami prefers to keep to himself, yet the Japanese author who is a regular favorite in Nobel literature prize predictions has been translated into more than 40 languages.

HONG KONG (Reuters Life!) - A rare, classical scroll by a Ming dynasty artist fetched $24.8 million at a Beijing sale, the highest price ever paid for a Chinese painting at auction, in a positive sign for the downturn-stricken Chinese art market.

BERNE (Reuters Life!) - A team of Swiss doctors is conducting about 100 autopsies a year without cutting open bodies, instead using devices including an optical 3D scanner that can detect up to 80 percent of the causes of death. Michael Thali, a professor at the University of Berne, and his colleagues have developed a system called "virtopsy," which since 2006 has been used to examine all sudden deaths or those of unnatural causes in the Swiss capital.

TAIPEI (Reuters Life!) - Sculptures of ancient Chinese symbols such as a swimming sea turtle, a boy farmer on the back of an ox and cranes resting on pine trees sold in Taiwan hardly look like toxic trash, but they nearly were.

ZANKA, Hungary (Reuters) - They called it the "Plattensee" (flat sea), and for Germans from both sides of the Berlin Wall, Hungary's Lake Balaton was close, cheap and mostly free of spies.

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) - Michael Morpurgo has been writing award-winning children's books for decades but he has lost none of his passion for story-telling or his fascination with taking a real-life event and fusing it with fiction.

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - At least 15,000 buffalo and "countless" goats and birds were sacrificed in a temple in southern Nepal, organizers said Wednesday, a ritual billed as the single biggest animal slaughter on earth.

SINGAPORE (Reuters Life!) - Passengers and travel agents have voted Singapore Airlines this year's best international carrier in a Zagat survey that also showed how the economic downturn had grounded the travel industry.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (Reuters) - Royal Caribbean's new Oasis of the Seas is the largest, widest, tallest, most expensive cruise ship afloat, a cornucopia of amusements aimed at quashing the notion that cruising is a sedentary vacation, said chief executive Richard Fain.

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists say a perfect combination of testosterone, experience and a hunger for a share of profits can produce financial traders who consistently outperform the market -- even during a crisis.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Herman Van Rompuy, the European Union's new president, may not be very well known around the world but he's already winning fans in Japan -- as a poet rather than a politician.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Singer Alicia Keys has won fans with her music but now the Grammy-winning R&B star is hoping to uplift them by launching her own jewelry collection inscribed with inspirational messages.

SINGAPORE (Reuters Life!) - Men who bottle up their anger at being unfairly treated at work are up to five times more likely to suffer a heart attack, or even die from one, than those who let their frustration show, a Swedish study has found.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Unfazed by a recession and rampant inflation, image-conscious Venezuelans show no signs of cutting back on the facelifts, liposuction, and breast augmentation that have become de rigueur beauty treatments.

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Five new restroom ambassadors will soon be tweeting from toilets at Times Square after beating hundreds of hopefuls for the coveted jobs.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - Environmentalists and green businesses are targeting foam food trays used to sell vegetables, fruits and meat in grocery stores.

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Chef Lidia Bastianich explores the lesser known regions of Italy and serves up recipes in her new cookbook that highlight the complexity of the country's history and cuisine.

MILAN (Reuters Life!) - Hollywood wild child Lindsay Lohan is staying on as artistic adviser at fashion house Emanuel Ungaro despite her debut collection being panned by critics, President and Chief Executive Mounir Moufarrige said on Tuesday.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - In a depressed neighborhood in the City of Angels, hundreds of good jobs appeared to fall from the sky last week.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - The British Library is re-housing part of its collection in a new facility that will hand responsibility for the storage and retrieval of seven million items to a robotic crane rather than a librarian.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - The model used to film the final, climactic scenes of the 1933 film "King Kong" sold for 121,250 pounds ($200,000) at auction on Tuesday.

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) - A car expert says he has tracked down Hitler's favorite Mercedes to a garage near the town that helped the Austrian-born Fuehrer become a German citizen.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - The British public would like to see Swedish band ABBA reform more than any other act, according to a survey.

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - America's best known weatherman Al Roker, who is already a top-selling author, changes gears with "The Morning Show Murders", a mystery thriller set in his world of network breakfast television.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - A major work by French painter Paul Delaroche thought to have been virtually destroyed during a World War Two German air raid on London in 1941 has been unrolled and found to be in good condition.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Regional accents may be more prominent on radio and television in today's Britain, but the "Queen's English" remains the preferred accent for call centres and promoting products to consumers, a new survey shows.