Reuters Lifestyle – Spoken Edition

(Reuters) - Michelin has stripped New York restaurant Jean-Georges of its three-star rating in its 2018 guide, leaving the city with five top-rated eateries, two fewer than San Francisco which now has the most three-star establishments in the United States. Celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant, in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in midtown Manhattan, was decorated with three stars when Michelin started rating the city’s restaurants more than a decade ago.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia’s world-famous Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, will be closed to climbers from 2019, its management board said on Wednesday, ending a decades-long campaign by Aborigines to protect their sacred monolith in the Northern Territory. A board of eight traditional owners and four government officials voted unanimously to close the rock to climbers, a spokesperson told Reuters.

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Fashionable cafes springing up in Libya’s capital are shutting out single men and catering for women looking for a break from the tensions - political and personal - crowding in around them. The cafes with European names and bright decor seem a world away from the city’s traffic-clogged and still violent streets. In a socially conservative society, they also offer privacy and protection from unwanted advances.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - At Kinfe Abera’s garage in Addis Ababa, cranky, 50-year-old Volkswagen Beetles enjoy a kind of life after death; their parts are never discarded but re-used to keep the city’s remaining Beetles on the road. The Beetle was born in the 1930s out of dictator Adolf Hitler’s desire to produce a cheap “people’s car” for the German family.

NEWQUAY, England (Reuters) - The Bloodhound Supersonic Car, effectively a fighter jet on wheels, on Thursday kicked off a bid to roar into the record books by eventually reaching 1,000 mph (1,610 kmh). Before a crowd of spectators, the blue and orange, spacecraft-like vehicle with a high tail and long, rocket-shaped nose made two test runs down a 1.7-mile (2.7 km) track, attaining 200 mph (320 kmh) in about nine seconds.