By The Huffington Post News Editors
The Rolling Stones may be hitting the road.
Rumors have been swirling about the possibility of a Rolling Stones tour since the famed band celebrated its 50th anniversary with shows in Brooklyn, Newark, and London. Now, Rolling Stone is reporting that the Rolling Stones will embark on an 18-show North American tour, set to begin May 2nd.
“Really, all you’re going to have to do is wait for an announcement,” Keith Richards said earlier about plans for a tour.
By The Huffington Post News Editors
You may have read headlines recently, at websites like the New York Post or Rolling Stone, reporting that Batman’s beloved sidekick Robin will be killed off in a comic book scheduled to hit shelves tomorrow.
By The Huffington Post News Editors
The following article is provided by Rolling Stone.
By PATRICK DOYLE
Mumford & Sons’ Babel just won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and the band is already planning album Number Three, setting up a backstage practice room at every gig of their winter arena tour to work out musical ideas. “We’re getting into the habit of just sort of working on stuff,” says keyboardist Ben Lovett.
By Evann Gastaldo 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 30 (UPI) — Recording artist Rihanna confirmed to Rolling Stone magazine she has reconciled with Chris Brown, the boyfriend who beat her up in Los Angeles in 2009.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at UPI Entertainment
By Evann Gastaldo 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
By Neal Colgrass 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
Speaking out for the first time since he resigned, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal takes the blame for a Rolling Stone article, and the unflattering comments attributed to his staff about the Obama administration, that ended his Afghan command and army career.
“Regardless of how I judged the story for fairness or accuracy, responsibility was mine,” McChrystal writes in his new memoir, which offers a carefully worded denouncement of the story.
The Rolling Stone article anonymously quoted McChrystal’s aides as criticizing Obama‘s team, including Vice President Joe Biden. Biden had disagreed with McChrystal’s strategy that called for more troops in Afghanistan. Biden preferred to send a smaller counterterrorism and training force — a policy the White House is now considering as it transitions troops from the Afghan war.
McChrystal adds the choice to resign as U.S. commander in Afghanistan was his own.
“I called no one for advice,” he writes in “My Share of the Task,” describing his hasty plane ride back to Washington only hours after the article appeared in 2010, to offer his resignation to President Barack Obama. McChrystal was immediately replaced by his then-boss, Gen. David Petraeus.
McChrystal devotes a scant page-and-a-half to the incident that ended his 34-year military career and soured trust between the military and media. The book, published by Portfolio/Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, comes out Monday.
There is no bitterness or score-settling with the White House staff that had pushed for his departure. McChrystal and the White House moved beyond the matter a year later, when the Pentagon cleared his staff of any wrongdoing, and first lady Michelle Obama invited McChrystal to serve on the board of Joining Forces, a White House initiative for troops and their families.
The closest McChrystal comes to revealing his regret over allowing a reporter weeks of unfettered access with few ground rules comes much earlier in the book. “By nature I tended to trust people and was typically open and transparent. … But such transparency would go astray when others saw us out of context or when I gave trust to those few who were unworthy of it.”
A Pentagon inquiry into the magazine’s profile cleared McChrystal of wrongdoing and called into question the accuracy of the June 2010 story. The review, released in April 2011, concluded that not all of the events at issue happened as reported in the article.
Rolling Stone issued a statement saying it stood behind freelance writer Michael Hastings‘ story, which it called “accurate in every detail.”
The book details the general’s rise through the ranks, from his time as a West Point cadet to serving in the 82nd Airborne Corps and earning his Special Forces Green Beret, and then commanding a battalion of the 75th Ranger regiment.
McChrystal describes only briefly an incident that nearly ended his career years earlier: allegations of a cover-up involving the friendly fire incident that killed football-star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman. McChrystal approved a Silver Star for valor, with a citation that stated Tillman had been cut down by “devastating enemy fire.”
But as reports came in from the troops at the scene, McChrystal realized Tillman may have died by fratricide. He sent an oblique warning to his superiors that President George W. Bush should delete mention of enemy fire from his remarks, when presenting the award to Tillman’s family at his memorial service.
McChrystal told the investigators that he believed Tillman deserved the award, and that he wanted to warn top U.S. military and political leadership that friendly fire was a possibility. The Pentagon later cleared him of wrongdoing.
In the book, McChrystal writes only that he followed “standard practice” to quickly process a Silver Star for Tillman’s actions on the battlefield, in time to present it to the family at the memorial service. He does not explain the incident further.
The man portrayed in the Rolling Stone article as arrogant comes off as far more down to earth in the book.
McChrystal writes of his doubts when he was asked to take charge of the military’s top counterterrorism unit, the Joint Special Operations Command. He worried the troops would reject him because he had not served in any of its elite units such as the Army’s Delta Force or the Navy’s SEAL Team 6.
He says he helped JSOC evolve from a disconnected organization that was slow to catch targets early on in Iraq, because the operators lacked the manpower or communications equipment to analyze intelligence they gathered quickly enough. It eventually grew into closely networked teams that worked with the CIA and FBI and others to take down up to a dozen targets a night in Afghanistan, with intelligence gathered from the first target leading to the others.
At the request of Pentagon security reviewers, the former general made famous by his command at JSOC doesn’t use that term, instead substituting “Task Force 714″ for JSOC, “Green team” for Delta, and “Blue” for SEAL Team 6.
Those are part of the changes the general agreed to make, because those units and their missions are classified, according to two U.S. officials briefed on the security review. They spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The review process delayed the release of the book, which had been scheduled to come out in December. Pentagon officials decided to give the book another read, after a member of the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden released an account of the raid without submitting the manuscript for a security review.
McChrystal said he “accepted many suggested changes and redactions, some reluctantly, particularly where public knowledge of facts and events has outpaced existing security guidelines,” in order to “keep faith with the comrades I had served alongside.”
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
An Afghan man who is being held with the most significant terrorism suspects in U.S. custody has apparently gained extensive knowledge of western pop culture in an unlikely place: the top secret prison-within-a-prison in Guantanamo Bay.
Nearly five years ago, Mohammed Rahim al-Afghani became the last prisoner sent to Guantanamo. He was accused of helping Osama bin Laden elude capture, and the CIA had interrogated him for months at an undisclosed location before he was locked away in Guantanamo’s Camp 7, a prison unit shrouded in secrecy that holds about 15 men who have been designated “high value” detainees by the U.S. government.
With no court appearances, or even charges filed, nothing was heard from Rahim and he has remained largely a mystery. So, it was a surprise when his lawyer, Carlos Warner, released letters from the detainee described by the head of the CIA as a “tough, seasoned jihadist.” More surprising still was the content: quirky notes peppered with references to Howard Stern, Fox News and the global video hit of South Korean singer PSY.
“Dear Mr. Warner,” he wrote. “I like this new song Gangnam Style. I want to do the dance for you but cannot because of my shackles.”
In another letter, the multilingual Rahim shows some familiarity with American slang. He tells his lawyer, most likely in jest, that he has adopted a banana rat, a rodent commonly spotted around the U.S. base in Cuba. “Tell the guards to leave my friend alone. They need to chillax.”
It’s hardly what one would expect from a middle-age Afghan who has never been to the U.S. While there is still little public information about Rahim, the letters provide some insight into the man — and suggest that the prisoners in Camp 7, a group that includes five charged with aiding and orchestrating the Sept. 11 terror attack, are not completely isolated from the outside world.
To Warner, a federal public defender for the Northern District of Ohio, the letters humanize a man who he contends has been demonized by U.S. authorities, who allege he worked as a translator and assistant to bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders. The lawyer says the letters demonstrate a surprising amount of resilience.
“It shows he’s different and he’s intelligent,” Warner said. “Just think that he’s doing this under all the restrictions that’s he’s under down there. He has an incredibly good sense of humor.”
There have been letters released to the media in the past from other detainees at Guantanamo, often providing valuable information about a prison that will have been open for 11 years on Jan. 11. Sami al-Haj, an Al-Jazeera journalist when he was captured and sent to Guantanamo, provided detailed accounts of a hunger strike before he was eventually released. Shaker Aamer, the last resident of Britain still held at the prison, has given an insider’s view on confinement conditions.
Rahim’s are different because he is in Camp 7, and the content departs so sharply from what one might expect from a jihadist. “I want you to contact Amanda Palmer,” he wrote Nov. 6, referring to the American singer. “… Ask her to write a song about me and my family.”
Warner and U.S. officials are prohibited from publicly discussing Rahim’s life and the allegations against him, but the broad outlines are in a public document filed in federal court by the government in response to Warner’s filing of a civil writ of habeas corpus seeking the prisoner’s release.
The document says Rahim is about 47 and was born in eastern Afghanistan. He fled with his family over the border to Pakistan when the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. Rahim has told authorities that he returned temporarily to fight the invaders, a war that killed two of his brothers, and moved back permanently once they retreated from the country.
A younger brother, Abdul Basit, told The Associated Press in London, where he is seeking asylum, that Rahim eventually got a job working for an Afghan government committee responsible for eradicating opium poppies, but that he was forced from the job by members of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that emerged in the 1990s.
Basit, who was detained by the U.S. military for five years in Afghanistan, says his brother is a well-educated man who was not particularly interested in global politics. He suggests his brother is being held more for who he might know rather than what he has done. “There is no reason to put him in Guantanamo for this long time,” Basit said in broken English.
The Justice Department document says Rahim began helping the Taliban in the 1990s and that job morphed into working for al-Qaida. It cites two other prisoners and an undisclosed source identifying Rahim as a close associate of bin Laden. Rahim was captured in Pakistan in 2007 and turned over to the CIA, in whose custody he was subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation. He was transferred to Guantanamo in March 2008.
In photos taken by the Red Cross at Camp 7, and obtained by the AP from the prisoner’s family in Afghanistan, Rahim has a long flowing beard. In one, he smiles broadly at the camera.
The first letters from Rahim released by Warner were in June, including one in which he disclosed that Majid Khan, a former Maryland resident who pleaded guilty to aiding al-Qaida, had acquired a cat at Camp 7, which AP reported at the time. The Pentagon and prison officials declined comment and said they could not discuss conditions of confinement for high-value detainees, although they added that prisoners are not permitted to have pets.
The rest of the letters came during or after subsequent visits by Warner, who had them cleared by the military before releasing them to the AP. None are more than a few sentences, and contain many typographical errors, which have been corrected for this story for the sake of clarity.
In one, Rahim returns to the theme of his fellow prisoner’s alleged cat. “I want a dog,” he writes. “I will train my dog to chase Majid Khan‘s cat.”
In separate notes, he asks Warner to appeal for help from radio personality Howard Stern. “If he is the ‘King of All Media’ he can help me.”
In another, he criticizes Fox News‘ “Fair and Balanced” slogan, writing that if that were true the channel “would not have to say it every five minutes.”
How he came by this information is not clear. A prison spokesman, Navy Capt. Robert Durand, won’t discuss life in Camp 7 but he says that “where satellite television and radio is available for detainees,” they have access to a wide variety of channels in Arabic, Farsi, English, Russian, Spanish and other languages. The line-up, however, apparently does not include Howard Stern or Fox.
With no Internet access, he could have picked up such information from other shows or through Warner, who has spent hours with him and delivered magazines such as Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and The Economist.
The U.S. military will not say when or if Rahim will be charged. His name does not appear on the list of detainees who have been cleared for release from Guantanamo and his name was not among those mentioned as possible candidates for an exchange with the Taliban as part of a peace deal.
___
Associated Press writer Paisley Dodds in London contributed to this report.
Source: Fox World News