The ‘Twilight’ star is tired of people asking if the pair has a relationship

Kristen Stewart, the 19-year-old star of the “Twilight” franchise, knows that she can come across as sullen and self-conscious in the public eye. But during an exclusive EW roundtable in Vancouver, Canada, where the cast was prepping for their last week of the “Eclipse” shoot and then the immediate onslaught of publicity for the Nov. 20 release of “New Moon,” Stewart was funny, quick and outspoken in a wide-ranging conversation with co-stars Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson.

Asked about the endless rumors of her supposed off-screen romance with Pattinson, for instance, Stewart got nicely fired up. “I probably would’ve answered it if people hadn’t made such a big deal about it,” she said. “But I’m not going to give the fiending an answer. I know that people are really funny about ‘Well, you chose to be an actor, why don’t you just f—ing give your whole life away?! Can I have your firstborn child?’”

Pattinson himself, who clearly loathes confrontation, tried to softly interject with philosophical statements about the need for an actor to hold onto his individuality. But Stewart cut him off.

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” she said. “There’s no answer that’s not going to tip you one way or the other. Think about every hypothetical situation: ‘OK, we are. We aren’t. I’m a lesbian.’ I’m just trying to keep something,” she said. “If people started asking me if I was dating Taylor, I’d be like ‘F— off!’ I would answer the exact same way.”

Without missing a beat, Pattinson looked at Lautner, promising “Me too.”

Singer says she is embarrassed she returned to Brown after assault

Rihanna has sold more than 12 million albums, and has had four No. 1 songs, but now her fame revolves mostly around one fight.

The singer hopes that will change on Nov. 16, when her first live performance since her Feb. 8 assault is streamed worldwide by Nokia mobile music. And when her album “Rated R” drops a week later, she believes fans will have insight into what transpired between her and ex-boyfriend Chris Brown in the wee hours of that morning.

“I can tell you that making this album was my recovery. It’s the way I vented and expressed myself,” a confident Rihanna said in our interview. “The minute I decided to leave the house again, I called up (Roc Nation A&R executive) Jay Brown and said ‘I want to do music, I want to go back in the studio,’ and we just did that. We started collecting songs and sounds and putting producers together, figuring out who we want to work with to develop new soundThat decision to jump back into the music game was preceded by decisions beyond Rihanna’s control. Almost immediately after the assault, an unidentified person leaked a photograph of Rihanna’s bloodied face. Cue the paparazzi; cue the rabid public interest in Rihanna’s personal life.

“I felt like I went to sleep as Rihanna and woke up as Britney Spears,” Rihanna recently told Glamour. So how’d she make the call that it was finally time to leave the house again?

“I was getting cabin fever. I kind of hid in the house and didn’t want to be around people,” Rihanna said. “One night I just said, ‘I want to do the most ridiculous thing and go to a nightclub.’ I went to the most hopping nightclub for that night, and I felt what it was like. It was kind of weird being around people for the first time in like a month.”

Making the album
Just about a month after the assault, Rihanna was at work on “Rated R,” which will be available in stores and via Nokia mobile music on Nov. 23. “I started working on it in the beginning of March and pretty much until now,” Rihanna said.

The songs are more than a recovery aid for the singer, they’re a reflection of what’s really been going on behind the images that have made their way into the press. “It’s a really fearless album,” she said. “A lot of people are saying things like, it’s dark, but it’s a very honest album and I made it in a very truthful way. I let my guard down and telling my story and being a little more vulnerable and expressing myself. I really vented in my music. I go through a lot of different music and moods in the album. You definitely will learn a lot about what’s going through my head.”

Being a role model
“I never asked to be a role model” is a common cry heard from celebrities who’ve been through scandals, but it’s not one you’re likely to hear from Rihanna. Her take on the burden of having the world watching her every move is profoundly mature for a woman who’s just 21 years old, and incredibly modest for someone whose very first break in the business came by way of Jay-Z and a Def Jam contract.

In an interview on “Good Morning America” Thursday, Rihanna said she was ashamed that she returned to Brown after the attack, saying “that’s embarrassing — that’s the type of person that I fell in love with. So far in love, so unconditional, that I went back.”

She also told “GMA” that she realizes going back is a normal reaction, saying, “It’s completely normal to go back. You start lying to yourself. I’ll say that to any young girl who is going through domestic violence: ‘Don’t react off of love.”’

“After being such an influential person in the music industry, or entertainment period, (being a role model) definitely comes with that,” Rihanna told msnbc.com. “People start to put you on a pedestal and you have to be perfect and they watch every second of what you do, including young girls who are looking to see what you’re doing …  They need guidance. There are things they can’t talk to their mom about, so they’re looking at you like, ‘What should I do?’ It happens by default but it’s also a gift that you can do what you love and do it well and still help young girls.”

Rihanna presents this realization the way many would announce that they picked up a gift for a co-worker’s birthday — glad to do it, but it ain’t headline news. But it’s obvious she’s thought deeply about what happened in February, and about the real scope of her influence.

“You don’t know the purpose of this,” she said, talking about her music, the assault, or maybe both. “People think it’s all about singing and having a successful career, but behind it all you’re also an idol to young women and young boys.”

A song about photographs
From Oprah Winfrey, who dedicated a show to the “Rihannas of the world,” to countless blogs and magazines, there’s been a tremendous amount support shown for Rihanna. She might have kept quiet publicly, but she’s heard what people are saying.

“I have to say in the past six months or so, I’ve been paying attention,” she said. “I just kind of see things differently now. I know how people think, what their perception is of me, and it’s weird that even the bad comments teach you all kinds of things.”

s.”

Pop sensation Rihanna is speaking out about the night her then-boyfriend Chris Brown beat her, saying it was “humiliating” and “traumatizing” to admit the assault took place and that it was “wrong” that she went back to Brown afterwards

“It was a wake-up call. It was a wake-up call for me. Big time,” Rihanna told “Good Morning America’s” Diane Sawyer in her first television interview discussing the assault. “I will say that to any young girl who is going through domestic violence, don’t react off of love. F love. Come out of the situation and look at it in the third person and for what it really is.”

The pop star said it was “embarrassing” that Brown was the type of person she fell in love with.

U.S.-built fortress left obsolete by fall of Berlin Wall becomes landmark

Nicknamed ”Magic Mountain,” this Cold War-era bunker built by the U.S. Air Force near Huntingdon, England, was designed to survive a direct nuclear strike. “If you were going to be anywhere when things broke loose, it’s the place you wanted to be,” one American ex-serviceman told msnbc.com

LITTLE STUKELEYS, England - It lacks the windswept beauty of Stonehenge or the Tower of London’s regal history but that hasn’t stopped a 20-year-old bunker left obsolete by the fall of the Berlin Wall from joining those two landmarks on Britain’s fabled list of historic gems.

Appearing to be little more than a weed-strewn hill adjacent to one of Europe’s longest runways, “Magic Mountain” was built to ensure that U.S. spy planes could keep flying over Europe in any eventuality — including World War III.

The subterranean structure, designed to survive a direct nuclear attack, was conceived to be a “key NATO asset” as the decades-long showdown between Western and Soviet forces rumbled on. But just months after it was completed in 1989 at a cost of $69 million, thawing East-West relations made the American-built facility a white elephant.

Despite being a tiny blip in the long arc of British history, Magic Mountain has now been designated as a structure of special merit alongside iconic destinations dating back centuries.

Experts with the government-run English Heritage spent about 10 years cataloguing hundreds of Cold War structures around the country — including many formerly secret military establishments.

Officials say Magic Mountain, set on the grounds of the Royal Air Force’s Alconbury base in the flatlands of eastern England, was given the protected status because it reflects the “determination to continue operating even in the most extreme horrors of a possible nuclear holocaust.”

But the grass-covered edifice isn’t just being mothballed or turned into a hushed museum — it’s being made to work for living.

Entrepreneurs have caught on to the fact that fortified sites that would cost millions from scratch can be obtained for a fraction of the price. Bomb-proof bunkers now store computer servers, documents and even wine. Hangars at one former U.S. Air Force base are even being used to breed ducks.

“A Cold War structure is about as secure a building as you’re ever going to see,” said Wayne Cocroft, an archaeologist with English Heritage. “There was a lot of concrete poured in the 1980s.”

Cold War atmosphere
Walking through Magic Mountain’s blast-proof “guillotine” doors, stainless steel decontamination chambers, airlocks, hatches and life-support systems provides an eerie glimpse back to a time when the end of the world was considered a very real possibility.

The underground avionics and intelligence assessment bunker was used to analyze reconnaissance data gathered by American U2 and TR-1 spy planes during high-altitude, tactical surveillance flights over Europe, historians say.

Magic Mountain also provided a “reassuring” presence for servicemen based at Alconbury, then a U.S.-run airfield about 15 miles from Cambridge and its world-famous university.

Steve Cole / English Heritage “Magic Mountain” featured its own power plant, decontamination facilities, air supply and  communications links to other U.S. military bases around the world.

David Jimenez, who spent 10 years stationed in Britain as a U.S. Air Force analyst during the Cold War, recounts that it was intended to protect pilots, commanders and other key personnel regardless of how “nasty” conditions became outside.

“There were continually things going on in Europe that had people edgy and there was always the threat that things could go sour at any moment,” Jimenez told msnbc.com from his home in El Paso, Texas. “They left nothing to chance. It was so reinforced I’m not sure anything would’ve been able to make a difference from the outside. If you were going to be anywhere when things broke loose, it’s the place you wanted to be.”

Officially known as only “Building 210,” Magic Mountain boasted a host of up-to-the-minute design features:

• Built of steel and reinforced concrete, it sits on a bed of gravel that allows the double-story structure to shift during an attack, thus absorbing part of the impact. Jimenez said it also was built atop underground “coils” intended to counter ground vibrations in the wake of a nuclear strike.
• It is topped by a reinforced concrete “cap,” which was designed to shield the facility from the impact of any direct hit by a missile.
• It featured its own power plant — reputedly providing enough energy to supply a small town — along with air and water-purification facilities, decontamination chambers, photographic dark rooms and electronics workshops.
• Interior air pressure could be kept at a higher level than outside to prevent the entry of poison gases or radioactive contamination. “It was a unique facility,” recalled Jimenez. “State of the art. No matter what happened outside, continuity could be maintained in the worst of situations.”
• It also featured direct communications links to other U.S. bases across Europe as well as Strategic Air Command’s headquarters in Omaha, Neb., and senior Pentagon officials.

“They were trying to design a base that could survive a nuclear attack and protect against biological and chemical warfare,” says Cocroft, the co-author of “Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation 1946-1989.” “They wanted to sow the seeds of doubt in Soviet military planners’ minds that if they struck first that enough NATO assets would survive to give them a bloody nose too.”

They make too much money for cities to just stop using them’

More than 400 cities spread across two dozen states now use cameras to enforce traffic rules.

You rip open the envelope and there it is: Another darned photo-enforcement traffic ticket.

The photograph, the zoom-in on the tag, it’s you, baby. Your car. Two weeks ago. Forty-one in a 30-mph zone.

It’s from your favorite municipality. You can pay $40 now or $80 later. You can also contest it, the infraction letter says, and that’s a laugh. You remember seeing that the folks who went down to fight their automated tickets in Montgomery County got convicted 99.7 percent of the time. Like a Soviet election, you think, a sham, a joke, and you, the chump in the parade.

There’s something that doesn’t smell right about these tickets, but you’re not quite sure what.

Is it the huge profits the government and their cohorts, the camera manufacturers, make on them? The District doubling the number of tickets it issued just two years ago, raking in $36 million last fiscal year? The fact that Redflex, one of the big manufacturers of these cameras, posted a 48 percent jump in revenue last year while the rest of the economy tanked?

People get worked up. Put these cyborgs on a ballot, and the voters beat them to the pavement.

Three cities Tuesday — two in Ohio, one in Texas — voted to rip the things down. In College Station, Tex., the camera manufacturer and their subcontractors reportedly spent $60,000 campaigning to keep them in place, more than five times the amount raised by the opposition, and lost anyway. Voters in Chillicothe, Ohio, went against the cameras at a rate of 72 percent. In Heath, Ohio, the mayor got caught removing anti-camera campaign signs from an intersection. He, and the cameras, got sent packing.

“I’m ecstatic,” Jim Ash, the guy in College Station who led the anti-camera campaign.

Nationwide, there have been something like 11 elections on automated enforcement. Your vote total: Revolting Peasants 11, Machines 0.

Yet the cameras multiply like something out of science fiction, like that robot Mr. Smith in a sequel to “The Matrix,” like the red weed in “War of the Worlds.”

Humans against machines
A handful of cities used them a decade ago. Now they’re in more than 400, spread across two dozen states. Montgomery County started out with 18 cameras in 2007. Now it has 119. Maryland just took the program statewide last month, and Prince George’s is putting up 50. The District started out with a few red light cameras in 1999; now they send out as many automated tickets each year as they have residents, about 580,000.

“They make too much money for cities to just stop using them,” says Joe Scott, a D.C. entrepreneur who has developed Phantomalert, a downloadable software for GPS units and an app for smart phones that is updated by subscribers who spot new cameras sprouting up. He started it a few years ago by logging in a couple of hundred cameras in the D.C. region. Subscribers have since uploaded 200,000 more. It’s like “Terminator,” humans against machines.

But wait a minute. Maybe the cameras are a good thing. Cars can be deadly. It’s not a joke.