Might want to try clearing your Chrome cache - if you had an old rule that caused a "hard" redirect or delivered a 404/403 status message, it may still be in there.
I can visit honstars.com/news/ with Chrome.Please check the set of you browser.
Not sure about this one, but try with a user agent test - RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BrowserName.* . Are you sending any additional headers?
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BrowserName.*