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WASHINGTON — Two minutes after he cleared a private plane for takeoff and a fateful flight over the Hudson River, an air traffic controller at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport was on the phone with a woman in the airport operations office, joking about barbecuing a dead cat. "We got plenty of gas in the grill?" the controller asked. "Fire up the cat." "Ooh, disgusting, augh, that thing was disgusting," the woman responded. According to a draft government transcript obtained by The Associated Press, the two continued to banter until seconds before the private plane collided with a tour helicopter over...

Cat Credited With Waking Up Bremerton Woman Amid Fire By Derek Sheppard (Contact) Monday, March 2, 2009   BREMERTON — In a rare role reversal, it was the cat who helped out the firefighters.More importantly, it was a cat who saved a woman's life with what would normally be a routine annoyance for cat owners — the early-morning face pawing.Around 6:45 a.m. Saturday, an elderly Bremerton woman's Veldee Avenue home filled with smoke billowing through the vents from the home's heater.The smoke alarm was going off, but she didn't hear it.Good thing she has a cat.The feline, whose name...

Mama and I like to find those books to read to 3B that expose him to the diversity that we find so beautiful in life. [snip] He's too young to have voiced his own gender and sexuality identity, so we make sure to read him books about boys, girls, and what lies between as well as books about being gay, straight, and what lies between--well, we would if we could find them, that is. [snip] I'm sure that this news comes as no surprise to parents who have already read The Fire Cat, but as I was just reading it...