Eight Lives To Go...
A South Carolina house cat named Piper plummeted 80 ft. from a tree last week and survived. Turns out her feat--which a local TV station caught on video and was also aired online--wasn't unusual. Cats take the plunge so often that "feline high-rise syndrome" was coined in 1976 to describe survivors' injuries (often a bloody nose and chest or lung trauma). "We have on record cats surviving after falling from 32 stories," says James Richards, director of Cornell University's Feline Health Center. How? A cat instinctively rights itself in midair, then spread-eagles to maximize drag and diffuse the landing impact over its whole body. But, kids, don't try that at home--it's a feline thing. "Cats," Richards says, "are special little guys."
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BOB MEYERS, whose 53-year-old brother, Dean, was shot dead in the 2002 Washington sniper attacks, on forgiving John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind behind the attacks, who was executed on Nov. 10 for his crimes







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