A Raleigh job placement agency is holding job fairs to hire 400 people who will conduct phone surveys.

The interviewer jobs start May 1 in North Raleigh and will run through mid-September, but some of the phone workers may end up getting hired permanently.

Greene Resources is holding the all-day job fairs April 24 and May 1 at the Hilton North Raleigh at 3415 Wake Forest Road.

The jobs pay $10 an hour and don't require selling anything. Instead, the phone bank workers will call people to conduct surveys.

The phone surveys will be conducted for RTI International, a large nonprofit research organization in Research Triangle Park conducts surveys and research for government agencies and other clients.
 

Jackson Galaxy works magic.

He can not only slow-eye-blink a rageaholic kitty cat into relatively peaceful submission, he can also cajole impertinent cat owners (or impertinent significant others of cat owners) into calm, feline-adoring beings.

Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who stars in Animal Planet's "My Cat From Hell" series, would say there's no magic involved. He would say it's just experience stemming from years of "trench training" in cat shelters and dealing with hundreds of distressed cat owners who are at a loss when it comes to relating to their pets.

Season 2 of "My Cat From Hell" debuts tonight at 8 p.m. on Animal Planet. I spoke with Galaxy by phone on Thursday, and when he wasn't telling me how my own cats were "calling all the shots" in my house, he talked a little about his background with cats and where he hopes to take the show in the future.

Instead of being crowded into obscurity by an overabundance of television crime shows, "Law & Order" has entered its 20th season like gangbusters, with some of its strongest episodes in years. The show is an institution, not only building and maintaining a loyal following over the past 20 years, but doing so despite innumerable cast changes that would have killed lesser shows.

Tonight the venerable crime drama takes on a topic to which it is no stranger: abortion. More specifically, the killing of doctors who perform them. But tonight, the episode (ripped from the headlines, of course) essentially becomes a moral debate which challenges the characters closest to the arrest and prosecution of the killer to reexamine their own beliefs.

We talked to the show's executive producer and head writer Rene Balcer this week about that episode and about other things, including the Lt. Van Buren cancer storyline and NBC's decision to drown viewers with reality shows and Jay Leno in prime time. Balcer, who is also the creator of "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," which currently airs on the USA network, told us that tonight's episode "turns conventional wisdom on its head."