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If you're a cat and you live in Australia, your days may be numbered. Richard Evans, a member of parliament, has developed a plan to erradicate both domestic and wild cats from Australia by the year 2020. Evans argues that cats are responsible for bringing dozens of indigenous species of small nocturnal animals to the brink of extinction. Since cats are an introduced species, they have no natural predators in Australia and the animals they prey on don't instinctually know how to defend themselves against cats. Korva talks with Evans who explains exactly how he plans to go about ridding Australia of felines.

On his second stop while traveling along the fabled Central Asian Silk Road, Mike Shuster talks with Robert about newly-independent Turkmenistan, a land of contrasts caught between a grim Soviet communist past and an uncertain post-communist future. This land-locked arid nation is rich in natural gas, but poor in ways of distributing it and its sparse population of 4 million people has yet to benefit from the country's mineral fortunes.

Robert talks with Ted Rohrlich, a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, about homicide in Los Angeles County. About half the homicides in the county go unprosecuted. According to Rohrlich, police are overwhelmed with the caseload. Rohrlich also says the nature of homicides in Los Angeles have changed since the 1970's...with more murders being committed by strangers than by family members and acquaintances. Rohrlich is writing a series on Los Angeles County crime for the Los Angeles Times.

Editor's Note: The audio for this story has been edited from its original broadcast form to remove an erroneous description of the nature of the government's investigation. Investment banker Frank Quattrone is sentenced to 18 months in prison on obstruction charges. Quattrone was a prominent investment banker during the late 1990s Internet boom. He was convicted in May of telling colleagues to "clean up" their files after learning of an investigation. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is undertaking a project that could be called the ultimate in land recycling. Crews are dredging up mud that has clogged the bottom of the Illinois River near Peoria and shipping it up to Chicago, where it will become topsoil for a new park being built on the site of an old steel mill. NPR's David Schaper reports.

New research from the journal Nature Neuroscience has shown that rats, like humans, experience regret.

A British zoo has welcomed the birth of a rare Malayan tapir. Fewer than 2,500 of the animals are estimated to remain in their natural habitats in southeast Asia.

Astronomers say in the journal Nature, that they discovered six galaxies that existed five and seven hundred million years after the big bang.

A legend has spread tha artifacts found in Alaska were donated in the 1940s to the American Museum of Natural History, and the lower quality bones were allegedly dumped in the river.

The television show is more than sci-fi swashbuckling. It's about human rights and terrorism, about the nature of conflict and what it means to be human. In fact, the show's themes are so relevant to what's happening in the world today that a screening and discussion panel was organized this week at the United Nations.