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Taxidermists, muralists and a crew of others have spent years sprucing up the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. On Saturday, the hall reopens to the public. Weekend Edition host Scott Simon talks with curator Ross MacPhee about the project.

Bao Tong was once a senior figure in the Communist Party. He was ousted and jailed for seven years after the Tiananmen Square events of 1989 and is still followed everywhere by security officers. But he doesn't hesitate to speak his mind, and is a scathing critic of the country's current leaders.

The fearsome storm has shut down early voting in multiple states and disrupted the presidential candidates' campaign schedules. Sandy may wreak havoc as it claws up the East Coast, but voting experts say its impact may fizzle come Election Day.

Eight thousand flights have been cancelled and the subway systems in New York, Washington, D.C. and Boston have been shutdown.

Bans on smoking in bars and workplaces appear to reduce heart attacks and deaths within months. The savings on health care spending were significant, too. Researchers say the findings provide strong support for limits on smoking indoors.

The storm is expected to cause dangerous flooding as it pushes a wall of water into shallow coastal bays and inlets along the East Coast. "It's like putting a fan on a plate full of water," one hurricane expert says.

The rest of the government was shut down, but the Supreme Court justices were in court Monday to consider a challenge to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. At issue was whether the case could be brought at all.

German media company Bertelsmann will own 53 percent of the new firm, Penguin Random House; Pearson, which owns Penguin, will control the rest. The merger, subject to regulatory approval, is scheduled to be completed in the second half of 2013.

Titan, potentially the world's fastest computer, comes online at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The supercomputer is designed to do more than 20,000 trillion calculations a second, allowing researchers to model everything from black holes to nuclear reactors. And they'll have video gamers to thank for its blazing speed.

Weekend Edition host Scott Simon talks with Eliot Higgins, known as the Brown Moses blogger, about the range of arms used by Syrian rebels. Brown Moses is considered an authoritative source on arms used in the Syrian conflict.