Morning Edition

Steve Inskeep has business news.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

These improvements in smartphones bring us to our last word in business: enhance it. It's a scene from countless movies and TV shows, computer experts race to analyze a blurry photograph to find a clue to catch the bad guy.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Enhance it.

The Libyan National Transitional Council says its fighters now control most of the Gadhafi stronghold of Sirte. The battle for the city has been bloody, with civilians caught in the middle and accusations of brutality on both sides.

The Sinai Peninsula has proven a major security headache for Egypt's military rulers since a popular uprising ousted President Hosni Mubarak eight months ago.

Gunmen who crossed over the border into Israel from southern Sinai killed eight civilians in August. In northern Sinai, unknown assailants have repeatedly attacked a natural gas pipeline feeding Israel and Jordan.

But what ultimately may prove more problematic for Egyptian authorities is the growing number of northern Sinai residents who are arming themselves with heavy weapons coming in from Libya.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is fighting for the survival of his center-right government as he goes before parliament for a vote of confidence Thursday. He faces growing discontent within his own party over his personal lifestyle and judicial woes. The test comes as Italy is becoming increasingly engulfed in the eurozone debt crisis.

U.S. authorities have charged two Iranians in a plot to kill a Saudi envoy. Steve Inskeep talks to David Ignatius, a best-selling novelist and foreign policy columnist for "The Washington Post," and to Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran and the Middle East with the Carnegie Endowment, about the plot which sounds like it came out of a spy novel.

The city of Harrisburg has filed for municipal bankruptcy and is entering uncharted legal waters. Pennsylvania's capital is mired in more than $300 million of debt related to a botched trash incinerator project.

Bob Connors tells the Boston Globe he designed the seven-acre maze in Danvers, Mass., so people would get lost. Apparently it worked because a family of four became completely disoriented. In a final act of desperation, they called 911 from inside the maze.

In 1887, the French-made motor car La Marquise was in the first automobile race. It is still running. The car got a standing ovation when it was driven onstage at a recent auction, and a winning bid of more than $4.5 million.

Since the last decade, there are now more Hispanic children of immigrants in the United States than actual immigrants. That should translate into more progress — educationally and economically. But Steve Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, tells Renee Montagne that while the second generation does better than the first, the third generation doesn't fare as well.