Here's your Daily Digest for Feb. 22, 2012:

Two journalists have been killed in Syria during heavy bombing in the city of Homs, according to Reuters. One journalist, Marie Colvin, was an American working for Britain’s Sunday Times, and the other was French photojournalist Remi Ochlik. Both were veteran war journalists.  Colvin lost an eye due to a shrapnel wound in Sri Lanka in 2001. Ochlik most recently covered uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The news comes days after New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid died in Syria of an apparent asthma attack.

Students at North Dakota State University held a morning prayer Wednesday for the four students killed in a crash earlier in the week. The four Minnesota women were traveling back to Fargo, N.D. in heavy snow when their car crossed the median near Alexandria, Minn. and was struck by an SUV. According to the Star Tribune, the victims were Lauren Peterson, 18, who was driving back from Prior Lake with Jordan Playle, 19, of Elk River, Megan Sample, 18, of Rogers, and Danielle Renninger, 18, of Excelsior. Students will also hold a candlelight vigil at 10 p.m. Thursday.

The constitutionality of using race as a factor in college admissions is being disputed. On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving race conscious admissions at the University of Texas. If the court decided to disallow using race in the admission process, it would eliminate a 2003 accomodation that “public colleges and universities could not use a point system to increase minority enrollment but could take race into account in vaguer ways to ensure academic diversity,” according to the New York Times. “Both supporters and opponents of affirmative action said they saw the announcement — and the change in the court’s makeup since 2003 — as a signal that the court’s five more conservative members might be prepared to do away with racial preferences in higher education.”