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February 21, 2012 | | CONTEST The discovery of Craig Romney’s cross-country travel blog created an explosion of fun with Romney family photographs. In a new contest, The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan invites readers to compose their own hilarious captions. SCOTUS The Supreme Court will revisit the issue of affirmative action in college admissions in a case filed by a white student who was denied a place at the University of Texas’s main campus in Austin. It will be the first case since a 2003 decision that endorsed the use of race in university admissions. The now more conservative court is being asked to rule that Texas’s affirmative-action policy is unconstitutional, possibly by overruling its earlier decision altogether. Justice Samuel Alito is more hostile to affirmative action than his predecessor, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself from the case. HORRIBLE Officials say they believe the cause of the horrendous prison fire that killed 359 inmates in a Honduras prison to be a dropped cigarette. Chief prosecutor Luis Alberto Rubi said that autopsies performed on 277 inmates showed no evidence of gunshot wounds while also ruling out the theory that gasoline helped ignite the fire. An inmate reportedly fell asleep while smoking a cigarette, dropping it on his mattress. Officials from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were said to have confirmed the cigarette theory. The Feb. 14 fire was the world’s deadliest in a jail in a century. PROTEST Israel has agreed to release detained Palestinian Khader Adnan without charging him as part of a deal to end his 66-day hunger strike, sources told Al Jazeera. Adnan had been detained by Israeli forces since Dec. 17 and was accused of being a spokesman for the Islamic Jihad. A banker by trade, Adnan was protesting his detention without trial when he set the record for the longest hunger strike by a Palestinian prisoner, which was previously set at 45 days in 1976. Adnan will serve out his administrative detention sentence, which lasts until April 17, and will then be released without charges. TENSIONS An Iranian official declared that Iran would take action if they felt their national interests were “endangered,” a semiofficial news agency reported on Tuesday. “Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests ... we will act without waiting for their actions,” said Mohammad Hejazi, the deputy head of Iran’s armed forces. A U.S. official had said earlier in the week that despite escalating tensions with Iran, U.S. spy services believe Iran would not start a conflict unless they were attacked first. Senior United Nations officials have begun the second round of talks with Tehran in three weeks to try to quell Iran’s reported buildup of its nuclear program. | | 
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