Midday Roundup: Idaho pastor survives Sunday morning shooting attack

Pray for pastor Tim. An Idaho pastor who gave the invocation at a weekend campaign rally for GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz was shot and injured outside his church the next day. Pastor Tim Remington was walking to his car after services at Altar Church in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, when he was shot as many as six times in the back. Remington survived the shooting and is hospitalized. Doctors called his survival miraculous. Police have identified 30-year-old Kyle Andrew Odom, a local man and former Marine, as the suspect, but have not commented on the motive for the shooting. Parishioners said Remington, 55, had received threats in the past from the drug addicts to whom he ministered.

Southern son. Author Pat Conroy, whose works The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides brought to life the raw, salty South Carolina coast, died Friday from cancer at his home in Beaufort, S.C. He was 70. Conroy’s novels captured the candid details of growing up a military brat in a large family with an abusive father, Marine aviator and military hero Donald Conroy. “The reason I write is to explain my life to myself,” Conroy said in a 1986 interview. “I’ve also discovered that when I do, I’m explaining other people’s lives to them.” Conroy and his father reconciled after The Great Santini came out in 1976. The film adaptation in 1979 starred Robert Duvall. Conroy was married three times and had two daughters. Although he lived around the world, he always considered South Carolina his home and lived in the coastal Lowcountry since the late 1990s.

Zoo-mania. At the box office this weekend, the PG-rated Zootopia took the No. 1 spot with more than $70 million in ticket sales. Zootopia’s opening weekend should set a record for a non-Pixar Disney animated movie. That means it had a bigger debut than Frozen, which still holds the record for highest-grossing animated film ever. The R-rated London has Fallen, the sequel to the 2013 action flick Olympus has Fallen, also opened this weekend, coming in second with an estimated $22 million in ticket sales.

Medical mystery. A bacterial outbreak has claimed the lives of 18 senior citizens in southern Wisconsin. The blood-borne organism, called Elizabethkingia, is common but usually doesn’t infect more than two to five people in each state per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Medical investigators don’t yet know the source of the outbreak, but the pathogen is resistant to a wide range of antibiotics and is very difficult to treat. All of the victims had underlying medical conditions and weakened immune systems.

WORLD Radio’s Jim Henry and the Associated Press contributed to this report.