Midday Roundup: Mormon church will keep ties to Boy Scouts

Still friends. The Mormon church announced Wednesday it will continue its affiliation with the Boy Scouts of America after the organization voted to allow gay scout leaders. Though homosexuality is inconsistent with Mormon teaching, church leaders said they received assurances from the Boy Scouts that they could continue to only appoint leaders who shared their religious views. The decision was a relief for the Boy Scouts because the Mormon church is the biggest sponsor of its troops in the United States. “The BSA affirms, and will defend, the right of all religious chartered organizations to select their Scout leaders in accordance with their religious beliefs,” the Boy Scouts said in a statement.

Shooting reaction. The family of a suspect in the on-air shooting deaths of two TV journalists expressed condolences to the victims’ families Wednesday. “Our thoughts and prayers at this time are with the victims’ families and with WDBJ television station family,” the family of Vester Lee Flanagan II said in a statement. Flanagan, a former co-worker of victims Alison Parker and Adam Ward, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a chase with police. A family friend read the statement aloud late Wednesday outside Flanagan’s father’s home in Vallejo, Calif. President Barack Obama also offered sympathy to the victims and called for stricter gun control measures after the shooting: “It’s a testimony in this case to the fact that local journalists, they go into tough places. This isn’t one of those situations. They should have been safe. I think it’s one more argument for why we need to look at how we can reduce gun violence in this country.”

Tragic journey. Police in Austria found at least 20 dead and decomposing bodies in the back of a truck today. The dead are believed to have been among the hundreds of thousands of people migrating across Europe in search of refuge from war-torn areas such as Syria and Libya. Police say as many as 50 bodies could be in the truck. The victims likely suffocated to death.

Final sentence. A Colorado judge formally sentenced Aurora movie theater shooter James Holmes on Wednesday. He received 12 life sentences, one for each person he killed when he opened fire at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. Judge Carlos Samour also sentenced Holmes to 3,318 years in prison for wounding 70 other people in the shooting. Earlier this month, the jury that convicted Holmes couldn’t agree on giving him the death penalty, automatically guaranteeing him life in prison. At Wednesday’s hearing, Samour tried to reassure victims and their families that justice had been served. “The defendant will never be a free man again—ever,” Samour said. “He will be behind bars in a locked facility every day for the rest of this life.”

Under suspicion. Chinese authorities have detained about a dozen people for providing inadequate oversight of the chemical storage facility that exploded in Tianjin earlier this month. The accused include both employees of the facility and local public officials. China’s state-run news agency has reported the facility, Ruihai, operated without a license from October 2014 to June 2015. Chinese officials are trying to figure out how to clean up the highly toxic site, now contaminated with cyanide.