Only 50 per show, please, says theater-operator AMC

By Supantha Mukherjee

(Reuters) – AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc said on Monday it will limit attendance at its U.S. theaters to a maximum of 50 people per show, effective immediately, due to the spread of coronavirus, sending its shares down 21%.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Sunday issued  a guidance to cancel or postpone events throughout the country that consist of 50 people or more for the next eight weeks.

U.S. officials have so far recorded nearly 3,000 cases and 65 deaths. Globally, more than 162,000 have been infected and over 6,000 have died.

AMC said it was adhering to CDC’s recommendation even though it was not a legal requirement for businesses in most U.S. jurisdictions.

“We anticipate that these headwinds are transitory and we expect a growth reset over the medium term,” Benchmark analysts said after downgrading the stock to “hold” from “buy”.

However, the brokerage said it was concerned if AMC will have enough financial flexibility to cover a longer-than-anticipated slowdown or a complete shutdown of its theatrical network.

AMC operates 1,004 theaters and 11,041 screens in 15 countries, including 636 theaters and 8,094 screens in the United States.

Theater chains, which have been facing off against streaming services Netflix and Disney+, were also hit by postponement of several films.

Hollywood studios have postponed upcoming blockbuster film James Bond thriller “No Time to Die”, Disney’s epic “Mulan” and the ninth “Fast and Furious” movie from Comcast Corp’s Universal Pictures.

AMC and Cineworld Group Plc’s Regal Cinemas on Friday halved their seating capacity to allow more space between moviegoers to prevent virus transmission.

Marcus Theatres, an unit of Marcus Corp, also said on Monday it plans to limit capacity by 50%.

Rival Cinemark Holdings did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the latest steps it has taken.

Cinemark shares were down 20%, and those of London-listed Cineworld’s fell 17%.

Shares of AMC have more than halved so far this year.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Shinjini Ganguli)

Let it burn: U.S. fights wildfires with fire, controlled burns

Ground fuels burn during a controlled burn administered by the U.S. Forest Service north of Gallina, New Mexico, U.S. August 15, 2019. REUTERS/Adria Malcolm

By Andrew Hay

COYOTE, N.M. (Reuters) – It was the kind of fire that has terrified communities across the drought-ridden U.S. West in the past few years: a ponderosa pine forest ablaze in the mountains of New Mexico filling the air with thick, aromatic smoke.

Except this fire was deliberately set by state penitentiary prisoners, dressed in red flame-resistant clothing and dripping a mix of gasoline and diesel around trees and scrub.

The managed burn — a low-intensity controlled fire – was meant to clear undergrowth and protect the Santa Fe National Forest, and surrounding villages, from future wildfires that are growing more frequent and severe across the West with climate change.

After a century of trying to extinguish blazes within hours, U.S. forest managers are increasingly starting them or letting natural fires burn to clean out fuel that can turn a wildfire into a catastrophe that destroys watersheds and homes.

Above-average moisture levels this summer have reduced the number of large wildfires across the country and allowed more controlled fires that mimic lightning strikes.

“We learned from our mistakes of putting fires out, building up a continuous fuel base,” said James Casaus, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) official running the managed fire near mountains where his grandfather used to burn forest clearings to improve sheep pasture.

The federal shift took on new urgency after wildfires burned over 10 million acres in both 2015 and 2017, the highest rates since 1952, according to National Interagency Fire Center data. At the same time, federal and state firefighting costs more than tripled to more than $4.5 billion in the decade to 2018.

The tipping point came last year when flames engulfed Paradise, California, killing 86 people in the state’s deadliest wildfire on record as the number of homes and structures destroyed nationwide more than doubled from 2017.

Walking around the ruins of Paradise, President Donald Trump blamed the tragedy on California’s poor forest management, even though the blaze began in an area of federal forest.

In December, he signed an executive order to speed projects to reduce “hazardous fuels” through forest thinning, burning and a nearly 20% increase in USFS timber sales.

Environmentalists generally welcomed the shift towards “forest restoration”, but were alarmed by Trump’s tactics, especially increased logging.

LOG JAM OR EXCUSE TO LOG?

The USFS, distrusted by some environmentalists for its role as a giant timber agency during much of its history, in June proposed a change to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to exclude certain projects from environmental assessments (EAs) and public comment to speed hazardous fuel and restoration work.

Controversially, these categorical exclusions included projects to log up to 6.6 square miles (17.09 square km) of forest and were not limited to areas near communities but applied to all national forests.

“What this rule does is it is an excuse to ramp up damaging logging and road-building on national forests,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director for the Tucson, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, who expected the move to be challenged in court.

In an emailed statement, USFS Chief Vicki Christiansen said logging played a role in fuel reduction work, but most of it was achieved by other means.

“While timber production does contribute to hazardous fuels accomplishments, the majority of our annual fuel reduction comes from activities such as non-commercial mechanical treatments, prescribed fire, federally funded state assistance programs, and naturally occurring wildfires,” said Christiansen, a former wildland firefighter.

She said studies of hundreds of past USFS projects showed activities earmarked for exclusion from EAs and public comment posed no significant impact to forest health.

“We found we do more analysis than we need, take more time than we need and slow down important work to protect communities, livelihoods and resources,” she said.

GETTING IT DONE

Christiansen expects the 2020 budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 to drive hazard fuel reduction long held back by the cost of fighting fires.

USFS fire suppression costs have skyrocketed since the 1980s as the agency found itself defending the mushrooming number of U.S. homes in areas at risk to wildfires.

Firefighting consumed 57% of the USFS budget in 2018, up from 16% in 1995, forcing the agency to raid other internal programs to pay for rising suppression costs.

Christiansen expects USFS hazardous fuel and restoration work to remain at around 3.4 million acres in 2019 but sees projects increasing in 2020 when “fire borrowing” ends following creation of a disaster fund to pull from should suppression costs go over budget.

“This will make our agency budget more stable and will free up funds to accomplish critical on-the-ground work that creates healthy, resilient forests,” Christiansen said.

U.S. states, which share the burden of frontline and prescribed burns, want some of those liberated funds, given forecasts that wildfire acreage and severity will continue to climb, said Jay Farrell, executive director of the National Association of State Foresters.

Back in New Mexico, Daniel Lara sloshes burning fuel onto scrub oak as fellow New Mexico State Penitentiary inmates torch trees and scrub that, if left to grow, can send fires into the forest canopy, creating a blaze that is difficult to contain.

“It needs to be thinned out, all of it,” says Lara, who received a week’s classroom training, as he started his 12-hour shift in the forest. “Hopefully we’ll get it done.”

(Reporting By Andrew Hay in Coyote, New Mexico; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Paul Simao)

Israel accuses French consulate employee of smuggling guns to Palestinians

Romain Franck, an employee of the French consulate-general in Jerusalem, appears with co-defendants in the district court in Beersheba, Israel, March 19, 2018. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel said on Monday it had arrested a French citizen, an employee of France’s consulate in Jerusalem, on suspicion of using a diplomatic car to smuggle guns from the Islamist Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Held since Feb 15, Romain Franck is accused of moving a total of 70 pistols and two assault rifles between the Palestinian territories on at least five occasions, the Shin Bet security agency said after a gag order on the case was lifted.

Franck “acted for financial profit, on his own initiative and without the knowledge of his superiors,” a Shin Bet statement said. He is not believed to have also had an ideological motives such as support for Palestinian militants, a Shin Bet official told Reuters.

“This is a very serious incident in which the immunity and privileges granted to foreign diplomatic missions in Israel were cynically exploited to smuggle dozens of weapons that may be used for terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and security forces,” the statement said.

Franck, 23, was due to appear at a 1230 GMT Israeli court hearing at which formal charges would be filed. His lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment on how Franck might plead.

A Facebook page under the name Roman Franck, and carrying photographs that looked similar to the mugshot published by the Shin Bet, shows images of the young man against desert vistas.

“Feeling good in Palestine,” says one caption.

A Jan. 17 posting said the Facebook account-holder was “traveling to Jerusalem starting to (sic) a new adventure”.

A spokesman for the French Embassy in Tel Aviv described Franck as “a member of the consulate-general in Jerusalem” and said France was taking the case seriously and cooperating with Israeli authorities.

Franck was arrested along with a Palestinian from East Jerusalem employed as a security guard at the consulate as well as seven other suspects, the Shin Bet said.

It accused him of using a consulate-owned sports utility vehicle, which enjoyed more cursory Israeli security checks due to its diplomatic status, to bring the factory-produced guns from Gaza to Palestinian arms dealers in the West Bank.

According to the Shin Bet statement, Franck received the guns from a Palestinian employed by the French Cultural Centre in Gaza. It could not immediately be reached for comment.

Most countries keep their embassies to Israel in Tel Aviv, as well as consulates in Jerusalem that handle diplomatic outreach to the Palestinians.

Israel counts all of Jerusalem as its capital, a status not recognized abroad although the United States, breaking with other world powers, plans to move its embassy in Israel to the city in May.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they seek to establish in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

(Reporting by Dan Williams; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Toby Chopra)

U.N. demands Syria ceasefire as air strikes pound rebel-held areas

A man stands on rubble of damaged buildings after an airstrike in the besieged town of Hamoria, Eastern Ghouta, in Damascus, Syria Janauary 9, 2018.

By Tom Perry

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The United Nations called on Tuesday for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Syria of at least a month as heavy air strikes were reported to have killed at least 40 people in rebel-held areas near Damascus and in the northwest.

Separately, U.N. war crimes experts said they were investigating multiple reports of bombs allegedly containing chlorine gas being used against civilians in the rebel-held towns of Saraqeb in the northwestern province of Idlib and Douma in the Eastern Ghouta suburbs of Damascus.

The Syrian government denies using chemical weapons.

The latest air strikes killed 35 people in the Eastern Ghouta suburbs after 30 died in bombardments of the same area on Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Air strikes in rebel-held Idlib killed six.

“Today there is no safe area at all. This is a key point people should know: there is no safe space,” Siraj Mahmoud, the head of the Civil Defence rescue service in opposition-held rural Damascus, told Reuters.

“Right now, we have people under rubble, the targeting is ongoing, warplanes on residential neighborhoods.”

Insurgent shelling of government-held Damascus killed three people, the Observatory and Syrian state media reported.

U.N. officials in Syria called for the cessation of hostilities to enable humanitarian aid deliveries, and the evacuation of the sick and wounded, listing seven areas of concern including northern Syria’s Kurdish-led Afrin region, being targeted by a Turkish offensive.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, helped by Iranian-backed militias and the Russian air force, is pursuing military campaigns against insurgents in the last major pockets of territory held by his opponents in western Syria.

GHOUTA AND IDLIB

There were air strikes on towns across the Eastern Ghouta, including Douma, where an entire building was brought down, a local witness said. In Idlib, where pro-government forces are also on the offensive, at least five people were killed in the village of Tarmala, the Observatory said.

Khalil Aybour, a member of a local council, said rescue workers were under enormous pressure “because the bombing is all over the Ghouta”.

The U.N. representatives noted that Eastern Ghouta had not received inter-agency aid since November.

“Meanwhile, fighting and retaliatory shelling from all parties are impacting civilians in this region and Damascus, causing scores of deaths and injuries,” said their statement, released before the latest casualty tolls emerged on Tuesday.

They said civilians in Idlib were being forced to move repeatedly to escape fighting, noting that two pro-government villages in Idlib also continued to be besieged by rebels.

Syria’s protracted civil war, which spiraled out of street protests against Assad’s rule in 2011, will soon enter its eighth year, having killed hundreds of thousands of people and forced millions to leave the country as refugees.

Paulo Pinheiro, head of the International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, said the government siege of Eastern Ghouta featured “the international crimes of indiscriminate bombardment and deliberate starvation of the civilian population”.

Reports of air strikes hitting at least three hospitals in the past 48 hours “make a mockery of so-called “de-escalation zones”, Pinheiro said, referring to a Russian-led truce deal for rebel-held territory, which has failed to stop fighting there.

The conflict has been further complicated since January by a major offensive by neighboring Turkey in Afrin against the Kurdish YPG militia.

“U.S. CALCULATIONS”

The YPG has been an important U.S. ally in the war against Islamic State militants, but Ankara sees it as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and Washington.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan ramped up his verbal assault on the U.S. role in Syria on Tuesday, saying U.S. forces should leave Manbij, a Syrian city held by YPG-allied forces with support from a U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition.

“If the United States says it is sending 5,000 trucks and 2,000 cargo planes of weapons for the fight against Daesh (Islamic State), we don’t believe this,” Erdogan told members of his AK Party in parliament.

“It means you have calculations against Turkey and Iran, and maybe Russia.”

In agreement with Iran and Russia, the Turkish military is setting up observation posts in parts of Idlib and Aleppo province. But tensions have flared as Turkish forces moved to set up one such post south of Aleppo.

The Turkish military said a rocket and mortar attack by militants had killed one Turkish soldier while the post was being set up on Monday.

It was the second attack in a week on Turkish soldiers trying to establish the position, near the front line between rebels and pro-Syrian government forces.

In an apparent warning to Ankara, a commander in the military alliance supporting Assad said the Syrian army had deployed new air defenses and anti-aircraft missiles to front lines with rebels in the Aleppo and Idlib areas.

“They cover the air space of the Syrian north,” the commander told Reuters. That would include the Afrin area where Turkish warplanes have been supporting the ground offensive by the Turkish army and allied Free Syrian Army factions.

(Reporting Tom Perry and Lisa Barrington in Beirut, Daren Butler and Orhan Coskun in Istanbul, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; writing by Tom Perry; editing by Mark Heinrich)