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Ellen Barkin stops attempted burglary inside her Manhattan home

WATCH Ellen Barkin stops attempted burglary inside her Manhattan home

Actress Ellen Barkin interrupted a burglar who broke into her Greenwich Village home on Wednesday, a rep for the New York Police Department confirmed to ABC News.

According to authorities, the actress heard a noise upstairs around 6:45 a.m. She saw the suspect, whom she described as a gloved Hispanic male in his twenties, at the balcony door.

Police said she grabbed at the door to close it, and the would-be thief jumped onto the fire escape and fled. A bag containing jewelry, possibly intended to be taken, was left behind.

A rep for Barkin did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News, but the actress, 63, has been tweeting about the incident.

"The first responders were great, here in 70secs! still waiting for the detectives… it’s only been 4 hours," she wrote in a tweet directed at NYPD Det. James Byrne. "My heart breaks for another day that will live in infamy but crime is still going on… in my house."

Barkin was seemingly referring to the attack that took place in downtown Manhattan on Halloween that claimed the lives of eight individuals.

Sources told ABC News, however, that detectives in the 6th Precinct were busy working the terror investigation and came as soon as they could later that afternoon.

They added that it is not unusual for there to be a delay on a non-violent crime.

.@NYPDByrne …only because u have the full name of the father of my children…the first responders were great, here in 70secs! still waiting for the detectives… it’s only been 4 hours

— Ellen Barkin (@EllenBarkin) November 1, 2017

.@NYPDByrne @NYPDONeill @NYPDDetectives Did I just hear this right? No detectives here, at all? My heart breaks for another day that will live in infamy but crime is still going on…in my house. @NYPDDetectives Robert Boyce

— Ellen Barkin (@EllenBarkin) November 1, 2017

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Republican tax plan to target mortgage deduction

Republicans have unveiled details of a sweeping tax plan, aimed at slashing rates for businesses and lowering inheritance taxes.

The proposal would lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%, while retaining the top individual rate for the wealthiest at 39.5%.

It eliminates a popular mortgage interest deduction for new home loans of $500,000 (£380,000) or more.

Delivering on the plan is a priority for Republicans and the president.

Republicans said the bill, which is estimated to cost about $1.51tn over a decade, is transformational.

They say it will make US companies more competitive and simplify the tax-filing process for the average American family.

"This is our chance to make sure that generations to come don't just get by, they get ahead in this country," House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said.

The most costly part of the plan is the reduction of the corporate rate.

Republicans said the bill also provides "relief" for ordinary Americans.

They said the changes will save the average family of four about $1,182 on their tax bill.

President Donald Trump and other Republican party leaders are hoping to win approval of the bill by the end of the year.

Mr Trump called it a "big, beautiful Christmas present" for families.

But Democrats say the plan favours corporations and the wealthy.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, who leads Democrats in the House, slammed the bill as "half-baked" and said it would raise taxes on the middle class.

Key elements

• Estate tax exemption nearly doubles to $11.2m, up from $5.49m, and will be eliminated by 2024
• Alternative Minimum Tax – which ensures the wealthy cannot entirely avoid taxes by taking advantage of deductions – will be repealed
• Corporate profits from overseas will no longer be taxed, but a minimum 10% tax will be placed on US foreign subsidiaries
• Child tax credit expands from $1,000 to $1,600 per child
• Despite speculation, there is no change to a limit on pre-tax contributions to 401(k) retirement funds
• The standard tax deduction increases from $6,350 to $12,000 for individuals, and from $12,700 to $24,000 for married couples
• Federal deductions for state and local income and sales taxes will be eliminated
• Local property taxes can be deducted from federal income, but are capped at $10,000

Murky details

By Anthony Zurcher, BBC News, Washington

The Republican party's outline of its new tax plan lists almost as many items that are going to stay the same as are being changed. That's the nature of tax reform – every deduction and loophole has a group that will fight to preserve it.

Republicans will boast that tax-deferred retirement plans, the credit for low-income workers and the charitable donations deduction are untouched.

They're playing a dangerous game, however, by targeting one cherished middle-class deduction – for interest on home mortgages. The powerful homebuilding lobby will wage a pitched effort to squash Republican hopes.

The tax proposal is framed as geared toward the working and middle classes – and there is some help there – but its central focus is a corporate tax reduction that, while popular among the party's corporate base, doesn't excite the general public.

Republicans will try to push the legislation through much the way they did healthcare reform – by keeping details murky and scheduling quick votes. Forces are already aligning against it, however, and Democrats are ready to paint the plan as a sop to the rich.

Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have a lot riding on a successful effort, but the road ahead is far from easy.

Who are the winners and losers?

Winners: Corporations and businesses

The bill slashes the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. That's expected to reduce revenue by almost $1.5tn from 2018-2027.

The bill also sets at 25% the top tax rate for income from certain businesses that is taxed at the personal rate – a further $500bn reduction in revenue.

Winners: Wealthy heirs

Under current law, inheritances over $5.49m face a 40% tax rate. The Republican proposal would immediately double the amount excluded from taxes to $11.2m and repeal it entirely in 2024.

The committee expects that to reduce revenue by $172.2bn through 2027.

Losers: Wealthy homeowners in Democratic states

Current law permits taxpayers to deduct interest paid on mortgages up to $1m. The Republican proposal would cap that at $500,000.

Trade groups for home builders and realtors oppose the shift, but the change is favoured by some left-leaning groups, including the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The organisation estimates that only about 5% of mortgage-holders in the US would be affected.

Many of those mortgage-holders are concentrated in high-cost, coastal states, such as California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland.

In California, for example, more than 16% of home loans exceeded $500,000, compared to less than 1% in Iowa.

Many of those homeowners would also likely be hit by the $10,000 cap imposed on local property tax deductions.

Many of the states most affected are strongholds of Democratic voters and home to Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

The change would also raise revenue, but the committee did not estimate the specifics of the provision.

Losers: Ivy League universities

The bill would impose a 1.4% tax on investment income earned by certain private colleges and universities.

The shift is expected to raise $3bn over a decade.

Source – bbc.com

Russia hackers pursued Putin foes, not just US Democrats

It wasn't just Hillary Clinton's emails they went after.

The hackers who disrupted the U.S. presidential election last year had ambitions that stretched across the globe, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.

The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that went back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users — from the pope's representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow. The targets were spread among 116 countries.

"It's a wish list of who you'd want to target to further Russian interests," said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP's findings. He said the data was "a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence."

The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.

Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet. The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of emails."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered "unfounded." But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.

"This is the Kremlin and the general staff," said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data.

"I have no doubts."

———

THE NEW EVIDENCE

Secureworks' list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.

In the United States, which was Russia's Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country's diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark.

The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton's inner circle.

The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.

Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.

"They got two years of email," Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn't know for sure who was responsible, "I always suspected some Russian connection."

In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.

The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.

In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists. Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot's Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.

"Everything on this list fits," said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.

Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin's radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican's representative in Kiev; an adult education organization in Kazakhstan.

"It's simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities," said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. He was also on the list.

"If you're not Russia," he said, "hacking these people is a colossal waste of time."

———

WORKING 9 TO 6 MOSCOW TIME

Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren't new. But raw data has been hard to come by.

Researchers have been documenting the group's activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia's intelligence services. The "Fancy Bear" nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia's national symbol.

In the wake of the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.

But the U.S. intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.

That makes the Secureworks' database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it's the result of a careless mistake.

Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear's signature pieces of malicious software.

He found a hyperactive Bitly account that Fancy Bear (which Secureworks calls "Iron Twilight") was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google's spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group's shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.

The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders. The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET .

The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95 percent of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday to Friday.

The AP's findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.

Secureworks' roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers' emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.

And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.

"We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks," said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. "I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services."

———

THE MYTH OF THE 400-POUND MAN

Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes — easily rivaling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history.

For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages — in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages — they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work.

The AP's effort offers "a little feel for how much labor went into this," said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

In response to the AP's investigation, the DNC issued a statement saying the evidence that Russia had interfered in the election was "irrefutable."

Rid said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated last year that the hacks could be the work of "someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."

"The notion that it's just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd," Rid said.

———

Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Myers reported from Chicago. Chad Day, Desmond Butler and Ted Bridis in Washington, Frank Bajak in Houston, Lori Hinnant in Paris, Maggie Michael in Cairo and Erika Kinetz in Shanghai contributed to this report. Novaya Gazeta reporters Nikolay Voroshilov, Yana Surinskaya and Roman Anin in Moscow also contributed.

————

Satter, Donn and Myers can be reached at:

http://raphaelsatter.com , https://twitter.com/jadonn7 and https://twitter.com/myersjustinc

———

Editor's Note: Satter's father, David Satter, is an author and Russia specialist who has been critical of the Kremlin. His emails were published last year by hackers and his account is on Secureworks' list of Fancy Bear targets.

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Source – abcnews.go.com

CIA release of bin Laden files renews interest in Iran links

The CIA's release of documents seized during the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden appears to bolster U.S. claims that Iran supported the extremist network leading up to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

U.S. intelligence officials and prosecutors have long said Iran formed loose ties to the terror organization starting in 1991, something noted in a 19-page al-Qaida report in Arabic that was included in the release of some 47,000 other documents by the CIA.

For its part, Iran has long denied any involvement with al-Qaida, and its foreign minister disparaged the documents in a tweet late Thursday: "A record low for the reach of petrodollars: CIA & FDD fake news w/ selective AlQaeda docs re: Iran can't whitewash role of US allies in 9/11."

The report included in the CIA document dump shows how bin Laden, a Sunni extremist from Iran's archrival Saudi Arabia, could look across the Muslim world's religious divide to partner with the Mideast's Shiite power to target his ultimate enemy, the United States.

"Anyone who wants to strike America, Iran is ready to support him and help him with their frank and clear rhetoric," the report reads.

The Associated Press examined a copy of the report released by the Long War Journal, a publication backed by the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank fiercely critical of Iran and skeptical of its nuclear deal with world powers. The CIA gave the Long War Journal early access to the material.

The material also included never-before-seen video of bin Laden's son Hamza, who may be groomed to take over al-Qaida, getting married. It offers the first public look at Hamza bin Laden as an adult. Until now, the public has only seen childhood pictures of him.

The release comes as President Donald Trump has refused to recertify Iran's nuclear deal with world powers and faces domestic pressure at home over investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The 19-page report included in the CIA release was available online Wednesday. The CIA later issued a warning about the files on its website, saying that since the material "was seized from a terrorist organization … there is no absolute guarantee that all malware has been removed." The CIA then took down the files entirely early Thursday, saying they were "temporarily unavailable pending resolution of a technical issue."

"We are working to make the material available again as soon as possible," the CIA said.

The unsigned 19-page report is dated in the Islamic calendar year 1428 — 2007 — and offers what appears to be a history of al-Qaida's relationship with Iran. It says Iran offered al-Qaida fighters "money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia."

This coincides with an account offered by the U.S. government's 9/11 Commission, which said Iranian officials met with al-Qaida leaders in Sudan in either 1991 or early 1992. The commission said al-Qaida militants later received training in Lebanon from the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which Iran backs to this day.

U.S. prosecutors also said al-Qaida had the backing of Iran and Hezbollah in their 1998 indictment of bin Laden following the al-Qaida truck bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

Al-Qaida's apparent siding with Iran may seem surprising today, given the enmity Sunni extremists like those of the Islamic State group have for Shiites.

But bin Laden had run out of options by 1991 — the one-time fighter against the Soviets in Afghanistan had fallen out with Saudi Arabia over his opposition to the ultraconservative kingdom hosting U.S. troops during the Gulf War. Meanwhile, Iran had become increasingly nervous about America's growing military expansion in the Mideast.

"The relationship between al-Qaida and Iran demonstrated that the Sunni-Shiite divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations," the 9/11 Commission report would later say.

Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, Iran would allow al-Qaida militants to pass through its borders without receiving stamps in their passports or with visas gotten ahead of time at its consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, according to the 19-page report. That helped the organization's Saudi members avoid suspicion. They also had contact with Iranian intelligence agents, according to the report.

This also matches with U.S. knowledge. Eight of the 10 so-called "muscle" hijackers on Sept. 11 — those who kept passengers under control on the hijacked flights — passed through Iran before arriving in the United States, according to the 9/11 Commission.

However, the commission "found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack."

For its part, Iran has denied having any relationship with al-Qaida since the 1998 attacks on the embassies. Iran quietly offered the U.S. assistance after the Sept. 11 attacks, though relations would sour following President George W. Bush naming it to his "axis of evil" in 2002.

On Thursday, Iran's semi-official Fars news agency, which is close to the hard-line paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, dismissed the CIA documents as "a project against Tehran."

The 19-page report describes Iranians later putting al-Qaida leaders and members under house arrest sometime after the Sept. 11 attacks. It mentions the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, saying it put increasing pressure on Iran, especially with the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq.

"They decided to keep our brothers as a card," the report said.

That would come true in in 2015 as Iran reportedly exchanged some al-Qaida leaders for one of its diplomats held in Yemen by the terror group's local branch. While Yemen described it as a captive exchange, Tehran instead called it a "difficult and complicated" special operation to secure the Iranian diplomat's freedom from the "hands of terrorists."

"The repercussions … of the Sept. 11 attacks were undoubtedly very large and perhaps above (our) imagination," the al-Qaida report said.

———

Associated Press writer Amir Vahdat in Tehran contributred to this report.

———

Jon Gambrell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jongambrellap . His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz .

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Source – abcnews.go.com

2nd woman accuses Dustin Hoffman of sexual harassment

WATCH Dustin Hoffman apologizes for any inappropriate behavior alleged by past intern

Writer and producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis is now the second woman to come forward to accuse Dustin Hoffman of sexual harassment.

Riss Gatsiounis told Variety on Wednesday that when she was a struggling playwright in 1991, Hoffman and "Tootsie" screenwriter Murray Schisgal scheduled a meeting with her to discuss the possibility of adapting her play "A Darker Purpose" into a movie vehicle for Hoffman.

Read: Dustin Hoffman apologizes for any inappropriate behavior alleged by past intern

She alleges that during a second meeting with the pair, Hoffman, who was 53 at the time, asked, "Wendy — have you ever been intimate with a man over 40?”

'Have you ever been intimate with a man over 40?' Dustin Hoffman asked TV producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis in 1991 https://t.co/WKlN7BxZaF pic.twitter.com/tkRBgYEQce

— Variety (@Variety) November 2, 2017

Riss Gatsiounis alleges that Hoffman, now 80, continued, "It would be a whole new body to explore," before inviting her to go shopping for clothes at a nearby hotel.

She says that after she declined, Hoffman left the meeting, after which she says Schisgal told her that the play was "too film noir-ish" and that they were going to pass.

A representative for Hoffman declined to comment for the Variety report. In a statement to Variety, Schisgal said, "Dustin Hoffman and I took many meetings with writers and playwrights over many years. I have no recollection of this meeting or of any of the behavior or actions described.”

On Wednesday, in a detailed guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, Anna Graham Hunter claimed that in 1985, while she was a 17-year-old working on the set of a TV production of "Death of a Salesman," Hoffman sexually harassed her.

In her column, Graham admits she's "conflicted" about revealing the alleged harassment because she still loves the actor's work and said he apologized.

“I loved the attention from Dustin Hoffman. Until I didn't," she writes, citing that by the second week on set, Hoffman started to ask about her sex life. She said she witnessed him talk about women’s breasts and even said she received unwanted physical contact from the actor.

"Yes, I loved the attention from Dustin Hoffman. Until I didn't." https://t.co/xPYxhgZagS

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) November 1, 2017

“Today, when I was walking Dustin to his limo, he felt my ass four times," she recounts from diary-like passages she said were written when she was 17. "I hit him each time, hard, and told him he was a dirty old man.”

In a statement to THR, Hoffman said: "I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am."

A request for comment from Hoffman was not immediately returned to ABC News.

ABC News' Michael Rothman contributed to this report.

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Women won't have equality for 100 years – World Economic Forum

The equality gap between men and women would take 100 years to close at its current rate, an economic monitoring group has suggested.

It is the first time that data from the World Economic Forum (WEF) has shown a year-on-year worsening of the gender gap since it began charting it in 2006.

The report ranks 144 countries by economic opportunities, education, political participation and health.

Women are measured as having 68% of the chances and outcomes that men have.

This is slightly down from the 68.3% measured last year.

The group predicts that it would a century to close all areas of equality it monitors globally, well up from the 83 years predicted in 2016.

Gender parity is closest in areas of health and education, it says, but significant gaps in economic participation and political empowerment continue to endure across the world.

Women will have to wait 217 years before they earn as much as men and are equally represented in the workplace, the figures suggest.

Nordic countries remain among some of the world's best for overall equality. Iceland tops the list with a 12% gender gap across all the WEF's measures. Norway, Finland ands Sweden are all in the top five.

Rwanda came fourth in the list for overall gender equality with a gap of 18%. The country has the highest share of women in parliament in the world – they occupy three in every five seats.

Nicaragua, Slovenia, Ireland, New Zealand and the Philippines also made the top 10 on the Global Gender Gap rankings.

Women in the Middle East and North Africa fared the worst, with war-torn Yemen coming last on the list with a gender equality score of just 52%.

The report shows women in the world earn less not just because of gendered salary differences, but because women are more likely to do unpaid or part-time work than men.

Women also generally tend to work in lower-paid professions and are less likely to be in highly-paid senior roles in companies.

Slovenia has the smallest gap in gender earnings – with women there on average earning 80.5% of the male national average.

The report says that if the economic gender gap was totally closed:

• China could add $2.5tn to its GDP
• The United States could add $1.75bn
• France and Germany could add more than $300bn each
• The UK could add $250bn

New world leaders' impact

Both Canada and France saw improvements to their political empowerment measures after Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron added more women in ministerial positions within their governments.

The US saw a marked drop in this area, with female political empowerment at its lowest rate in 10 years. It came 96th in this area.

The report blames a significant decrease in female ministerial positions for the fall – a Freedom of Information request in March revealed that only 27% of all jobs within the Trump administration were taken by women.

• Meet Trump's cabinet: The people around the president
• All-male White House picture sparks anger

Overall the US fell four places to take 49th position.

The UK climbed five places, taking 15th spot this year. Its rank is largely due to high levels of female education, and Prime Minister Theresa May's government has helped the UK to improve its political score. A record number of female MPs were elected to the country's parliament in June.

But it continues to lag behind in economic participation and opportunities for women in particular. The UK ranks 95th in the world for income equality, with women in the UK earning on average 45% less per year than men.

Other countries that improved overall included Bangladesh, which now ranks 47th in the world and the highest in South Asia after increasing female employment in professions.

Sub-Saharan African countries made marked improvements in women's health. Nine countries from the region are in the world's top 20 for high female labour force participation.

Source – bbc.com

Lawyer for Ratner accuser fires back at director: 'See you in court'

WATCH Producer Brett Ratner accused of sexual misconduct by 6 women

A spokesperson for Melanie Kohler, who has accused director Brett Ratner of raping her years ago, said today she will "not be intimidated" by the defamation lawsuit Ratner has filed in response to her allegation.

Ratner filed the suit in Hawaii federal court on Wednesday.

"The goal of these lawsuits is to intimidate women. Our goal is to stop the behavior. Melanie will not be intimidated,” Kohler's spokesperson Bill Burton told ABC News.

Read: Producer Brett Ratner accused of sexual misconduct by 6 women

Her lawyer Robbie Kaplan added, "We always knew that they would pick one woman to victimize further in an effort to bully other women into silence. Mr. Ratner and his lawyers can try to erase the truth through threats and intimidation, but courts decide cases based on the facts and the law. So our message to Mr. Ratner and his lawyer is short and simple: See you in court."

Ratner's suit, filed by attorney Eric Seitz, is not tied to The Los Angeles Times report from earlier this week, where six women alleged that Ratner, 48, either sexually harassed or assaulted them. Kohler was not named in the article and she has since taken down her Facebook post where she claimed she was raped by the Hollywood director.

"This is an action for defamation arising from the defendant's deliberately false and malicious accusations that plaintiff raped the defendant 'about 12 years ago,'" according to the suit, which was obtained by ABC News.

"Commencing on or about Oct. 20, 2017, defendant recklessly and/or intentionally posted a statement on her Facebook page claiming that 'Brett Ratner raped [her]," the suit said.

Kohler said she had met the director at a Los Angeles club more than 12 years ago. She claimed Ratner took her to the home of fellow producer Robert Evans, where Ratner "forced her" to have sex, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages, noting that Ratner wants a "jury trial" to clear his name.

This legal development comes on the heels of The LA Times piece, where six actresses, including Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge, told the paper that Ratner was sexually inappropriate and/or abusive. Munn claims that as an aspiring actress she was forced to witness him pleasuring himself, while Henstridge claims he "physically forced himself" on her for oral sex.

Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Greg Doherty/Getty Images

In a statement to ABC News, Ratner's general counsel, Martin Singer, denied the allegations against his client.

"Brett Ratner vehemently denies the outrageous derogatory allegations that have been reported about him, and we are confident that his name will be cleared once the current media frenzy dies down and people can objectively evaluate the nature of these claims," Singer said in the statement. "He understands the seriousness of this issue and the importance of addressing the concerns of victims of sexual misconduct both in the entertainment industry and beyond."

While Warner Bros. now says it's reviewing the accusations against the filmmaker, putting on hold a long-in-development Hugh Hefner biopic Ratner was to produce and direct, Ratner released a statement to ABC News regarding his relationship with the studio, noting, "I am choosing to personally step away from all Warner Bros.-related activities. I don’t want to have any possible negative impact to the studio until these personal issues are resolved."

ABC News' Sabina Ghebremedhin contributed to this report.

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Bin Laden's thoughts unearthed in a hand-written journal

A journal made public by the CIA and apparently handwritten by one of Osama bin Laden's daughters offers a glimpse into how the late al-Qaida leader viewed the world around him and reveals his deep interest in the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions that were unfolding in the months before a U.S. raid killed him.

He talks about Libya becoming a pathway for jihadis to Europe; of his time as a young teen visiting William Shakespeare's home in Britain; of how quickly turmoil had gripped the Middle East.

The 228-page journal meanders between discussions, thoughts and reflections bin Laden shared with his family about how to exploit the uprisings, what to make of the rapid changes unfolding in the Arab world and when al-Qaida should speak out.

"This chaos and the absence of leadership in the revolutions is the best environment to spread al-Qaida's thoughts and ideas," bin Laden is quoted as telling his family in the document.

Bin Laden's wife, referred to as Um Hamza, assures him that a tape he released seven years earlier calling out the rulers of the region as unfit could be one of the major forces behind the Arab Spring protests roiling the region.

The Associated Press examined a copy of the journal uploaded by the Long War Journal to its website. The CIA released it on Wednesday as part of a trove of material recovered during the May 2011 raid that killed bin Laden, then took down the files, saying they were "temporarily unavailable pending resolution of a technical issue."

The journal appears to cover conversations between bin Laden and his daughters, Miriam and Somiya, his wife and his sons, Khaled and Hamza — the latter of whom would go on to become a potential successor to lead the group his father founded.

The journal is titled, "Special diaries for Abu Abdullah: Sheikh Abdullah's points of view — A session with the family," which refers to bin Laden by his traditional Arabic name. The conversations took place between February and April 2011, with the journal entries dated according to the Islamic calendar.

During that time, uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt had ousted longtime autocratic rulers, touching off protests in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. The Middle East was on the cusp of unstoppable change, chaos and turmoil.

In Libya, the uprising there would end with Moammar Gadhafi's death months after bin Laden was killed. In Yemen, al-Qaida would gain a greater foothold and remain active amid the chaos of war and famine. In Bahrain, the Sunni-led monarchy would launch a crackdown on the country's Shiite majority. In Syria, the government's lethal response to a protest by schoolchildren in early 2011 would spark mass protests across the country and ignite a war and massive refugee crisis that continues today.

The reflections, jotted down in blue ink at times and at others in red, refer repeatedly to media reports of what was happening across the region.

At one point, they criticize Al-Jazeera TV's broadcast of gruesome images from a deadly protest in Yemen, saying that a warning should have been given in order to shield children from viewing them. However, the Qatari-backed channel is also hailed for "working on toppling regimes" and for "carrying the banner of the revolutions."

Bin Laden appears concerned by the speed of some of the region's revolts, believing that a gradual approach would help avoid the backlash of a counter-revolution as regime figures sought to hold onto power at all cost.

"I am upset by the timing of the revolutions. We told them to slow down," bin Laden is quoted as saying, though it's not entirely clear which countries he is referring to.

On Libya, bin Laden says he believes the uprising "has opened the door for jihadists."

"This is why Gadhafi and his son say that the extremists will come from the sea, which will be an area of operation for al-Qaida. This will be the Somalia of the Mediterranean," he is quoted as saying.

Still, bin Laden appears reluctant to issue a statement in support of Islamists in Libya for fear that if Gadhafi is ousted, the U.S. will try to expand its footprint there.

Yemen is a primary focus of the journal entries. Al-Qaida's branch there is among its most active in the world and the journal suggests al-Qaida was plotting an assassination attempt against Yemen's embattled ruler at the time, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

There is little indication that the writer had much information about what was happening in the region beyond what was reported in the media. This could indicate that bin Laden had become isolated in his final months hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where U.S. forces would find and kill him a little over a month later. Or it could also be that bin Laden was shielding his relatives from al-Qaida intelligence.

In the early pages of the document, bin Laden is asked about his thoughts on jihad, and replies that he first considered it "in secondary school."

He says this was a result of his home and school environment. Separately, he describes his father as a pious man.

"There wasn't a particular group that was guiding me, like the Muslim Brotherhood," he is quoted as saying.

From a young age, he appeared to be unfazed by worldly spoils, recounting a story about declining a new watch from his wealthy father.

He recalls a summer spent studying in the U.K. when he was 14, including a visit to the home of William Shakespeare. His time in Britain left him feeling uneasy and he decided not to return the following summer.

"I saw that they were a society different from ours and that they were morally corrupt," he says.

Bin Laden imagines that Saudi Arabia would soon feel the "tsunami" of change sweeping the region. The late al-Qaida chief held Saudi citizenship until the early 1990s, before he was stripped of his nationality by the government.

He talks about wanting to deliver a message to Saudi youth and Saudi rulers: "The flood is coming and it will lead to a change so there is no need for violence."

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Michael and Badr reported from Cairo, Salaheddin from Baghdad and Harb from Dubai.

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Source – abcnews.go.com

Puerto Rico governor to tour Superstorm Sandy sites in NY

The governor of Puerto Rico traveled to New York Thursday to see how the state rebuilt following Superstorm Sandy and meet with Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to discuss his island's recovery from Hurricane Maria.

Gov. Ricardo Rossello joined Cuomo for an aerial tour of sites on Long Island impacted by the 2012 storm that were rebuilt to be more resilient to flooding. The two men then discussed additional ways New York can help the U.S. territory, and Cuomo announced the deployment of additional utility workers to assist in restoring electricity.

Rossello said he hopes Puerto Rico emerges from Maria as well as New York did after Sandy.

"Five years down the road we can have a bigger event where we remember what the catastrophe was," he said.

Cuomo, who has slammed the federal response to the storm, said an additional 350 utility workers and 220 utility trucks would be sent to Puerto Rico this weekend. The state already has sent hundreds of personnel and millions of pounds of supplies, and Cuomo has visited the island twice since the storm.

"It's been 35 days," he said at a joint press conference with Rossello. "The result is intolerable. You cannot have a situation where people don't have water for 40 days. Just imagine if that happened in the United States. … Puerto Ricans have been treated as second class Americans."

Considered a possible candidate for president in 2020, Cuomo stopped short of calling out President Donald Trump by name. But he said the slow response was contributing to a "humanitarian crisis."

Federal officials have defended the recovery effort and said they will remain in Puerto Rico until the work is done.

Rossello also expressed his solidarity with New York following Tuesday's deadly terror attack in Manhattan.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with you after the tragic events that occurred a couple of nights ago," he said. "We are with you. We will be with you, as you have been with us."

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Source – abcnews.go.com

Egyptian TV presenter sentenced over pregnancy remarks

An Egyptian TV presenter has been sentenced to three years in jail after she discussed ways of becoming pregnant outside a conventional marriage.

Doaa Salah, a presenter on Al-Nahar TV, asked if her viewers had considered having sex before marriage, and also suggested a woman could marry briefly to have children before divorcing.

She was charged and convicted with outraging public decency.

Ms Salah was also ordered to pay 10,000 Egyptian pounds (£430) in compensation.

The authorities said the ideas in the programme "threatened the fabric of Egyptian life", the EFE news agency reports.

Sex before marriage is widely regarded as unacceptable in socially conservative Egypt.

Ms Salah suggested that a potential husband could be paid for taking part in a short-lived marriage, and also spoke about how sperm donation is an accepted method in Western countries – but not in Egypt.

She was suspended from her presenting job for three months in the aftermath of the broadcast, before legal action was taken against her.

The three-year sentence follows an initial verdict which is open to an appeal.

Source – bbc.com