Next up, Babe Ruth. The leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson, has revealed that, following a course of IVF, she is three months pregnant with her and her partner Jen Wilson’s first child. The announcement was met with widespread expressions of goodwill, and Davidson has handled the various interviews with her usual sangfroid and good cheer. “I’ve had a bit of the fatigue, the nausea and the dizzy spells and all the rest of it,” she said, admitting she had tried to keep the news quiet as she struggled with early-morning sickness. “There was once when I was on my way up to First Minister's Questions and you can probably see on one of the tapes that I go in and sit down, I’m there for a good 30 seconds before I get back up and walk right out again, just in case.”

The 39-year-old MSP is yet again living by that powerful political dictum: be the change you wish to see in the world. She won’t just be a first-time mum in the political front line, but a first-time gay mum. In a couple of years she might even be a first-time gay mum and first minister. In her deliberate, unfussy way, Davidson makes advance after advance for gay people by simply getting on and doing things. Given the conservative environment in which she operates - both party and nation - this matters.

Mueller’s team won’t say publicly, and they don’t seem to be leaking about it either. But the people they’ve been questioning have been leaking quite a lot to reporters in recent months. And the resulting stories, considered together, suggest several intriguing possibilities for where Mueller is going.

Mueller’s investigators have recently asked about hacked and leaked emails from 2016, foreign money trails, the Trump campaign’s digital operation, President Donald Trump’s business dealings in Russia and Michael Cohen’s role in them, secret meetings in the Seychelles, and Jared Kushner’s foreign business dealings. The special counsel is even still investigating Paul Manafort, whom he’s already charged on 23 counts in two different venues.
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1) The email hacking and leaks
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2) Trump’s business dealings in Russia and other countries
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3) Russian oligarchs’ money flowing into politics
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4) The Seychelles meetings and Emirati money
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5) The Trump campaign’s digital operation
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6) The Steele dossier’s claims
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7) Other potential charges against Paul Manafort
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8) Jared Kushner’s business and foreign policy (and Russia)
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9) The obstruction report/Trump interview

Pompeo has said “Jesus Christ … is the only solution for our world.” Now he’s about to become America’s Secretary of State. The Trump Administration fails to understand, let alone enforce, the Separation of Church and State clause in the U.S. Constitution. Instead, it has loaded the president’s cabinet with fundamentalists who see their main job as using their positions to spread their personal religious beliefs. This represents a true existential threat to our nation.” (via Tracy Knauss)

Trump has no regard for the harm he is doing to the nation and the world, whose dictators have adopted the Trump model for destroying the press. The study notes these threats as it goes into deeper detail with descriptions of the dangerous hostility that Trump holds for the the media that he is determined to undermine. What follows is the section of the study that focuses on the United States and its media-hating leader:

"In 2017, the 45th President of the United States helped sink the country to 45th place by labeling the press an 'enemy of the American people' in a series of verbal attacks toward journalists, attempts to block White House access to multiple media outlets, routine use of the term 'fake news' in retaliation for critical reporting, and calling for media outlets’ broadcasting licenses to be revoked. President Trump has routinely singled out news outlets and individual journalists for their coverage of him, and retweeted several violent memes targeting CNN.

The violent anti-press rhetoric from the White House has been coupled with an increase in the number of press freedom violations at the local level as journalists run the risk of arrest for covering protests or simply attempting to ask public officials questions. Reporters have even been subject to physical assault while on the job.
Press freedom violations in the country of the First Amendment in fact have become so frequent of late that RSF joined a coalition of more than two dozen press freedom organizations to launch the US Press Freedom Tracker in August, which documented 34 arrests of journalists in 2017, the majority while covering protests (find out more on the tracker)."