Gene engineering goes global; jockeying to test experimental Ebola drugs; Puerto Rico’s power grid, and more

class=”MsoNormal” style=”line-height:normal”>Nipah virus, rare and dangerous, spreads in India (Emily Baumgaertner, New York Times)
The infection, an emerging threat, has killed virtually all of its victims so far in India.

DHS cyber specialist: look for behavior patterns with APTs (Sean Lyngaas, Cyberscoop)
To better track advanced hacking groups, U.S.-based companies should watch for signals in human behavior instead of changing tactics, according to Casey Kahsen, an IT specialist at the Department of Homeland Security.

The terrible arguments against the constitutionality of the Mueller investigation (George Conway, Lawfare)
In an early-morning tweet last week, President Trump took aim once again at Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but with a brand new argument: “The appointment of the Special Councel,” the president typed, “is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”
The president swiftly fixed the spelling of Mueller’s title, but he stuck with his constitutional claim, in a reissued tweet. He didn’t explain what his argument was, or where he got it, but a good guess is that it came from some recent writings by a well-respected conservative legal scholar and co-founder of the Federalist Society, professor Steven Calabresi. Unfortunately for the president, these writings are no more correct than the spelling in his original tweet. And in light of the president’s apparent embrace of Calabresi’s conclusions, it is well worth taking a close look at Calabresi’s argument in support of those conclusions. It isn’t very surprising to see the president tweet a meritless legal position, because, as a non-lawyer, he wouldn’t know the difference between a good one and a bad one. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with lawyers making inventive and novel arguments on behalf of their clients, or on behalf of causes or people they support, if the arguments are well-grounded in law and fact, even if the arguments ultimately turn out to be wrong. But the “constitutional” arguments made against the special counsel do not meet that standard and had little more rigor than the tweet that promoted them. Such a lack of rigor, sadly, has been a disturbing trend in much of the politically charged public discourse about the law lately, and one that lawyers—regardless of their politics—owe a duty to abjure.

Puerto Rico’s power grid is in worse shape than it was before Hurricane Maria (Umair Irfan, Vox)
Mismanagement led to a huge missed opportunity to build a more resilient grid.