U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Spc. Bradley Manning who has already been charged in the leaking of a classified military video, and who is the government's prime suspect in the leaking of some 90,000 classified military documents to Wikileaks, is back in the United States.

CNN reported today (7/30) that Manning has been transferred from Kuwait where he's been in custody for nearly two months, to Quantico, Virginia.

In related news, on Thursday Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked the FBI to help Pentagon authorities investigate the Wikileaks case.

The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday (7/29) said that it could take 10-12 days to seal the "orphaned" wellhead that has been spewing a mixture of oil and natural gas into Louisiana's Barataria Bay since Tuesday when a barge ran into it.

A company called Wild Well Control Inc. has been designated as the prime contractor to secure the wellhead.

On Thursday the Washington Post (subscription) was first to report about the Obama administration's desire to make it easier for the FBI to gain access to "an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation."

In short, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked Congress to make a "clarification" about the type of information the FBI can demand from a company via a National Security Letter (NSL). The DOJ wants to add the words "electronic communication transactional records" to the list of items an NSL can be applied to. The Post reports that government lawyers define this type of information as "addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history."

Of course, the Obama administration's request is sending up a lot of red flags over privacy and data security. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was one of the first groups to jump on the Post story yesterday.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Wednesday that its agents along with the U.S. Marshals Service have arrested 75 foreign nationals with criminal records and 12 fugitives in Virginia and Washington, D.C. since the beginning of June.

Arizona's illegal immigration law took effect Thursday (7/29), but without some of the more controversial provisions.

A Federal judge on Wednesday, most significantly, blocked the part of the law that would have allowed a police officer to question a person's immigration status should the officer suspect the person is in the country illegally.

A barge collided with an "orphaned" oil wellhead in Louisiana's Bayou St. Denis near the Barataria Waterway Tuesday morning. The accident has left oil and natural gas leaking into the water. In a statement today (7/28), the U.S. Coast Guard said a sheen is covering more than six-square miles.

More than 800,000 gallons of oil have leaked from a pipeline and entered a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan. The leak was detected and the pipeline was shutdown Monday (7/26) morning, but it might have been spewing oil since Sunday. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm declared the incident a disaster on Tuesday (7/28) as the oil made its way into the Kalamazoo.

An investigation has been launched to figure out what caused the pipeline leak.

The Pentagon on Tuesday (7/27) launched an investigation to find out how classified military documents were leaked to Wikileaks.org.

And while it has been reported that Wikileaks' founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange has said his organization does not know who sent it the information, U.S. officials say Army Spc. Bradley Manning is a "person of interest" who had access to the classified Afghanistan information.

Manning is an U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst who Defense officials have arrested and charged for leaking to Wikileaks the now famous video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing on a group of people in Baghdad in 2007, killing two Reuters news agency staffers.