In a brief order, the court said the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, should decide the matter of interest arising from punitive damages for victims in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

Stanford University law professor Jeffrey Fisher, an attorney who represents commercial fishermen, Native Alaskans, landowners, businesses and local governments in the case, said justices rejected Exxon Mobil's bold attempt to take away interest.

"It's nice to see the court refusing to do the outlandish thing Exxon wanted," Fisher said.

The issue is whether interest accrued since 1994, when a federal jury first awarded punitive damages for the supertanker's spill of 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound.

The company contends that if interest is paid, it should be calculated from the date the punitive damages were awarded by the Supreme Court, not all the way back to 1994, said Exxon Mobil spokesman Alan Jeffers. The company will pursue that contention with the 9th Circuit.

Ria Ramkissoon wore a purple jumpsuit and a blank expression during her appearance Tuesday at the city's booking center, answering only, "Yes," when asked whether she had read the charges against her.

Her attorney, Steven D. Silverman, argued for bail to be set, but District Court Judge Theodore B. Oshrine decided that holding Ramkissoon without bail was appropriate because of the seriousness of the allegations.

"This is not a black-and-white case," Silverman told the judge. "I'm convinced from talking to her that she's been grossly overcharged."

Silverman said after the hearing that his client, a petite native of Trinidad who moved to Maryland with her mother at the age of 8 and has no criminal record, was manipulated by cult members.

The study by the Government Accountability Office, expected to be released Tuesday, said about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.

Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO's estimate.

"It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called "S" corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.

"Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code," Edwards said.

The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren't paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.

Dorgan and Levin have complained about companies abusing transfer prices — amounts charged on transactions between companies in a group, such as a parent and subsidiary. In some cases, multinational companies can manipulate transfer prices to shift income from higher to lower tax jurisdictions, cutting their tax liabilities. The GAO did not suggest which companies might be doing this.

Plame accused Vice President Dick Cheney and several former high-ranking administration officials of revealing her identity to reporters in 2003. She and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, say that violated their constitutional rights.

A federal judge dismissed the case last year on largely procedural grounds. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that ruling Tuesday.

The lawsuit named former presidential adviser Karl Rove, as well as Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

A U.S. district court judge in Massachusetts issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from demonstrating at the Defcon conference on Sunday in Las Vegas how to take advantage of the system's vulnerabilities to get free rides.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority says in a complaint filed Friday that the students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws.

Judge Ronald Giles agreed Tuesday with the mayor's attorneys that a no-contact order didn't include Ayanna Kilpatrick. The mayor spent time with his sister during the weekend.

Last week, Giles had sent the mayor to jail last week in a separate perjury case.

Giles had put the mayor in jail Thursday after learning he traveled to Windsor, Ontario, in July without notifying authorities, a condition of his bond in the perjury case. Kilpatrick was released Friday.