Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010, said a study on Thursday that arrives as Congress faces rising demands for tax reform, but seems unable or unwilling to act.

Pepco Holdings, a Washington, D.C.-area power company, had the lowest effective tax rate, at negative 57.6 percent, among the 280 Fortune 500 companies studied.

The statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, but over the 2008-2010 period, very few of the companies studied paid it, said the report.

The average effective tax rate for the companies over the period was 18.5 percent, said Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, both think tanks.

Their report also listed General Electric Co, Paccar Inc, PG&E Corp, Computer Sciences Corp and NiSource Inc as among the 30 that paid no taxes. All 280 corporations examined were profitable over the period.

Athens, Greece - The Greek prime minister has rejected pressure to resign, warning that early elections would lead to an exit from the euro, and says instead he is seeking talks with the opposition conservatives.

Two officials close to Prime Minister George Papandreou also say he has scrapped his plan to hold a referendum on the latest European debt deal for Greece after the main opposition leader said would back it.

They said Papandreou made the comments during an emergency Cabinet meeting Thursday. One also said the premier would not resign despite mounting pressure, and would await the outcome of Friday's confidence vote in his government.

They spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose talks in the Cabinet meeting, being held in Parliament.

Update: Ignoring increasing calls to step down, Greece's prime minister says he is seeking emergency talks with the opposition and warns that an early election would force Greece into leaving the euro currency.

Prime Minister George Papandreou made the comments in an emergency Cabinet meeting Thursday. His office released his speech to the ministers.

Papandreou sparked a crisis when he announced Monday he would put a European debt deal to a referendum in Greece. Two officials close to him say the referendum idea has now been scrapped, after the opposition indicated they backed the new bailout deal to cut Greece's debts.

'It's WAR' - Anons far away. 'No it's not' - Mexicans

Plans by Anonymous to expose members and associates of a Mexican drug cartel have reportedly been abandoned, at least locally, amid doubts whether a member of the hacking collective was ever really kidnapped by the group.

In an ultimatum posted on YouTube on 6 October (and much later in English), Anonymous threatened to publish data on cartel members and affiliates in Veracruz unless an unnamed male kidnap victim was released by 5 November. The kidnapping supposedly happened during a street protest in the Mexican state of Veracruz or a leafleting campaign (reports vary). The hackers threatened to expose journalists, taxi drivers and corrupt cops that have collaborated with the cartel.

Los Zetas - a ruthless gang of drug traffickers known for kidnap, mass murder and hanging bloggers by their own intestines - reportedly responded to the ultimatum by hiring computer experts to track down individuals involved in the online anti-cartel campaign, dubbed #OpCartel.

The Anonymous hacking group leaked the IP addresses of 190 people alleged to have child pornography on their computers. Credit: Anonymous

The hacktivists in Anonymous have continued their crusade against child pornography websites by publicly disclosing the IP addresses of 190 people allegedly found to have illegal sexual images of kids on their computers.

Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a "monster" that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state.

Mr Bukovsky paid a visit to the European Parliament on Thursday at the invitation of Fidesz, the Hungarian Civic Forum. Fidesz, a member of the European Christian Democrat group, had invited the former Soviet dissident over from England, where he lives, on the occasion of this year's 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. After his morning meeting with the Hungarians, Mr Bukovsky gave an afternoon speech in a Polish restaurant in the Trier straat, opposite the European Parliament, where he spoke at the invitation of the United Kingdom Independence Party, of which he is a patron.

In his speech Mr Bukovsky referred to confidential documents from secret Soviet files which he was allowed to read in 1992. These documents confirm the existence of a "conspiracy" to turn the European Union into a socialist organization. I attended the meeting and taped the speech. A transcript, as well as the audio fragment (approx. 15 minutes) can be found below. I also had a brief interview with Mr Bukovsky (4 minutes), a transcript and audio fragment of which can also be found below. The interview about the European Union had to be cut short because Mr Bukovsky had other engagements, but it brought back some memories to me, as I had interviewed Vladimir Bukovsky twenty years ago, in 1986, when the Soviet Union, the first monster that he so valiantly fought, was still alive and thriving.

Mr Bukovsky was one of the heroes of the 20th century. As a young man he exposed the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1917-1991) and spent a total of twelve years (1964-1976), from his 22nd to his 34th year, in Soviet jails, labour camps and psychiatric institutions. In 1976 the Soviets expelled him to the West. In 1992 he was invited by the Russian government to serve as an expert testifying at the trial conducted to determine whether the Soviet Communist Party had been a criminal institution. To prepare for his testimony Mr Bukovsky was granted access to a large number of documents from Soviet secret archives. He is one of the few people ever to have seen these documents because they are still classified. Using a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer, however, he managed to copy many documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Soviet government.

Israel has sentenced a former soldier to four and a half years in prison for leaking classified documents to a journalist who used them to expose an alleged army policy to assassinate wanted Palestinian militants in violation of court rulings.

Anat Kam, 24, was convicted in February for copying 2,085 military documents on to a disc as she completed her mandatory army service and passing some of them to Uri Blau, an investigative reporter with the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.

She escaped the much more serious charges of harming state security after reaching a plea bargain.

Her case provoked a domestic uproar - in part because she was held for four months under secret house arrest with the Israeli media banned from reporting on it, but also because it was viewed as an assault on the freedom of the press. The Independent was the first newspaper to report on Ms Kam's arrest.

In passing sentence yesterday, the three-judge panel elected to send a clear message to other would-be whistleblowers. "If the army cannot trust the soldiers serving in various units and exposed to sensitive issues, then it cannot function as a regular army," the judges wrote. They said that Ms Kam's motive for taking the documents was "mainly ideological". Ms Kam has already served nearly two years of house arrest, which will not count towards her prison term, and she received a further 18-month suspended sentence.

A new book based on a series of interviews with the Navy SEALs involved in the mission to kill Osama bin Laden claims to directly contradict the Obama administration's depiction of the operation, The Washington Examinerreported Friday.

SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden, by former SEAL commander Chuck Pfarrer, claims to tell the true story of the successful raid to kill the terror chief on May 2.

According to a press release, the book takes "readers on the helicopter flight over the wall that leads deep into the terrorist lair and describing what it looked, sounded and smelled like as the bullets flew."

The book also takes issue with the Obama administration's characterization of the mission.

"In a hasty effort to claim victory and make political haste, administration aides changed their stories several times," the release said. "Their leaks made SEAL Team Six look ineffective and clumsy."

Gerald Celente visits Talk Radio Europe yesterday and has some poignant comments about the current trends of our world.


Excerpt:

"The game is rigged and you have a bunch of money junkies and power hungry freaks that call themselves politicians and Berlusconis running the show and running people's lives into the ground. So yeah, we have these Occupy movements: They're global. And there's no end in sight. It's only going to get worse because the psychopaths and sociopaths in power are going to make sure it gets worse."

A "gigantic bank run" is imminent, so says Nobel Prize winner .

In his Nov. 1 post, the economist every one enjoys making fun of believes the endgame for the euro lies in the breadbasket of the European sovereign debt market, Italy, leading to one of two lynchpin countries, France, to collapse next. Then, it's bedlam.

"The question I'm trying to answer right now is how the final act will be played," Krugman writes. "At this point I'd guess soaring rates on Italian debt leading to a gigantic bank run, both because of solvency fears about Italian banks given a default and because of fear that Italy will end up leaving the euro. This then leads to emergency bank closing, and once that happens, a decision to drop the euro and install the new lira. Next stop, France."

Krugman states the obvious, of course, but he offers no recommendation for Europeans to protect themselves from the all-but-certain currency devaluations as a result of a broken euro - not that he is expected to do so. But it's times like these, one would think that this quack of economics had a suggestion for Europeans to protect themselves from a currency collapse. Or maybe the collapse of euro is how Treasury will be able to fund its upcoming $628 billion offering in the coming five months without going to war in another part of the world, as he had once suggested. But in a previous post of Sept. 6, Krugman attempted to formulate a response to the "Glenn Beck" gold crowd - a response that Ben Bernanke could have used in response to Rep. Ron Paul's queries regarding gold.