WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Justice Antonin Scalia can seem among the most predictable of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, voting conservative and regularly siding with law enforcement over individuals. But then comes an exception like Monday, when Scalia launched a fiery dissent from the bench to a decision permitting police to take DNA swabs from people arrested.

The nine justices divided 5-4 in one of the most closely watched criminal disputes of the term, declaring that the collection of DNA does not violate the U.S. Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches.

Writing for the minority, Scalia was joined by three liberal justices. But his 11-minute oral statement - a departure from the usual practice in which only the majority opinion is read aloud - was classic Scalia. It relied on his "originalist" interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and employed forceful rhetoric as clever as it was heated. He declared that the majority's rationale "taxes the credulity of the credulous." An adroit writer, he sprinkled in words from decidedly non-legal contexts, such as "hash" and "genuflecting" and mixed in references to American revolutionary Patrick Henry and the biblical Leviathan.

The latter came at a moment of high drama in the white marble courtroom when Scalia concluded: "It may be wise, as the court obviously believes, to make the Leviathan all-seeing, so that he may protect us all the better. But the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection. I dissent."

Only a few times each term does a justice read a dissenting opinion aloud. It typically happens in a close, hard-fought case, when a dissenter is especially angry and wants to call attention to a decision he or she believes especially unwise. Since his appointment to the bench in 1986 by Republican President Ronald Reagan, Scalia has relished the forum. In an early dissent, to the June 29, 1988, decision in Morrison v. Olson, Scalia went on for nine minutes as he famously objected to a law allowing judges to appoint special prosecutors and wrote in his opinion, "Frequently, an issue of this sort will come before the court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing ... But this wolf comes as a wolf."

SEVERAL ZINGERS

Monday's declaration in Maryland v. King contained several zingers and lapsed into a mocking tone. As is typical when any dissenter reads aloud, the other eight justices looked forward showing no change in their emotions. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion and has felt the sting of Scalia's dissents many times, sat stone-faced, solemn.

Nor did Kennedy, in his written opinion, respond to Scalia's objections; he instead emphasized the value of DNA collection to law enforcement and compared the cheek swab to routine fingerprinting.

The decision is a boon for states and the federal government relying on interconnected DNA laboratories nationwide to solve crimes. All 50 states already require the collection of DNA from felony convicts. At issue was the collection from arrestees. The 5-4 decision fell along largely ideological lines, with conservatives making up most of the majority. The crucial fifth vote came from Justice Stephen Breyer, a 1994 appointee of President Bill Clinton who tends to vote liberal but occasionally tacks to the right on matters of criminal law.

Neither Breyer nor any other justice beyond Scalia and Kennedy issued separate opinions, or spoke from the bench.

UNREASONABLE SEARCH?

In Monday's case, Alonzo King had been arrested in Maryland on assault charges. A DNA sample was taken from inside his cheeks with a cotton swab as part of routine booking. It matched the DNA found on a 2003 rape victim, and King was eventually convicted of rape. On appeal, he argued the cheek swab was an unreasonable search.

Scalia, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, agreed the search was unreasonable because the swab was taken when King was not suspected of the earlier offense. Scalia said that violated a core Fourth Amendment principle that police may not conduct a search unless there are reasons to believe that evidence will be found.

While Scalia's stance may not have been obvious, given his conservative reputation and usual latitude for police searches, it is a piece of a lesser known Scalia pattern in some areas of criminal law. He has, for example, joined with liberals for firm rules on the Constitution's guarantee that defendants be able to confront their accusers, even in situations involving sensitive crime victims.

In those cases and the DNA dispute, Scalia returns to his view that the Constitution should be interpreted as it was understood when it was written in the 18th century. He declared on Monday that Americans despised the British use of "general warrants," those not grounded in some particular offense. He said the majority turned away from the roots of the Fourth Amendment by permitting arrestees to be subjected to "suspicionless searches" primarily to solve unrelated crimes.

Scalia also complained that the ruling lacked a limit on the definition of "serious offenses." On that point, Scalia closed with his signature dramatic exaggeration.

"Make no mistake about it: because of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But so would taking your DNA whenever you fly on an airplane ... (or) taking your children's DNA when they start public school."

(Editing by Howard Goller and Cynthia Osterman)

The 56-year-old from Bistrita the Transylvanian town associated with the legend of Count Dracula has been painting with passion since he was a teen, producing vivid works of Monaco, the streets of Paris, the hurly burly of the Romanian capital and huge, colorful, more abstract canvases.

His five dogs even sleep on his vibrant canvases laid out in the streets in a rundown area of the Romanian capital. He also posts some on walls for passers-by to see.

Murivale sees the notion of a real dog lying on a painted dog as summing up what he is trying to say life and art as one.

He also paints on broken doors and peeling buildings.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey launched construction on Wednesday of a third bridge linking its European and Asian shores, the latest in a slew of multi-billion dollar projects that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan sees as embodying its emergence as a major power.

Erdogan, who has led a decade-long transformation of a once crisis-prone economy into Europe's fastest growing, has prioritized the building frenzy as the nation's infrastructure struggles to keep up with its growth.

With an eye to an election cycle ending in parliamentary polls in 2015, Erdogan called on the Turkish, Italian and Korean firms involved to complete the Istanbul bridge within two years.

"This is how we are building a powerful Turkey," he told a crowd of several thousand people, some waving Turkish flags, who gathered at a construction site on the shores of the Bosphorus strait to the north of Europe's largest city.

"For the seven hills of Istanbul, we have seven grand projects, one is this bridge, a third necklace over the Bosphorus," he said of the $3 billion project, set to be the world's widest and longest combined road and rail bridge.

A huge 150 billion lira ($80 billion) is being invested in projects including a third Istanbul airport, billed to be one of the world's biggest, as well as rail and road tunnels under the Bosphorus, a high-speed train line to the capital Ankara and a shipping canal designed to rival Panama or Suez.

The bridge is meant to ease congestion in the city of 14 million people. Its population was less than 2.5 million when the first Bosphorus Bridge was opened to traffic in 1973.

With the population forecast to hit 17 million and the number of vehicles seen rising to 4.4 million from 3 million within a decade, the government is under pressure to act fast.

Environmental groups have said the highway and airport projects will cause significant damage, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of trees and harming natural water basins, accusations rejected by Erdogan.

OTTOMAN LEGACY

Wednesday's ceremony, timed to coincide with the 560th anniversary of Istanbul's conquest by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, harked back frequently to the Ottoman Empire, which crumbled to be replaced by modern Turkey 90 years ago.

Such references have become commonplace under Erdogan's rule as the country regains prominence across the Middle East, encouraging critics of the authoritarian prime minister to accuse him of behaving like a modern-day sultan.

Hundreds of military officers have been jailed on charges of plotting a coup against Erdogan; others including academics, journalists and politicians are facing trial on similar accusations.

Barred from running for prime minister again, Erdogan is widely expected to bid for a newly empowered presidency in an election next year, cementing his status as Turkey's most significant leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern secular republic.

Erdogan frequently embraces Istanbul's imperial past, when the Ottoman Empire sprawled across three continents.

"In all the lands where they were present, the Ottomans left behind creations which conquered the people's hearts. Just like our ancestors we are continuing to write history and leave behind creations," he said.

An Ottoman military band banged drums and smashed cymbals while Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul and their wives said a Muslim prayer before launching the project near the village of Garipce on the European side of the city.

The bridge will be named Yavuz Sultan Selim, commonly known in English as Selim the Grim, whose 16th century reign brought huge expansion in the Ottoman Empire and dominance across the Middle East.

($1 = 1.8580 Turkish liras)

(Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Alison Williams)

Without providing specific details of the proposals, Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said Switzerland is acting now because U.S. patience with those Swiss banks suspected of aiding American tax cheats is running out.

She said the aim of the government's planned deal is to "restore stability" to the Swiss banking industry, but that it will be up to the banks themselves to decide if they want to negotiate with U.S. authorities to settle legal disputes over suspected American tax evaders. The deal was agreed to by the Swiss Cabinet and will go to lawmakers in parliament for approval later this year.

"We are convinced it's a good, pragmatic solution that really helps the banks resolve this issue," Widmer-Schlumpf told a news conference in the Swiss capital Bern.

She also acknowledged that the talks with U.S. negotiators have been difficult and that the U.S. would make a unilateral amnesty offer once Switzerland has passed legislation creating the legal basis for banks to hand over client names without violating the Swiss law.

Though Switzerland has long been a center for finance, diplomacy and trade, it has been trying to shed its image as a haven for tax evasion and money laundering that has been carried out through the misuse of its famous banking secrecy. The government has signed deals with other nations to provide greater assistance to foreign tax authorities seeking information on their citizens' accounts.

Widmer-Schlumpf refused to say how much money Swiss banks will have to pay to avoid prosecution. However, she said there will be a distinction between what banks did prior to 2009, when the United States went after UBS AG, Switzerland's biggest bank, and those that continued aiding tax cheats afterwards. UBS entered a deferred prosecution agreement with U.S. authorities in February 2009, and agreed to pay $780 million in fines, penalties, interest and restitution.

"It will be a certain number of banks that engaged in these practices after 2009 that, let's say this honestly, they shouldn't have done," she said.

She declined to provide further details of the agreement, but dismissed reports that the Swiss government will pay billions of dollars upfront to cover fines the country's banks can expect to receive from U.S. authorities.

"I can tell you that Switzerland will pay nothing," she added. "We will ensure that banks can participate in this deal, but we won't do more."

In January, Switzerland's oldest bank, Wegelin & Co., became the first foreign bank to plead guilty in the United States to tax charges when it admitted that it helped American clients hide more than $1.2 billion from the Internal Revenue Service. The bank, which was founded in 1741, is closing after admitting to helping American tax cheats. Over a dozen Swiss banks, including UBS and Switzerland's second-biggest bank, Credit Suisse, have been caught up in the long-running U.S. probe.

Widmer-Schlumpf stressed, however, that a new Swiss law would work on the basis of the existing legal assistance procedure: the United States has to formally request information about Americans' past suspected breaches of their U.S. tax obligations.

"What we're really aiming for is that stability and calm finally returns, so our banks can go after their core business, which is providing good services," she said.

In a statement, the government said it "wants to create the legal basis for resolving the tax dispute with the United States" by enabling banks to make their own agreements with the U.S. Justice Department and put the disputes behind them.

"The solution chosen will allow legal closure to be achieved without having to enact new legislation with retroactive effect or indeed applying emergency law," the government said. Banks that cooperate with U.S. authorities, it added, would be obliged to provide maximum protection for their employees against discrimination or dismissal for following orders.

The Swiss Bank Employers Association AGV said the agreement would ensure "legal certainty for bank clients and customers" while preventing prosecution of bank employees. Separately, banks and employers have agreed that bankers who face hardship due to legal proceedings will be able to draw on a special 2.5 million Swiss francs ($2.6 million) fund.

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Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.

This Memorial Day weekend, the hulking metal come-ons are once again glinting and shimmering at night.

The Neon Museum, where Sin City's most iconic signs go to retire, has begun aiming more than 100 multicolored spotlights on its outdoor collection of 150 signs. It's also extending hours for nighttime tours, and a handful of signs have been fully restored with new bulbs.

Since October, visitors have been able to meander past the Silver Slipper, Aladdin's lamp, the Stardust marquee and dozens of other signs saved from the wrecking ball. But the museum closed at 5:30 p.m., meaning that tourists had to squint through the desert sun to glimpse the old guardians of this nighttime city.

For the first time Friday, visitors were able to behold the fully restored signs in all their luminescent glory. The dozens of other markers were bathed in custom-designed spotlights, like true Vegas showgirls.

"The skyline of Las Vegas is a nighttime skyline," said executive director Danielle Kelly, moments before the first afterhours tour came through.

"We stand among the architecture of this city. The notable architecture of this city is its signage. And their illumination is when they came alive," Kelly said.

In a town known for detonating buildings that are beyond their prime, Las Vegas' Neon Museum stands apart in its zeal for salvaging the blinking, glowing memories of the past.

Kelly says time has transformed the signs from commercial emissaries into objects of art.

The hour-long guided tours bend through the artfully cluttered 1.5-acre lot. The excursion offers an alternative to the mega-mall homogeny along the desert metropolis' revamped main drag.

Worn by the beating sun and twisted by desert winds, most of the marquees have lost their flash, some of their bulbs and much of their paint. They tilt toward each other like tombstones in an ancient cemetery. But taken together, they tell a story about the town's glitziest days.

There's the nouveau graveyard's oldest sign: a green and white 1930s relic that marked a restaurant where Hoover Dam construction workers bought fried chicken and bootleg whiskey.

One of the signs with working bulbs a vintage arrow pointing lovebirds to "Marriage Information" alludes to the town's role as the nation's elopement, and divorce, capital.

And the giant marquee that once sat astride the Stardust casino featuring a space-age, deep-red font and cascade of stylized diamonds recalls Nevada's embrace of its role as a test site for nuclear weapons

While only four of the kitschy relics are illuminated, the spotlights play up each sign's attributes and create a feel of pulsating energy.

On Friday, the flashing red lights and blue and purple shadows along with the errant stray cat gave the attraction the surreal, slightly creepy feel of a shuttered theme park.

The museum plans to turn on a few more signs, but facilities director Sam Reza said full wattage would be too dazzling.

"The purpose of the museum is never to have all of the signs fully illumined. We wanted to keep them in the state that they were taken down. To have all of these signs fully lighted up would be overwhelming," she said.

Funding is also a factor; it can cost $100,000 to bring back a single sign.

Art lovers founded the museum in 1996 in a sandy lot outside downtown Las Vegas a few miles north of the Strip as a way to rescue old signs when buildings were demolished or remodeled.

In 2012, curators had the bright idea to open it to the public and began working on a plan to light up the night once again.

Casino bosses began abandoning curlicues of neon in the desert several decades ago, beginning with Steve Wynn's remodel of the Golden Nugget.

Today, major hotel-casinos are built to advertise themselves. The facades and exterior entertainment do the heavy lifting, from the glossy, brown obelisk that is the Wynn Las Vegas, to the fountains that dance outside the Bellagio, to the condensed New York City skyline that frames New York New York.

When signs do crop up, neon has all but surrendered to computerized LED signs.

But most visitors still feel a connection to the town's glittery glory. Most anyone can visualize Vegas Vic, with his checked shirt, perpetually lit cigarette and extended thumb, in their mind's eye.

Sandra Chervinsky, who snapped dozens of pictures during the Neon Museum's inaugural twilight tour, demonstrated her love of vintage Vegas signage by getting full-color tattoo of the iconic "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign on her calf.

"When I saw the night tours, I was like, 'I got to do it,'" said Chervinsky, of Montreal. "The light is so perfect, and you're surrounded by all these different eras."

The new tours will run every half hour through 10 p.m., leaving visitors enough time to catch a late show or hit up one of the town's 24-hour bars before heading hotelward.

With the changes and expanded tour capacity, the museum hopes to welcome more than 50,000 visitors this year.

The lot can feel a bit macabre in this youth and novelty-obsessed town, but Kelly said the museum's latest iteration shows that the signs have become key players in a new kind of escapist vision.

"It's not a graveyard," Kelly said. "The signs haven't died. They're just in a new space. And they perform a new function. It's still a fantasy they're selling: the idea of a place."

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Hannah Dreier can be reached at http://twitter.com/hannahdreier

The European Space Agency inaugurated its Near-Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Center today (May 22), cutting the ribbon on a facility that officials said will strengthen Europe's contribution to the hunt forand comets.

The new facility which is located at the ESA Center for Earth Observation in Frascati, Italy will supporthunters, serve as the main access point for European NEO data networks and provide data in near real time to scientific institutions, international organizations and policymakers, ESA officials said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant that melted down in March 2011 after being hit by a tsunami, is finding that it can barely meet the headcount of workers required to keep the three broken reactors cool while fighting power outages and leaks of tons of radiated water, said current and former nuclear plant workers and others familiar with the situation at Fukushima.

Construction jobs are already plentiful in the area due to rebuilding of tsunami ravaged towns and cities. Other public works spending planned by the government, under the "Abenomics" stimulus programs of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is likely to make well-paying construction jobs more abundant. And less risky, better paid decontamination projects in the region irradiated by the Fukushima meltdown are another draw.

Some Fukushima veterans are quitting as their cumulative radiation exposure approaches levels risky to health, said two long-time Fukushima nuclear workers who spoke to The Associated Press. They requested anonymity because their speaking to the media is a breach of their employers' policy and they say being publicly identified will get them fired.

TEPCO spokesman Ryo Shimizu denied any shortage of workers, and said the decommissioning is progressing fine.

"We have been able to acquire workers, and there is no shortage. We plan to add workers as needed," he said.

The discrepancy may stem from the system of contracting prevalent in Japan's nuclear industry. Plant operators farm out the running of their facilities to contractors, who in turn find the workers, and also rely on lower-level contractors to do some of their work, resulting in as many as five layers of contractors. Utilities such as TEPCO know the final headcount 3,000 people now at Fukushima Dai-ichi but not the difficulties in meeting it.

TEPCO does not release a pay scale at Fukushima Dai-ichi or give numbers of workers forced to leave because of radiation exposure. It does not keep close tabs on contracting arrangements for its workers. A December 2012 survey of workers that the company released found 48 percent were from companies not signed as contractors with the utility and the workers were falsely registered under companies that weren't employing them. It is not clear if any laws were broken, but the government and TEPCO issued warnings to contractors to correct the situation.

Hiroyuki Watanabe, a city assemblyman for Iwaki in Fukushima, who talks often to Fukushima Dai-ichi workers, believes the labor shortage is only likely to worsen.

"They are scrounging around, barely able to clear the numbers," he said. "Why would anyone want to work at a nuclear plant, of all places, when other work is available?"

According to Watanabe, a nuclear worker generally earns about 10,000 yen ($100) a day. In contrast, decontamination work outside the plant, generally involving less exposure to radiation, is paid for by the environment ministry, and with bonuses for working a job officially categorized as dangerous, totals about 16,000 yen ($160) a day, he said.

Experts, including even the most optimistic government officials, say decommissioning Fukushima Dai-ichi will take nearly a half-century. TEPCO acknowledges that the exact path to decommissioning remains unclear because an assessment of the state of the melted reactor cores has not yet been carried out.

Since being brought under control following the disaster, the plant has suffered one setback after another. A dead rat caused a power blackout, including temporarily shutting down reactor-cooling systems, and leaks required tons of water to be piped into hundreds of tanks and underground storage areas. The process of permanently shutting down the plant hasn't gotten started yet and the work up to now has been one makeshift measure after another to keep the reactors from deteriorating.

Thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods that are outside the reactors also have to be removed and safely stored. Taking them out is complex because the explosions at the plant have destroyed parts of the structure used to move the rods under normal conditions. The process of taking out the rods, one by one, hasn't even begun yet. The spent rods have been used as fuel for the reactors but remain highly radioactive.

One Fukushima Dai-ichi worker, who has gained a big following on Twitter because of his updates about the state of the plant since the meltdowns, said veteran workers are quitting or forced to cut back on working in highly radiated areas of the plant as their cumulative exposure rises.

"I feel a sense of responsibility to stick with this job," he told AP. "But so many people have quit. Their families wanted them to quit. Or they were worried about their children. Or their parents told him to go find another job."

Known as "Happy-san" to his 71,500 Twitter followers, he has worked in the nuclear industry for 20 years, about half of that at Fukushima. He has worked at bigger contractors before, but is now at a mid-level contractor with about 20 employees, and has an executive level position.

"If things continue the way they are going, I fear decommissioning in 40 years is impossible. If nuclear plants are built abroad, then Japanese engineers and workers will go abroad. If plants in Japan are restarted, engineers and workers will go to those plants," he said in a tweet. Most of Japan's nuclear plants were shut for inspections after the Fukushima disaster.

His cumulative radiation exposure is at more than 300 millisieverts. Medical experts say a rise in cancer and other illnesses is statistically detected at exposure of more than 100 millisieverts, but health damage varies by individuals. He was exposed to 60 millisieverts of radiation the first year after the disaster and gets a health checkup every six months.

Nuclear workers generally are limited to 100 millisieverts exposure over five years, and 50 millisieverts a year, except for the first year after the disaster when the threshold was raised to an emergency 100 millisieverts.

The workers handle the day-to-day work of lugging around hoses, checking valves and temperatures, fixing leaks, moving away debris and working on the construction for the equipment to remove the spent fuel rods.

Other jobs are already so plentiful that securing enough workers for even the more lucrative work decontaminating the towns around the plant is impossible, according to Fukushima Labor Bureau data.

During the first quarter of this year, only 321 jobs got filled from 2,124 openings in decontamination, which involves scraping soil, gathering foliage and scrubbing walls to bring down radiation levels.

"There are lots of jobs because of the reconstruction here," said bureau official Kosei Kanno.

A former Fukushima Dai-ichi worker, who switched to a decontamination job in December, said he became fed up with the pay, treatment and radiation risks at the plant. He has 10 years of experience as a nuclear worker, and grew up in Fukushima.

He warned it would be harder to find experienced people like him, raising the risk of accidents caused by human error.

He accused TEPCO of being more preoccupied with cost cuts than with worker safety or fair treatment. The utility went bankrupt after the disaster and was nationalized by a government bailout. Even if TEPCO somehow obtains workers in quantity in coming months, their quality would deteriorate, he said.

"We're headed toward a real crisis," said Ryuichi Kino, a free-lance writer and photographer who has authored books about the nuclear disaster and has reported on TEPCO intensively since March 2011.

Under the worst scenario, experienced workers capable of supervising the work will be gone as they reach their radiation-exposure limits, said Kino.

He believes an independent company separate from TEPCO needs to be set up to deal with the decommissioning, to make sure safety is not being compromised and taxpayer money is spent wisely.

Watanabe, the assemblyman, said the bigger nuclear contractors may go out of business because they are being under-bid by lower-tier companies with less experienced, cheaper workers. That is likely to worsen the worker shortages at the skilled level, he said.

Happy-san has the same fear. Some of the recent workers, rounded up by the lesser contractors, appear uneducated and can't read well, he said.

Although life at the plant has calmed compared to right after the disaster, Happy-san still remembers the huge blast that went off when one of the reactors exploded, and rubble was showering from the sky for what felt like an eternity.

"We had opened the Pandora's box. After all the evil comes out, then hope might be sitting there, at the bottom of the box, and someday we can be happy, even though that may not come during my lifetime," he said.

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Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at www.twitter.com/yurikageyama

But Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House oversight committee where Lerner was to appear, has issued a subpoena to Lerner anyway.

The subpoena was delivered after the committee received the letter from Lerner's attorney, a committee aide said.

Her attorney, William Taylor, said in a letter obtained by National Journal, that Lerner had "not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation" but that she would decline to testify at a House hearing on Wednesday.

Taylor further asked for his client to be allowed not to show up at all. "Because Ms. Lerner is invoking her constitutional privilege, we respectfully request that you excuse her from appearing at the hearing," Taylor wrote to Issa.

Taylor had written that "requiring her to appear at the hearing merely to assert her Fifth Amendment privilege would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her."

Lerner was the IRS official who first disclosed the targeting of tea party and conservative groups earlier this month in what was later learned to be a planted question during a conference. Lawmakers were furious as she had appeared before a congressional panel only two days earlier and had failed to mention the targeting, even as she was questioned about the topic.

Lerner has drawn fire from both sides of the aisle. Rep. Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, has called for her to resign. On Tuesday, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., pilloried her at a hearing as the lady who doesn't do math but knows how to plant a question.

In a letter last week, Issa wrote to Lerner, saying, It appears that you provided false or misleading information on four separate occasions last year. More ominously, he warned that misleading Congress is a serious matter, with potential criminal liability.

In turn, Lerner has decided to invoke the Fifth to avoid testifying before Congress again. 

But from the time he confessed to out-of-state police four years after the notorious killing of Kim Nees, almost nothing about the Barry Beach case has been routine and advocates promised they will find other ways to prove his innocence.

Beach, 51, has been a cause celebre among some influential state and national advocates who say his murder confession was coerced. Years of calls for his release culminated in a 2011 judge's order freeing him and laying the groundwork for a new trial, with testimony expected from witnesses who allege Nees was killed in an out-of-control fight among girls.

Before Wednesday, Beach had been free for more than a year, settling into a new life in Billings, with a house and a job, after more than 27 years in prison for the killing. The state Supreme Court's reversal of the 2011 order put him back in prison for what will likely be the rest of his life barring some kind of intervention.

In his last hours of freedom, Beach ate breakfast at a Billings diner where he gathered with a small group of friends including the city's mayor. Wearing a T-shirt that read "I didn't do it," he fielded calls from supporters and said he had received so many text messages that it was wearing out his phone battery.

"It was hard enough to be innocent to begin with," Beach told The Associated Press. "But to be going back, still innocent, for the second time, is just unbelievable."

Less than two hours later he surrendered himself to authorities and was returned to Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, where authorities placed him in an intake unit that holds about 150 inmates.

By Thursday he already was going through the standard process for incoming inmates, including a series of medical and mental health checks and a review of his security status. He'll stay in the intake unit until a bed to opens up in the long-term cell blocks, said Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Anez.

Under normal circumstances that could take months, but for Beach it could be just a few weeks "because obviously he's not a new inmate in the conventional sense," Anez said.

Prior to his release, Beach's good behavior earned him privileges such as a spot on the inmate maintenance crew and a bed on the low-security side of the 1,500 inmate prison. He'll likely be eligible for similar privileges.

Less certain is whether he'll qualify for the least-restrictive area of the prison, the work and re-entry center. That's where prisoners work and live "outside the fence" as employees of the prison's ranch and dairy farm or members of the inmate wildland firefighting crew.

Over the years, Beach's polarizing case has made him nearly a household name in Montana, as his cause collected a lengthy list of supporters, including former state legislators and other elected officials.

The case involves an endless string of strange details such as missing DNA evidence, a bloody palm print at the crime scene that didn't belong to either Beach or Nees and murmurings over the years that a group of women privately was taking credit for the crime. All that, coupled with allegations that a relative to one of those women was on the local police force and broke into the evidence room prior to the trial.

Yet many have joined the victims' immediate family and others in adamant belief of Beach's guilt.

A majority of court justices sided with those supporters when they ruled Tuesday that Beach's lengthy 1983 confession to detectives in Louisiana outweighed hearsay witnesses who told the district court judge in 2011 that Nees might have been killed by a jealous gang of girls.

The court cited past legal setbacks for Beach, including a clemency panel that roundly rejected the innocence claim, and concluded that he "did not provide reliable evidence of his actual innocence that displaced the trial evidence and thus his conviction."

The court indicated its decision concluded Beach's legal "saga." But in this case packed with unusual legal twists and turns nothing seems certain and advocates led by Centurion Ministries promised to keep pushing for Beach again to be released.

The case has delivered a few legal wins for Beach but they're always followed by more setbacks. His backers were able to get an unusual 2007 clemency hearing that allowed new defense witnesses but then had to face a strong rebuttal from the original prosecutor and former Gov. Marc Racicot, a political luminary in the state, and a lengthy confession that to many trumps other evidence.

Beach was long ago turned away by the federal courts, but backers believe there could be another chance there given more recent developments. They also could petition the state's high court to rehear the case, although no decision has been made.

His attorney, Peter Camiel, said innocence claims like Beach's always face many hurdles before they are completed.

"For me, personally, it is one of the most unusual cases I have dealt with," Camiel said. "You have to keep your head up most of all because we know our client is innocent."

Before he walked into the Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office to surrender, Beach made the most of his 17 months of freedom, cognizant that it could come to a quick end, his mother said.

He started his own handyman business and later got a job doing maintenance at a hotel. He went water skiing, bowling, camping, fishing and attended local school sporting events. Bobbi Clincher said she hopes those days will come around again but understands her son faces long odds.

"As long as there's a breath in a person, there's a fight, or there should be fight," Clincher said. "It's just been unending ... But there are other courts in the land, and you just continue to do what you have to do."

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Gouras reported from Helena, Mont.

CANNES (Reuters) - A tragic love story between two Palestinians living under Israeli occupation received a standing ovation at the Cannes film festival on Monday and broke new ground as the first film fully funded by the Palestinian cinema industry.

"Omar" by director Hany Abu-Assad, known for the 2005 award-winning film "Paradise Now", is a political thriller interwoven with a story of trust and betrayal as two lovers are torn apart by Israel's secret police and Palestinian freedom fighters.

Omar, a baker, is in love with Nadia, the sister of his friend Tarek who is a Palestinian fighter on the West Bank.

Arrested and humiliated by the Israeli military police, Omar, played by Adam Bakri, joins Tarek and colleague Amjad in a mission to kill an Israeli soldier and ends up imprisoned, tortured, and under pressure to betray his friends.

Earmarked a traitor, he starts to doubt Nadia's fidelity, especially as she is also pursued by Amjad, and his life falls apart as he is pursued across the ravaged Palestinian landscape.

Abu-Assad said he was delighted by the reception his film received at Cannes, where picky critics are known to boo films that do not meet their expectations, and he hoped the festival would help gain international attention for "Omar".

"But my first audience is the Palestinians and the Arabs and I hope they will be engaged with it," said Abu-Assad after the film's premiere at the 66th Cannes festival.

"Even if they are not on the West Bank or Palestinians ... it is about the youth and Arab world now and I hope they can accept it and that they can relate to it."

PALESTINIAN FUNDING

Abu-Assad said it had taken him about a year to raise the $1.5 million needed to make "Omar" which was shot in the West Bank and the Israeli-Arab town of Nazareth last year.

He said it was the first film to be fully funded by individual Palestinians and Palestinian businesses.

"For the first time, we convinced businessmen from Palestine to invest in the film industry. It's incredible," he said.

A second Palestinian film at Cannes, the short film "Condom Lead" by brothers Mohammed and Ahmad Abunassar, was funded by the filmmakers themselves. It is the first time a Palestinian film has been included in the short film competition at Cannes.

"Omar" is one of 18 films being screened in the second major competition category at Cannes, Un Certain Regard, which showcases emerging directors and more daring films than those in the main competition vying for the top prize, the Palme D'Or.

Cambodian director Rithy Panh's documentary "L'Image Manquante" ("The Missing Picture") is one of the experimental movies in Un Certain Regard pushing story-telling boundaries.

He used small clay figures intercut with historical footage to tell the story of how his family perished in the Khmer Rouge's brutal revolution after their 1975 capture of Phnom Penh.

Other films in Un Certain Regard to receive positive reviews include Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring" starring Emma Watson in a gang of celebrity-obsessed teenagers breaking into their Hollywood idols' homes to steal luxury goods.

"Fruitvale Station" by American filmmaker Ryan Coogler was praised by critics as provocative with exceptional performances.

The film is based on the true story of Oscar Grant, an unarmed San Francisco Bay Area resident who was shot and killed by police in the early hours of New Year's Day in 2009.

French director Rebecca Zlotowski's "Grand Central" about love in a nuclear power plant received favorable reviews as did "L'Inconnu du Lac" (Stranger by the Lake), a murderous gay love story by French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie.

(Additional reporting by Alexandria Sage; Editing by Jon Hemming)