The Swiss rider, whose decision was expected because the 2013 Tour doesn't have an opening prologue stage, wrote on his Twitter account Friday that he won't be riding.

Cancellara's announcement came ahead of starting his home Tour of Switzerland on Saturday, a nine-day warmup for cycling's signature event that begins June 29.

Snow-blocked roads forced Swiss organizers to change the route of the second stage Sunday over the steep Nufenen pass at 8,130-feet altitude. The stage to the ski resort of Crans-Montana will instead start at Ulrichen.

Cancellara's rivals include defending champion Rui Costa of Portugal and Slovakian sprint specialist Peter Sagan.

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"This is wonderful news for our members, their families and the State of Hawaii," said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. "Now our members don't have to leave their family and friends in Hawaii to look for family-supporting jobs on the mainland. Their future in Hawaii bodes well for the state's economy as well.

"Our members and our union made this sale possible, but I want to also thank Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie (D), his staff and the Hawaii legislature for their support."

Per the successorship clause in the existing collective bargaining agreement, Par Petroleum will honor the existing three-year contract through its expiration date on January 31, 2015. None of the 119 production, maintenance and lab workers represented by Local 12-591 were laid off, and they all can continue their employment.

"We look forward to establishing a new relationship with Par Petroleum," said USW International Vice President Gary Beevers, who heads the union's oil sector. "Buying the refinery was a smart business decision. This is a great opportunity for the company to be profitable and fulfill Hawaii residents' and businesses' need for reasonably priced fuel."

Local 12-591 members played a key role in saving the refinery by writing letters to elected officials and lobbying them in Washington, D.C. to request help in making the conditions favorable for a new owner. They also garnered thousands of signatures from Hawaii's residents in petitions to Governor Abercrombie and other elected officials.

"If it weren't for our members' hard work, persistence and solidarity this refinery sale would not have happened and Tesoro would have quietly turned the facility into an import terminal," said USW District 12 Director Bob LaVenture. "Everybody wins in this dealour members, Hawaii citizens, the state and Par Petroleum."

This is the fourth refinery that the USW has helped to save. The other three were PBS Energy in Delaware City, Del., Monroe Energy LLC in Trainer, Pa., and Philadelphia Energy Solutions in Philadelphia, Pa.

"We are grateful for this sale of the refinery," said Pat Koge, Local 12-591 unit chair of the Tesoro group. "My members and I are excited about our future now. We thank everyone who has helped us along the way. We look forward to working with Par Petroleum."

The USW is the largest industrial union in North America and has 850,000 members in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. The union represents workers employed in metals, rubber, chemicals, paper and forestry, oil refining, atomic energy and the public and service sector.

Contact: Lynne Hancock, USW, 615-828-6169,

SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of Brazil's biggest cities on Monday in a growing protest that is tapping into widespread anger at poor public services, police violence and government corruption.

The marches, organized mostly through snowballing social media campaigns, blocked streets and halted traffic in more than a half-dozen cities, including Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Brasilia, where demonstrators swarmed past the Congress and Presidential Palace.

While peaceful, and unfolding mostly as a festive display of dissent, Monday's demonstrations were the latest in a flurry of protests over the past two weeks that have added to unease over Brazil's sluggish economy, high inflation and a spurt in violent crime.

The marches began this month with a small protest in Sao Paulo against a small increase in bus and subway fares. The demonstrations initially drew the scorn of many middle-class Brazilians after protesters vandalized storefronts, subway stations and buses on one of the city's main avenues.

But the movement quickly gained support and spread to other cities as police used heavy-handed tactics to try to quell the demonstrations. The biggest crackdown happened on Thursday in Sao Paulo when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas in clashes that injured more than 100 people, including 15 journalists, some of whom said they were deliberately targeted.

The protests have gathered pace as Brazil is hosting the soccer Confederation's Cup, a dry run for next year's World Cup. The government hopes these events, along with the 2016 Summer Olympics, will showcase the country as an emerging power on the global stage.

Brazil is also gearing up to welcome more than 2 million visitors in July as Pope Francis makes his first foreign trip for a gathering of Catholic youth in Rio.

Contrasting the billions in public money spent on new stadiums with the shoddy state of Brazil's public services, protesters are using the Confederation's Cup as a counterpoint to amplify their concerns. The tournament got off to shaky start this weekend when police clashed with demonstrators outside stadiums at the opening matches in Brasilia and Rio.

"We shouldn't be spending public money on stadiums," said one protester in Sao Paulo who identified herself as Camila, a 32-year-old travel agent. "We don't want the Cup. We want education, hospitals, a better life for our children."

Other common grievances at Monday's marches included political corruption and the inadequate and overcrowded public transportation networks that Brazilians cope with daily.

POLICE ORDERED TO USE RESTRAINT

The harsh police reaction to last week's protests touched a nerve in Brazil, which endured two decades of political repression under a military dictatorship that ended in 1985. It has also added to doubts about whether Brazil's police forces would be ready for next year's World Cup.

Jose Vicente da Silva, a security consultant and retired police colonel, said training for the big events has focused too much on elite forces instead of the rank-and-file officers who must face the public.

The clashes, he said, "suggest that the everyday policeman in Sao Paulo has barely trained at all" in how to handle a demonstration.

The uproar following last week's crackdown prompted Sao Paulo state Governor Geraldo Alckmin, who initially described the protesters as "troublemakers" and "vandals," to order police to allow Monday's march to proceed and not to use rubber bullets.

The protests are shaping up as a major political challenge for Alckmin, a former presidential candidate, and Sao Paulo's new mayor, Fernando Haddad, a rising star in the left-leaning Workers' Party that has governed Brazil for the past decade. Both have so far insisted that the bus fare hike that sparked the protests is non-negotiable.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who has enjoyed high approval ratings since taking office in 2011, only recently began to slip in opinion polls. Although the protests have gained traction, they do not appear to reflect any broad-based collapse in her support, but Rousseff was booed at Saturday's Confederations Cup opener.

Still, the resonance of the demonstrations underscores what economists say will be a challenge for Rousseff and other Brazilian leaders in the years ahead: providing public services to meet the demands of the growing middle class.

"Voters are likely to be increasingly disgruntled on a range of public services in a lower growth environment," Christopher Garman, a political analyst at the Eurasia Group, wrote in a report.

(Additional reporting by Esteban Israel and Brian Winter.; Editing by Paulo Prada and Christopher Wilson)

While monitoring a known extremist in Yemen, intelligence agents "were able to detect a nascent plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange," he said in testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence committee during a hearing on National Security Agency data gathering programs.

U.S. officials said the programs have helped to foil more than 50 potential terrorist plots around the world.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Jackie Frank)

Rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad have for months been trying to take Kweiras and two other military air bases nearby without success. The government has recently gone on the offensive in the province and in areas in the country's heartland to recapture rebel-held territory.

Activists said warplanes also struck targets in the villages of Atareb and Kfar Hamra in Aleppo province, and troops clashed with rebels inside the provincial capital of the same name. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The regime has gone on the offensive in Homs and Aleppo, the country's largest city, to build on the momentum from its victory at the strategic town of Qusair earlier this month.

The violence also continued to spill over the border. Heavy clashes erupted between pro-Hezbollah gunmen and followers of a radical Sunni cleric in southern Lebanon, killing two people, officials said.

Lebanon has been on the edge for months and bursts of violence between supporters and opponents of Assad have become frequent.

The country is deeply divided along sectarian lines, with Sunni Muslims largely supporting their brethren in Syria, who make up the majority of the rebellion against Assad's regime, and many Shiites supporting Assad, whose regime is dominated by Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam.

The polarization has deepened in recent weeks after Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based Shiite militant group backed by Iran, openly joined the fight in Syria on Assad's side and helped his troops crush rebels in the town of Qusair just over the border in Syria earlier this month.

The clashes broke out in an eastern suburb of Sidon erupted Tuesday after several people threw stones and shattered windows in a car belonging to Amjad al-Assir, the brother of Hezbollah critic and hard-line cleric Sheik Ahmad al-Assir, the officials said. A statement from al-Assir's office said he was not driving it at the time. Al-Assir then gave Hezbollah a one week ultimatum to vacate apartments occupied by the group's supporters in the mostly Sunni city as clashes broke out with gunmen wielding automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Officials believed the gunmen fighting al-Assir's followers to be Hezbollah sympathizers.

Lebanese army troops deployed in the area of the fighting, which subsided after several hours. The military called on gunmen to withdraw immediately from the streets.

Earlier Tuesday, Lebanon's official news agency said gunmen shot and wounded a Syrian man, whom it said was believed to have been involved in a deadly attack on four Shiite youth in Ras Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold that is also home to Christians in a volatile area near the border with Syria.

The National News Agency did not elaborate on the suspected connection between the attack on the Syrian in the town of Labwa and the killing of four Shiites in a Sunday ambush nearby.

The Syrian uprising began more than two years ago with peaceful protests against Assad, but later grew into a civil war that has killed 93,000 people and likely many more, according to the U.N.

Millions of Syrian fled their homes and sought shelter in neighboring countries with Jordan and Lebanon hosting the bulk of them, further fueling fears that Syrian conflict's sporadic spill overs across the border into the Arab country of 4 million people will turn into a full blown war.

Lebanon, a country of 4 million which is still recovering from its own 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, is hosting over half a million refugees.

In Syria meanwhile, an explosion inside a housing complex in a rebel-held village in the country's northern Idlib province killed 20 people, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

It was not immediately known what caused the explosion and who was behind it. Nobody claimed responsibility for the blast.

The complex belonged to a member of parliament, the group said. The lawmaker, Ahmed al-Mubarak, was not in the area at the time of the explosion but his brother was among those killed, the Observatory's director Rami Abdul-Rahman said.

___

Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed to this report.

Dr. Dean Brooks died May 30 at a retirement home in Salem at age 96, family members said. He had been in declining health for several weeks after a fall.

Brooks' daughter Dennie Brooks said Friday the film's producers were turned down by all the other mental hospitals they approached. But her father, who was the Salem hospital's superintendent, saw the value of the movie in starting a national discussion about mental health and the responsibility of institutions to do no harm.

She said Dean Brooks also thought being part of a movie would be fun for him and for patients. He ended up playing a small role in the film which was based on a 1962 Ken Kesey novel and starred Jack Nicholson and making sure patients were involved, too.

Allowing the movie inside the hospital was a big career risk, but Dean Brooks regularly took risks on behalf of the patients, going so far as to take them on mountain-climbing expeditions and teaching them to rappel down cliffs, said Greg Roberts, the Oregon State Hospital's current director.

At the urging of staff, he allowed patients to start wearing regular clothes rather than uniforms long before other state hospitals.

"He would wink at me and say he could do stuff then I could never get away with today," Roberts said. "In my opinion, Dean Brooks literally set the bar on how to be a great state hospital superintendent."

Kesey based the novel on his experiences working at a Veterans Administration hospital while a writing student at Stanford University. But the movie made the story forever part of the history of the Oregon State Hospital, which has since moved to another building.

In the film, the free-spirited Randall McMurphy fakes mental illness to get off a prison farm, only to be defeated by the overwhelming institutional power of the hospital and the domineering Nurse Ratched.

Dean Brooks played Dr. Spivey, a psychiatrist who initially acquiesces to Ratched's power but later is inspired by McMurphy to stand up for himself and the patients.

While the movie gave him a platform to speak out for patients, Brooks had a reputation as an innovator before the film was produced, his daughter said. She cited a patient outing he organized that included whitewater rafting and was featured in Life Magazine.

"He saw Ken Kesey's true message about our capacity and organization's capacity to do harm to one another," Dennie Brooks said. "If he hadn't known that, he would have gone right along with the administration at the time and said, 'No, we're not gonna do it (the film).'"

Before giving his approval for the movie, Dean Brooks went to every ward and discussed the idea with patients and staff.

"To make the deal, he insisted primarily that the patients be respected, and the patients actually be involved," said Charles Kifleyak, who made a documentary about the psychiatrist and the filming of "Cuckoo's Nest" called "Completely Cuckoo."

"He felt the film had to benefit the patients in some way, or he was not going to do it," Kifleyak said from Burbank, Calif.

Nearly 90 patients ultimately had parts in the movie, or jobs behind the scenes, said Dennie Brooks, who also worked on the film as a location coordinator.

Though Kesey was unhappy enough with the movie's portrayal of his book to sue its producers, owners and distributors, he "got" Dean Brooks and what he was doing at the hospital, Brooks' daughter said. Kesey eventually won an undisclosed settlement.

The writer visited the hospital while working on a screenplay, which was rejected, and he later penned a handwritten note to Brooks.

"What I thought was the greatest innovation was the eye-level way you deal with the men and women under your care, and the affection that created affection," Kesey wrote.

After the movie, Dean Brooks remained friends with Kesey. They did speaking engagements and visited Disneyworld together, even sharing a hotel room, she said. Dean Brooks also remained friends with actress Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched.

Born July 22, 1916, in Colony, Kan., Dean Brooks put himself through medical school at the University of Kansas playing trombone in dance bands, his daughter said. There he met his wife, Ulista Jean Moser, a nursing student. She died in 2006 after 65 years of marriage.

Brooks went into the U.S. Navy in 1943 and served as a triage officer on ships taking part in the invasions of several islands in the South Pacific, including Iwo Jima, his daughter said.

After the war, while Dean Brooks served at a military hospital outside Medford, Ore., his commanding officer counseled him to become a psychiatrist.

Dean Brooks also worked at a Tacoma, Wash., VA hospital before joining the Oregon State Hospital staff in 1947 as a psychiatrist. He became superintendent in 1955.

After he retired in 1981, Dean Brooks moved to Everett, Wash., to be close to his grandchildren. He continued to advocate for the mentally ill, founding the Dorothea Dix Think Tank to decriminalize mental illness and find better ways of treating patients.

Besides Dennie Brooks, he is survived by two daughters, Ulista Jean Brooks and India Brooks Civey; a brother, Robert; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A's rookie Nate Freiman hit a walk-off single with the bases loaded off Yankees closer Mariano Rivera to decide the game.

It was Oakland's 11th consecutive win at home this season and completed a 3-0 sweep against the Yankees, who grabbed an early lead when second baseman Robinson Cano hit a two-run homer in the first inning.

Both teams used six relievers in a game that took more than five and a half hours to finish.

Rivera, baseball's all-time saves leader, broke Freiman's bat on the play but the Oakland player still got enough on it to bring home the winning single.

"I've used that bat for quite a while. If it's going to break, that's a pretty good way for it to go," said Freiman.

In another game that went to extra innings, the Chicago Cubs needed 14 to beat the Cincinnati Reds 6-5 with pinch hitter Julio Borbon delivering a walk-off single with two outs.

Borbon delivered the single after Starlin Castro had led off with a single and stole second before moving to third on a groundout.

"I was ready from the ninth inning on," said Borbon. "It was my first walk-off, so it was definitely worth the wait."

Ryan Zimmerman homered and drove in three runs as the Washington Nationals posted a 5-4 win over Colorado. Rockies left fielder Carlos Gonzalez, center ielder Dexter Fowler and shortstop Troy Tulowitzki all left the game with injuries.

Zimmerman hit a two-run homer in the third then added an RBI double in the eighth.

The Toronto Blue Jays defeated Texas 3-1, handing the Rangers a third successive loss at home. Texas pitcher Yu Darvish struck out nine in seven innings of a no decision.

(Reporting by Julian Linden; Editing by Peter Rutherford)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A Martian rock analyzed by NASA's rover Opportunity contains clays formed in non-acidic water, an environment potentially suitable for the chemistry of ancient life to brew.

The solar-powered Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 for what was expected to be a 90-day mission to look for signs there was once water. It, and a twin rover, Spirit, which succumbed to the harsh Martian environment three years ago, had both found rocks altered by highly acidic water.

While acid-loving microbes exist on Earth, scientists suspect the chemical building blocks for life need more neutral conditions to evolve into life.

"The tough thing about an acid environment is that it's very, very hard, we believe, to get pre-biotic chemistry, the kind of chemistry that can lead to the origin of life," Cornell University's Steve Squyres, lead scientist for the Opportunity and Spirit missions, told reporters during a conference call on Friday.

"What's exciting about this discovery is that it points to a neutral pH at a time very, very early in Martian history," he added.

"What we have here is a very different chemistry. This is water you can drink," Squyres said. "This is the most powerful evidence for neutral (non-acidic) chemistry water that has been found by Opportunity," he added.

Opportunity took three years to reach the rim of a large impact basin called Endeavour Crater, where it examined, among other objects, a small rock called Esperance.

It took seven tries before Opportunity got itself positioned properly to scratch the rock's surface and see what lies beneath. Unlike NASA's follow-on Mars rover Curiosity, which landed on the opposite side of Mars in August, Opportunity has no drill or onboard chemistry lab to obtain and analyze samples.

Instead, it uses its instruments to determine basic mineralogy. Esperance, scientists determined, contains aluminum-rich clays, a telltale sign that neutral water flowed through the rock.

Likewise, Curiosity's first analysis of powder drilled from an ancient mudstone showed signs of neutral water, plus elements needed to support microbial life. Results from the rover's second sample analysis are pending.

Opportunity now is making its way south along the Endeavour Crater rim toward an exposed stack of rock that may provide more clues about Mars' transition from a warm and wet world to the cold, dry, acidic desert that exists today.

Scientists are hopeful Opportunity will make it there by August 1, before the start of Martian winter in the southern hemisphere.

"We've been on borrowed time for a while," said project manager John Callas, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "How long Opportunity lasts is anyone's guess."

(Editing by David Adams and Peter Cooney)

The announcement by Defense Minister Irakli Alasania came five days after he visited Afghanistan to meet with his country's contingent in the U.S-led coalition in the aftermath of the attacks. A massive truck bomb killed seven Georgians at their base in Helmand province's Now-e-Zad district on June 6, while three other Georgian soldiers died May 13 in a bomb attack on another base in Helmand's Musa Qala district.

The bombings were part of a wave of militant attacks in recent weeks, pushing violence to some of the highest levels of the 12-year war as Afghan forces take over most security responsibility from international troops set to withdraw next year.

Alasania said on television station Rustavi-2 that Georgia will maintain its current level of troops in Afghanistan but did not say where they would work from. Georgia, a former Soviet republic with aspirations of joining NATO, has 1,545 troops serving in Afghanistan.

"It's a contribution made by Georgia to the international mission that is fighting terrorism and ensuring global security," he said.

He did not say where the closed bases specifically were, and it wasn't immediately clear how many bases Georgia maintains in Afghanistan.

Violence continues to escalate this month in Afghanistan, with the Taliban and other insurgents targeting NATO troops, government forces, politicians and civilians. On Tuesday, 17 people died in Kabul when a Taliban car bomber hit buses carrying employees of the Supreme Court, the deadliest attack in the capital in a year and a half.

Wednesday morning, a motorcycle bomb killed an Afghan soldier and civilian in the south of the country, officials said.

The blast was near a market in Helmand province's heavily contested Sangin district, local police chief Ghulam Ali said. Three soldiers, one local police officer and 11 civilians were wounded.

Helmand government spokesman Omar Zwak said the explosives in a parked motorcycle were remotely detonated as an army and police patrol passed by.

In eastern Afghanistan, militants attacked a NATO convoy carrying supplies on Tuesday night, killing two Afghan police officers and two truck drivers, provincial deputy police chief Asadullah Insafi said.

Three insurgents were also killed in the attack in the eastern province of Ghazni, Insafi said.

____

Associated Press writer Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili in Tbilisi contributed to this report.

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UPDATE: BlackBerry has told The Financial Post that the launch date specified by T-Mobile UK is not accurate. No other details were provided

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