Haddad-Adel, a close adviser and a relative by marriage of clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been a member of a coalition of conservative "Principlist" candidates that included Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati.

"With my withdrawal I ask the dear people to strictly observe the criteria of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution (Khamenei) when they vote for candidates," he said in a statement carried by the semi-official Mehr news agency.

He did not endorse a single candidate, but called for a hardline conservative victory. "I advise the dear people to take a correct decision so that either a Principlist wins in the first round, or if the election runs to a second round, the competition be between two Principlists."

Haddad-Adel was approved to run in the election last month by the Guardian Council, a vetting body of clerics and jurists, along with seven other men. The slate of candidates is largely dominated by conservatives close to Khamenei.

The presidential vote on Friday will be Iran's first since 2009, when mass protests erupted after losing reformists disputed the election results, saying they were rigged to favor President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Jon Hemming/Mark Heinrich)

The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief grew out of an unlikely partnership between President George W. Bush and lawmakers led by the Congressional Black Caucus. It has come to represent what Washington can do when it puts politics aside and what America can do to make the world a better place.

President Barack Obama, speaking at the recent dedication of Bush's presidential library, praised the compassion Bush showed in "helping to save millions of lives and reminding people in some of the poorest corners of the globe that America cares."

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said of Bush in a statement that "while many events may distinguish his presidency, his devotion to combatting the scourge of HIV/AIDS will certainly define his legacy."

The AIDS program's future, however, is uncertain. Obama has upped the stakes, speaking in his State of the Union address this year of "realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation." But funding for the relief plan's bilateral efforts has dipped in recent years and it's doubtful that Congress, in its current budget-cutting mood, will reverse that trend when the current five-year program expires later this year.

The AIDS program is also trying to find a balance between its goals of reaching more people with its prevention and treatment programs and turning over more responsibility to the host nations where it operates.

"This has been an incredible achievement," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., a senior Congressional Black Caucus member who played major roles both in passing the original 2003 act and its 2008 renewal that significantly increased funding for AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis treatment in Africa and other areas of the developing world. She spoke of the more than 5 million people now receiving life-saving antiretroviral treatment and 11 million pregnant women who received HIV testing and counseling last year. "But I'm worried that with any type of level-funding or cuts we'll go backward," she said.

The 2008 act more than tripled funding from the 2003 measure, approving $48 billion over five years for bilateral and global AIDS programs, malaria and tuberculosis. It also ended U.S. policy making it almost impossible for HIV-positive people to get visas to enter the country.

The AIDS program was the largest commitment ever by a nation to combat a single disease internationally. According to the U.N.'s UNAIDS and the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2011 the United States provided nearly 60 percent of all international AIDS assistance.

A decade ago, almost no one in sub-Saharan Africa was receiving antiretroviral treatment. By 2008, the AIDS program had boosted that number to 1.7 million. As of last year it was 5.1 million.

The State Department says the program last year also helped provide treatment to some 750,000 HIV-positive pregnant women, allowing about 230,000 infants to be born HIV-free, supported 2 million male circumcisions and directly supported HIV testing and counseling for 46.5 million.

"This is a remarkable story that the American people should know about," Kimberly Scott of the Institute of Medicine, which recently completed an evaluation of the AIDS program, said at a forum sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the CSIS Global Health Policy Center.

According to UNAIDS, the number of people living with HIV has leveled off, standing at about 34 million at the end of 2011. New infections that year reached 2.5 million, down 20 percent from 2001. AIDS-related deaths were 1.7 million, down from 2.3 million in 2005.

Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at Kaiser, said most countries where the program operates have yet to reach the "tipping point," where new infections occurring in a year are less than the increase in people receiving treatment. Among the success stories were Ethiopia, where the 40,000 going on treatment in 2011 was almost four times the new infections. Still with a long way to go was Nigeria, which that year had 270,000 new HIV infections and a 57,000 increase in those getting treatment.

Chris Collins, director of public policy at amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, also warned of potential repercussions as the AIDS program shifts from being an emergency response to the AIDS epidemic to a more supportive role for country-based health programs.

"The countries themselves largely are avoiding the important role that key populations play in epidemics," he said, referring to gay men, those injecting drugs and sex workers. These groups face discrimination and criminal charges in many cases, and 90 percent of the money to help them now comes from external sources.

Collins also spoke of the "huge mismatch" between the positive science and rhetoric on fighting AIDS and the money available. Since 2009 the funding for bilateral and global HIV and AIDS programs has largely stalled.

Kaiser's Kates said that while there's still bipartisan support for the AIDS program in Congress, "the big question is will the financing be there to reach the goals" of treating more people and advancing toward that AIDS-free generation. "The challenge right now is that the global economic climate is different, the U.S. climate is different, but the need is still great."

New Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho, who coached Ballack at the English club, was in Leipzig and the long-speculated transfer of Bayer Leverkusen winger Schuerrle to the Premier League club looked to be heading towards completion.

Mourinho himself refused to confirm or deny it, telling reporters: "We will see."

German newspaper Express, however, said the deal had been finalised after a meeting in Germany between Mourinho and Leverkusen sports director Rudi Voeller.

The rapid 22-year-old Schuerrle joined Leverkusen from Mainz 05 in 2011 and has become a regular for Germany, battling for a starting spot with Lukas Podolski.

Ballack, who won 98 caps for Germany and led them to the 2002 World Cup and Euro 2008 finals, played for clubs including Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Bayer Leverkusen and Kaiserslautern.

Some 50,000 fans filled the stadium to see him play against former colleagues, including Didier Drogba, Michael Essien and Torsten Frings.

Ballack, who started his career at Chemnitzer FC, won a string of domestic club trophies in Germany and England but failed to claim a major European or world title despite coming close on several occasions.

A proposed final Germany appearance last year was rejected by Ballack who was angry with federation officials and coach Joachim Loew because of the way his international career ended after injury ruled him out of the 2010 World Cup.

(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann, editing by Ed Osmond)

The big rock called Asteroid 1998 QE2 was making its closest approach to Earth on Friday, keeping a safe distance of 3.6 million miles, or 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked about the asteroid during a briefing. He says scientists have concluded the asteroid "poses no threat to planet Earth."

He added, to laughter, "I never really thought I'd be standing up here saying that."

The asteroid is believed to be about 1.7 miles long.

The White House was hosting a "We The Geeks" Google+ Hangout Friday, bringing together NASA's deputy administrator and scientists to talk about asteroids.

PARIS (Reuters) - A Muslim convert arrested on suspicion of stabbing a French soldier in a Paris suburb was motivated by religion and had shown some signs of radicalization, French authorities said on Wednesday.

The attack took place on May 25, three days after attackers chanting Islamist slogans killed a British soldier in London.

France has been on a security alert since January, when its troops began fighting al Qaeda-linked Islamists in Mali.

Prosecutor Francois Molins said authorities were treating the Paris attack as a terrorist act.

The suspect had been seen on a surveillance camera saying a Muslim prayer minutes before the assault on a soldier on patrol in the La Defense business district of Paris, he said.

"The nature of the incident, the fact it took place three days after London, and the prayer just before the act lead us to believe he acted on the basis of religious ideology and that his desire was to attack a representative of the state," Molins told a news conference.

"It seems clear the intent was to kill."

The soldier, who was attacked from behind with a knife, was released from hospital on Monday.

The suspect, identified by police as Alexandre Dhaussy, was arrested in a Paris suburb on Wednesday after being identified through fingerprints.

His age was originally given as 22 but authorities later clarified that he would reach that age on May 30.

RADICAL SIGNS

Molins said the suspect was known to police for crimes such as theft and possession of firearms and that he converted to Islam as an adult. No details of his ethnicity were given.

Police later said Dhaussy had been identified by intelligence services for showing some signs of radicalization, but had not been considered dangerous and was not monitored any further.

He had, for instance, refused a job in 2011 that would mean he had to work alongside women and been checked by police in 2012 for acting suspiciously and not wanting to wait for a bus with women, police said.

France's Muslim population is estimated at 5 million-6 million and is the biggest in Europe, the legacy of the French colonization of North and West Africa and subsequent waves of immigration into the suburbs of cities such as Paris, Marseille and Lyon.

In March 2012, the country was shocked by the killing of four Jews and three soldiers in and around the southern city of Toulouse by a radicalized French Muslim called Mohamed Merah, who was later shot dead by police.

That attack was the worst on French soil since bombings in 1995 on the underground train network by Algeria's Armed Islamic Group that killed eight and wounded scores.

"This incident comes at a time of concern, threats, terrorist threats that this country has been receiving for the past few months. So we have to remain alert," Interior Minister Manuel Valls said on i>Tele television of the Paris stabbing.

In Britain, the killing of the soldier in what the government said appeared to be a terrorist attack has led to protests against radical Islam and fears of a possible anti-Muslim backlash.

(Additional reporting by Brian Love and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Mark John and Alison Williams)

"I can confirm that George remains in hospital but purely as a standard precaution for observation because he suffered some bumps and cuts to his head. But he's making good progress, he's fine and he's really looking forward to getting home," the spokeswoman said.

British media have reported that the 49-year-old former Wham! front man fell out of a car he was travelling in on the M1 motorway just outside London during rush hour - the latest of a string of recent accidents and health scares.

The tabloid Sun newspaper interviewed a woman who said she had skidded to a halt after the singer fell out of the vehicle in front of her, and that she had used her car to shield him from other vehicles.

"There was a nasty cut on his forehead and the back of his head. There was blood all down his face and on his teeth," the Sun reported driver Katherine Fox as saying.

Last year, the "Careless Whisper" singer cancelled a tour of Australia due to "major anxiety" brought on by a 2011 battle with severe pneumonia in Vienna, where he was treated in intensive care for a month.

Michael has sold an estimated 100 million records over his career, but in the past few years has hit the headlines for his personal life more often than for his music.

In 1998 he was arrested in California for "engaging in a lewd act" in a public toilet. He has also had a number of run-ins with British police for possession of narcotics, and served time in jail for driving under the influence of cannabis.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Sector analysts forecast potential peak annual sales of isavuconazole at 530-600 million Swiss francs ($623.47 million), of which Basilea could receive up to 25 percent in royalties.

Orphan status is granted to drugs that treat conditions or diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. The designation usually comes with a seven-year marketing exclusivity period if the drug is approved for sale.

"The granting of orphan designation for isavuconazole in the U.S. reflects the high medical need and is an important regulatory milestone for Basilea and our partner Astellas," chief Basilea medical officer Achim Kaufhold said in a statement.

Isavuconazole, which treats both mould and yeast infections such as candida infections, is being developed with Japan's Astellas.

Bank Sarasin called the drug backing a significant win for Basilea. The company's shares surged more than 6 percent in early trading. At 0731 GMT, the stock was 5.1 percent higher amid a 1 percent rise on the European healthcare sector.

The U.S. drug backing comes as Basel-based Basilea faces a year of waiting for regulatory approval on its main product, antibiotic drug ceftobiprole. The company is in the process of answering questions from European agencies on the drug and said any possible approval could come in the fourth quarter.

The firm has been hunting for a partner for ceftobiprole - which it hopes will make it to market to treat hospital and community-acquired pneumonia - for several years and said it was aiming for a partnership by the end of 2013.

The backing also follows a string of shake-ups at Basilea, including the departure of its chief financial officer just two months after that of the firm's founder and chief executive.

($1 = 0.9624 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Katharina Bart; editing by Patrick Graham)

The online blueprints for a fully functional 3D-printed gun have disappeared faster than a speeding bullet.

On Wednesday, the State Department ordered the company that posted the schematics, Defense Distributed, to remove them from the web. (Watch a Defense Distributed video explaining the gun above.) According to the State Department, publicly posting the instructions may have violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs the "transfer of, and access to" certain weapons and their technical details. By posting the files to the web where anyone in the world could download them, the company may have inadvertently violated those export restrictions.

"Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure) or transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad, is considered an export," the State Department  in a letter.

However, the State Department did not say that the instructions must remain offline for good. Rather, the department asked that Defense Distributed file the necessary paperwork for the government to determine if the blueprints are, in fact, a violation of ITAR. In the meantime, State wrote, the company "should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled."

That letter came just two days after Defense Distributed, through its open-source printing project DEFCAD, posted the instructions for its "Liberator" handgun to the Internet. In just three days, the instructions had already been downloaded more than 

Here's how it works, :

Fifteen of the gun's 16 pieces are constructed on the $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, Forbes said. The final piece is a common nail, used as a firing pin, that can be found in a hardware store. []

And indeed, by Thursday evening, the webpage to download the instructions had been updated with the : "This file has been removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information."

Still, the federal order does not mean all copies of the blueprints have been be wiped from the web. The instructions have been posted to the file-sharing sites Pirate Bay and Mega, among others, meaning they're still available for download.

Wilson, who claims to have been inspired by anarchist writings, himself made that point in an , saying he thought he would ultimately be free from the government's oversight.

"I still think we win in the end," he said. "Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about."

Lawmakers at the state and federal level have already moved to ban printable firearms.

In California, Democratic state Senator Leland Yee said in athat he would soon introduce a bill to ban weapons that "are invisible to metal detectors and that can be easily made without a background check." At the federal level, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have likewise called for legislation to ban such firearms.

"A terrorist, someone who's mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage," Schumer

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Relations between the two leaders were stiff until Churchill arranged a tete-a-tete with Stalin, with the aid of interpreters, which led to a late-night boozy banquet in 1942, according to files released by Britain's National Archives.

"There I found Stalin and Churchill, and Molotov who joined them, sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds, crowned by a suckling pig and innumerable bottles," wrote Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, of the visit.

The mood was "merry as a marriage-bell," he added, though Churchill was complaining of a "slight headache" when Cadogan came to find him at one in the morning, and "seemed wisely confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine."

The two leaders did not engage in much military talk during the meeting, which went on until three in the morning, but Churchill did probe the Georgian-born dictator about his internal policy.

Asked what was happening with the kulaks, the relatively rich farming class Stalin had vowed to exterminate, he responded "with great frankness" saying that the kulaks had been given land in Siberia but '"they were very unpopular with the rest of the people!"'

The evening was dubbed a success by the author of the note, as the two men got on.

"Certainly Winston was impressed, and I think the feeling was reciprocated," he wrote.

(Reporting By Dasha Afanasieva, editing by Paul Casciato)

Saturday's ambush, which targeted Congress party politicians returning from a campaign event with the area's indigenous tribal community, appeared to be a warning to officials to stay away from the rebels' main base of support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and party President Sonia Gandhi visited some of the 37 people who were injured in the attack in a hospital Sunday in the Chhattisgarh state capital and said the government would take firm action against the perpetrators.

"We are devastated," said Gandhi, who denounced what she called a "dastardly attack" on the country's democratic values.

Rajnath Singh, president of the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, said the country should unite in its fight against the Maoist insurgency.

The convoy was attacked in a densely forested area about 345 kilometers (215 miles) south of Raipur, Chhattisgarh's capital, as the Congress members were returning from a party rally.

Four state party leaders and eight police officers were among the 24 people who were killed. Other victims were party supporters.

Police officer R.K. Vij said 11 of the 37 injured were in serious condition.

Police identified one of those dead as Mahendra Karma, a Congress party leader in Chhattisgarh who founded a local militia, the Salwa Judum, to combat the Maoist rebels. The anti-rebel militia had to be reined in after it was accused of atrocities against tribals indigenous people at the bottom of India's rigid social ladder.

The dead also included state Congress party chief Nand Kumar Patel and his son. The injured included former federal minister Vidya Charan Shukla, 83, police said.

The Press Trust of India news agency said the attackers blocked the road by felling trees, forcing the convoy to halt. Vij said the suspected rebels triggered a land mine that blew up one of the cars. The attackers then fired at the Congress party leaders and their supporters before fleeing.

Congress is the main opposition party in the state. It has stepped up political activities, trying to win the support of tribals, ahead of state elections scheduled to be held by December.

K.P.S. Gill, a former police chief of Punjab state who has written widely on reform, said the attack was "a very horrifying incident."

However, Gill said the state government was incapable of devising a strategy to tackle the Maoist threat. "They don't have the political will and bureaucratic and police set-up to prevent such attacks," he said.

He said the state government had ignored the need for special forces to tackle the threat. "Most of the special forces in the state are being used for non-operational duties like guarding state politicians," he said.

Prime Minister Singh has called the rebels India's biggest internal security threat. They are now present in 20 of India's 28 states and have thousands of fighters, according to the Home Ministry.

The rebels, known as Naxalites, have been fighting the central government for more than four decades, demanding land and jobs for tenant farmers and the poor. They take their name from the West Bengal village of Naxalbari where the movement began in 1967.

The fighters were inspired by Chinese Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong and have drawn support from displaced tribal populations opposed to corporate exploitation and official corruption.

The government has offered to begin peace talks with the rebels, but without success. The Maoists demand that it first withdraw thousands of paramilitary soldiers deployed to fight the rebels.

Maoist rebels carried out two major attacks in Chhattisgarh in 2010. They ambushed a paramilitary patrol in April that year, killing 76 troops in their worst attack ever. A month later, they triggered a land mine under a bus carrying civilians and police, killing 31 people.