Former pizza magnate Herman Cain dropped out of the US presidential race on Saturday after accusations of sexual misconduct overwhelmed his bid to win the Republican nomination as an anti-Washington tax reformer.
Cain’s departure set off a competition among other candidates to win over his conservative supporters with voting to start next month in the race to determine the Republicans’ presidential pick for 2012 to oppose President Barack Obama.
Cain, a former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive, told followers in his hometown of Atlanta that”false and unproved” sexual accusations had forced him to suspend his White House bid.
He said he would endorse another candidate, effectively ending a roller-coaster campaign thatsaw the African-American businessman go from complete outsider to the rising star ofRepublican conservatives within a few weeks over the autumn.

The death toll from the latest round of clashes which started over the weekend between protestors and the police across Egypt has risen to 35, the country's health ministry said Wednesday.
The deaths included 31 in the capital Cairo, two in the second largest city Alexandria, and one in Ismailia in northeastern Egypt and another in Matrouh in the northwest, the ministry said.
On Wednesday alone, 290 were injured, it added. A total of over 2,000 have by now been wounded since the outbreak of the fresh violent clashes in the country, as the mass protests entered its sixth day and has no sign of ebbing.
On Wednesday evening, the Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, where the Interior Ministry building is and the epicenter of the turmoil earlier this year which toppled Egypt's ex-President Hosni Mubarak, was still brimmed with demonstrators estimated in tens of thousands, the same scenario as previous couple of days.
During the day, policemen fired tear gas canisters to the rock- throwing crowds of protestors in the Mohamed Mahmoud Street near the Tahrir Square, and three armored vehicles were seen deployed by the army on the street to curb clashes.

Cairo police fought protesters demanding an end to army rule for a third day on Monday and the death toll rose to 33, with many victims shot, in the worst violence since the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
As midnight approached, about 20,000 people packed Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the anti-Mubarak revolt early this year, and thousands more milled around in surrounding streets.
“The people want the fall of the marshal,” they chanted, referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak’s defence minister for two decades and head of the army council.  
In a late-night statement, the ruling council urged calm and called for crisis talks with political forces to find a way forward. The council voiced its “deep regret for the victims in these painful incidents”, state news agency MENA said.

A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material.The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice - a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes.The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has "extraordinarily high energy absorption" properties.Potential uses include next-generation batteries and shock absorbers.The research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology and is published in the latest edition of Science.