Barcelona’s board of directors resigned on Wednesday following a judicial ruling that paves the way for new elections at the Catalan giants later this year, the club announced. The resignation had been expected after a Spanish judge last week ordered the European champions to hold fresh polls for the board after club members complained regulations had been broken.
Wallaby coach John Connolly on Thursday condemned New Zealand’s controversial ”throat-slitting” haka as damaging for rugby. Criticism of their pre-match ritual, which in the Kapa O Pango haka climaxes with an apparent throat-slitting gesture, put the All Blacks on the defensive ahead of Saturday’s Bledisloe Cup match against Australia.
Michael Schumacher is confident of continuing his superb recent form in front of his home crowd at the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, Germany, this weekend. The seven-time world champion (37) has cut Spaniard Fernando Alonso’s championship lead from 25 to 17 points after winning the last two races in dominant fashion.
Titan Quest, with its isometric, Greek mythology-saturated gameplay, really wants to be Diablo 3. But in their desire to make it so, the developers have stuck so closely to the formula of Blizzard‘s wrist-pain-inducing hack ‘n’ slash, that it’s barely Diablo 2,5.
PCs are cheap today, and soon they’ll be even cheaper, thanks to a price war between the two leading chip suppliers, AMD and Intel. Thursday’s expected launch of Intel’s next-generation Core 2 Duo range leaves AMD needing to halve the prices of many processors in order to stay competitive. And on Tuesday it did it, more than halving Athlon 64 prices.
Three main militia groups in a strife-torn eastern province have agreed to lay down their arms ahead of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) historic elections this weekend, the United Nations said on Thursday, offering a glimmer of hope on the same day that violence at a campaign rally underlined tensions in this vast nation.
Insurgents detonated a car bomb and fired mortar rounds into a busy commercial district in the centre of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 31 civilians, a defence official said. At least 115 were wounded, he added. Television pictures showed a major fire and rescuers struggling to pull the dead and injured from the rubble in Karrada.
South Africa’s producer price index (PPI) rose by 7,5% year-on-year (y/y) in June from a 5,9% y/y increase in May, Statistics South Africa said on Thursday. The PPI rose 3% on a monthly basis after May’s monthly rise of 0,9%. The PPI was expected to have risen to 6,3% y/y, a survey of economists by I-Net Bridge found, with forecasts ranging from 5,1% y/y to 6,5% y/y.
European aircraft manufacturer EADS issued a profits warning on Thursday following a crisis over Airbus production problems, but said that net profit in the first half had risen by 5%. The group also said that the results of a study into the overall implications of problems in A380 production might reveal further extra costs.
Real-time strategy games are usually the preserve of PC owners who have the mouse, keyboard and patience to effectively manipulate the miniature armies at their disposal. But <i>Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2</i> bucks the trend by releasing on the Xbox 360, complete with high-definition support.