WH Smith CEO quits after accounting error that wiped almost £600m off value

WH Smith’s chief executive has stepped down with immediate effect after a review found accounting failures in its North American division, prompting the travel shop chain to slash its profit outlook.Nearly £600m was wiped off the retailer’s market value in a 42% one-day share price fall when the blunder emerged in August. It came shortly after the sale of its high street business, which has since been rebranded as TGJones by its new owners.WH Smith shares climbed by more than 7% on Wednesday after Carl Cowling’s departure was announced, although they are still trading substantially below the levels seen before the August sell-off.Cowling, who had been group chief executive for six years, will be replaced on an interim basis by the company’s UK chief executive, Andrew Harrison, until a permanent replacement is found

Harvard to investigate Larry Summers’s Epstein ties as he exits OpenAI board

Harvard is set to launch a new investigation into its former university president and Bill Clinton economic adviser Larry Summers about his ties to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as it also emerged Summers has resigned from the board of OpenAI.The moves comes after Summers said he would be stepping back from public engagements after emails revealed the extent of his relationship with the late sex offender.A Harvard spokesperson confirmed to the Harvard Crimson on Tuesday night that a new investigation into Summers’s connections with the accused child sex trafficker was under way. The inquiry will also look at other university affiliates named in the documents, including Summers’s wife and nearly a dozen others. A Harvard spokesperson, Jonathan Swain, told the student newspaper that “the University is conducting a review of information concerning individuals at Harvard included in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein documents to evaluate what actions may be warranted

What is Cloudflare – and why did its outage take down so many websites?

The internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, making many websites inaccessible for about three hours.Cloudflare is a global cloud services and cybersecurity firm. It provides datacentres, website and email security, protection from data loss and defences against cyber threats, among other things. It describes itself as providing an “immune system for the internet”, with technology that sits between its clients and the wider world that blocks billions of cyber threats daily. It also uses its global infrastructure to speed up internet traffic

Cloudflare says ‘incident now resolved’ after outage causes error messages across the internet – as it happened

The firm has just issued an update saying it believes the incident over.A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.I’ve just quickly tested several key sites which are loading again.Key sites around the world went down, some for a few hours, after a widely relied-upon Internet infrastructure company suffered an unknown issueThe outages took place in the early hours of US morning and during UK business hoursIt affected users of everything from Spotify, ChatGPT, X, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Canva to retail websites of Visa, Vodafone and Vinted and UK grocery chains Asda and M&S

Australia enter Ashes series with transition abruptly forced upon an ageing squad | Geoff Lemon

The Ashes may offer one cause for celebration, but this series will also see the Australian team host more birthday parties than Timezone in the 90s. New boy Jake Weatherald had his 31st a day before the squad was announced. Nathan Lyon turns 38 the day before the Perth Test. Beau Webster turns 32 just before Brisbane, Usman Khawaja will be 39 on day two in Adelaide, Josh Hazlewood turns 35 on the fifth day in Sydney, and Mitchell Starc will be 36 before January is out.For two or three years there has been mounting fascination with the age of this team and especially the bowling attack

Stokes wants to be one of ‘lucky few’ England captains to claim Ashes victory in Australia

Ben Stokes is aiming to become one of the “lucky few” England captains to claim an away Ashes victory as he called on his players to forget a 15-year barren spell in Australia and “create our own history”.After being shut out by the pandemic four years ago, up to 40,000 England supporters are estimated to be descending on Australia over the course of this winter. All are hopeful of witnessing an all-time classic and a change to the story after three winless Ashes tours.Stokes, ready to unleash Mark Wood and Jofra Archer when the series begins in Perth Stadium on Friday, is fully aware of the challenge: succeed and he will become just the sixth postwar England captain to do so after Andrew Strauss (2010-11), Mike Gatting (1986-87), Mike Brearley (1978-79), Ray Illingworth (1970-71) and Len Hutton (1954-55).“I have come here absolutely desperate to get home on that plane in January as one of the lucky few captains from England to have come here and been successful,” said Stokes, having named a 12-strong match day squad that includes Shoaib Bashir as the spin-bowling option