Accused of appropriating rap music, Yauch likened it to the Rolling Stones playing the Blues

In 1979 Tony Judt published an article with the unusual title "A Clown in Regal Purple". In a coruscating attack on "modernisation theory", he laid waste the methodology and reputation of a generation of number-crunching social historians. Within the bitchy world of scholarly politics it made him infamous, but few outside knew his name. His area of expertise was the history of socialism in France, a furrow he ploughed often and deeply.

A university professor is claiming that he lost his job after he gave James Franco an embarrassing 'D' grade in a course he was teaching on account of the knock-'em-dead actor and perennial student showing up for only two out of the 14 lectures he was expected at.

Lee Pockriss was one of the secret weapons in the pop business," says the singer and fellow Brill Building composer Paul Evans. "He wrote a lot of hit songs and yet nobody knows his name." While that is true, Pockriss's successes tended to be with novelty songs, notably "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini".

Baruj Benacerraf, who died on 9 August aged 90, was a Venezuelan immunologist who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Global warming is causing animals and plants to migrate further up mountains and away from the equator in attempts to avoid the higher temperatures associated with climate change, scientists have found in an exhaustive survey of nearly 1,400 species.

People who are fat and fit live just as long as their slim counterparts and are less likely to die from heart disease, according to a new study.

Business troubleshooters, aka company doctors,will be heading back to school if Christine Elliott gets her way. As chief executive of the Institute for Turnaround, Elliott is leading a plan to teach new recruits key skills needed to guide a business through tough times.

Action is needed now to prevent nightmarish "Planet Of The Apes" science ever turning from fiction to fact, according to a group of eminent experts.

Passive smoking can cause genetic damage to sperm cells that may result in birth defects, miscarriages and other reproductive problems which make it difficult to father a healthy child, scientists have found.

Gordon Brown was last night forced to defend receiving £600,000 from speeches and books published in the past year.

News of the contest to become the next chancellor of Cambridge University has tended to focus on the David and Goliath battle between Lord Sainsbury and local shopkeeper Abdul Arain. But this unlikely face-off could be disrupted by the unexpected participation of the leading beard-wearer Brian Blessed. A Facebook campaign by students has resulted in the vocally endowed actor garnering the required 50 nominations to run – and, reports the Cambridge Tab, he has consented to his inclusion on the ballot. This is not the first time that marginally-less-hilarious-than-they-think undergraduates, made giddy by their eclectic DVD collections, have afforded Blessed the status of a campus folk hero. In January a motion was passed by York University's student union, mandating the institution to rename one of its study spaces "The Brian Blessed Centre for Quiet Study".