JESSICA MITFORD, the celebrated author and one of the fabled Mitford sisters, died at the age of 79 yesterday at her home in Oakland California. She had suffered a short illness.
Her husband - the civil rights lawyer Bob Treuhaft whom she married in 1943 - their son, Benjy, as well as her daughter from her first marriage, Constantia, were at her, side when she died.
Mitford's death came before she could complete research for an updated version of her 1963 satirical expose of the funeral business, The American Way of Death.
The fifth of Lord and Lady Redesdale's six daughters, as a teenager Jessica shocked Britain when she eloped with Winston Churchill's nephew - her second cousin - to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
She was considered the most rebellious of her equally famous sisters - Nancy, the celebrated novelist who wrote Love in a Cold Climate, Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Deborah, who became the Duchess of Devonshire, Unity, who espoused fascism and went to Germany in the 1930s in a failed attempt to seduce Adolf Hitler, and Pamela.
The BBC will lose its sole right to broadcast Queen Elizabeth's Christmas Day speech, Buckingham Palace said yesterday. The BBC's royal correspondent said the decision was linked to the corporation's decision to interview the Princess of Wales last year, which was said to have angered the queen.
The palace said that, starting in 1997, the queen's broadcast would be produced and distributed by the BBC and the Independent Television Network on a two year alternating cycle.
Former Italian prime minister and media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, had a hernia operation yesterday.
Berlusconi's spokesman said the operation at a private clinic in Rome went well but declined to comment on how long the opposition leader would stay in hospital. Berlusconi (59), leader of the main centre right Freedom Alliance bloc, was prime minister for seven months in 1994.