ROME – Muriel Spark, whose spare and humorous novels made her one of the most admired British writers of the years following World War II, has died in Tuscany, Italian officials said Saturday. She was 88.

Spark died Thursday in a hospital in Florence, said Massimiliano Dindalini, mayor of the village of Civitella della Chiana, where Spark had lived for almost three decades.

Spark wrote more than 20 novels, including “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”

That 1961 book, later adapted for a successful theatrical play and movie, made her famous internationally.

Most of Spark’s novels are short, with the plots often bizarre or macabre, satirical or darkly humorous.

In 1970’s “The Driver’s Seat,” the main character searches for someone to murder her.

And “The Abbess of Crewe,” a 1974 satire written after Watergate, is about the political machinations in an ecclesiastical community.

In 1963, she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1978 an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mahmut Bakalli was Kosovo leader

PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro – Kosovo’s communist-era leader Mahmut Bakalli died Friday. He was 70.

Bakalli died of throat cancer, said Ernest Luma, a spokesman for the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo.

He lead the disputed province’s communists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, stepping down following disagreements with the central body of the Yugoslav Communist Party over the handling of unrest by ethnic Albanian students.

During the Kosovo war in 1998-99, he was part of a five-man delegation that met with former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in a failed bid to end the conflict.

Years later, he was the first witness to testify against Milosevic at his war crimes trial at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

Frank Gibney was WWII translator

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Frank Gibney, who served as a Japanese translator for the Navy in World War II and whose books later helped Americans understand the culture of their former enemy, died. He was 81.

Gibney died Sunday of congestive heart failure at his Santa Barbara home, said his son, Thomas, of Placerville.

For his cultural work, Gibney held two Japanese honors: the Order of the Rising Sun, Third Class, and the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Second Class.

Gibne was studying Greek in 1942 when he was drafted for a special Navy program. He spent most of the war interrogating prisoners and got to know not only their strategic knowledge but also their personal histories. He spent two years at a POW camp across from Pearl Harbor.

Gibney also served as a combat translator and helped to capture Col. Hiromichi Yahara, the chief Japanese military strategist on Okinawa.

He also was a journalist and was wounded while covering the Korean War for Time magazine in 1947.

His 1992 book “The Pacific Century” was the blueprint for an award-winning 1993 PBS series.

Gibney also founded and edited the Japanese and Chinese editions of Encyclopedia Britannica and was working on a book about the encyclopedia’s history in the week before his death, his son said.

Arthur Wilson worked in transit for 70 years

LOS ANGELES – Arthur Winston, a longtime transit employee who received a citation from President Clinton for his decades of service, died in his sleep, his family said Friday. He was 100.

He died Thursday evening.

For decades, he reported to work at the crack of dawn to supervise workers who cleaned and refueled the region’s bus fleet.

He missed just one day of work in more than 70 years at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and that was to attend his wife’s funeral in 1988. In 1996, he received an “Employee of the Century” citation from Clinton.

He was born in Oklahoma and said he began picking cotton at age 10. His family headed west when droughts and storms ruined several crop seasons. In 1924, Winston found work with the Pacific Electric Railway Co., a forerunner of the MTA.

He left the company in 1928, returned six years later and stayed until his retirement last month.

Associated Press