Why does System Preferences want to contact the BBC?

The Reverse DNS shows a different web site than the BBC's site. Maybe something is masquerading. A process ID is also listed. What does it match in Activity Monitor?

The URL given is, news.bbc.co.uk.edgesuite.net
The part I've highlighted in red is the real web site. The rest is just trying to fool you into thinking it's BBC. This is a common scamming/phishing technique that will use bank site URLs as part of a URL.

The discussion at this page indicates that this is likely ad related. If I had to guess, it may be iTunes or Front Row related, one of those may be doing something Network related and trying to change something.

Rss feeds

My simple guess is that it is updatingi RSS feeds for the apple news RSS screensaver. Nothing evil happening here.

It is always interesting watching Little Snitch intercept apps talking to websites.

I think firefox takes the lead in my latest observations.

Edgesuite is a caching service just like Akamai. Apple and many others use it. I'm guessing it's an RSS feed as stated above, or you have an additional preference pane. Check that PID out and see what it is.

I used little snitch for a bit until I decided I was tired of looking up threats that didn't exist. I now comfort myself in the fact zero time is wasted there, I have incremental total backups daily, practice sound password protocols, and the odds of a security breach using my Mac is so close to zero that it can be considered zero.
Save part of your life and remove Snitch.