EXPECTING. Meredith Baxter Birney, 36, star of the TV sitcom Family Ties, and David Birney, 42, star of the recent TV mini-series Master of the Game and of next season's Glitter: twins, their second and third children; in October; in Los Angeles. Taping of new Family Ties episodes has started, and in the grand tradition of I Love Lucy the show's story line will follow Birney's pregnancy all the way to the birth.

MARRIED. Debbie Reynolds, 52, perennially plucky star of stage, screen and nightclubs; and Richard Hamlett, 48, a Roanoke, Va., real estate developer whom she met seven months ago while playing a benefit in Reno; she for the third time, he for the second; in Miami Beach. Only two weeks before the wedding, in a magazine interview, Reynolds called her personal life a "disaster," adding, "I obviously have no taste in choosing a mate and should never trust myself ever to do it."

DIED. Leanita McClain, 32, sensitive, idealistic columnist for the Chicago Tribune and the first black member of the paper's editorial board, whose emotionally charged commentary reflected the tensions of the city's racially polarized politics; by her own hand (an overdose of pills), after bouts of depression brought on at least in part, friends said, by the strain of being a role model and by the furor resulting from an article she wrote for the Washington Post last summer titled "How Chicago Taught Me to Hate Whites," which prompted the city council to consider demanding an apology; in Chicago.

DIED. Manuel Buendia, 58, Mexico's leading syndicated political columnist, whose feisty front-page commentary in Mexico City's daily Excelsior frequently exposed corruption and criminality in the higher levels of the government, labor and business, and regularly attacked CIA involvement in Latin America; of gunshot wounds (while entering a parking lot, he was shot at least three times in the back by an assassin who escaped in the crowded streets); in Mexico City. His columns, which had recently zeroed in on corruption in the oil industry and its powerful union, had provoked several death threats, and he carried a pistol at all times.

DIED. Arthur H. ("Red") Motley, 83, publisher-president responsible for making Parade magazine the largest and most profitable of the national Sunday supplements; of a heart attack; in Palm Springs, Calif. A garrulous onetime salesman of zithers and Fuller brushes, he became boss of the five-year-old, money-losing supplement in 1946. By pitching it to newspaper markets in the burgeoning suburbs, he increased its circulation from 2 million to 19 million, under various owners, until his retirement in 1978.