MILESTONES

ADOPTING. ED ROLLINS, 52, loose-lipped G.O.P. political adviser, and his wife SHERRIE ROLLINS, 37, ABC executive; their first child, a girl; in Nanjing, China. Ed Rollins was on a consulting trip to the city when he was told of a baby abandoned on a bridge. Nicknamed "Xiao-Xiao" or "thing of beauty" by orphanage officials, Lily should be arriving in the U.S. in the next two weeks.

AILING. LARRY HAGMAN, 63, TV incarnator of Dallas' dastardly J.R. Ewing; from a malignant tumor on his liver; in Los Angeles. He is on a waiting list for a transplant.

DIED. FABIO CASARTELLI, 24, Olympic medalist and star Tour de France cyclist; of severe head injuries received when he fell from his bicycle after failing to make a sharp curve during a high-speed descent; along the Portet d'Aspet mountain pass in the Pyrenees, France. The death renewed calls for competitors to wear helmets.

DIED. HARRY GUARDINO, 69, actor; of lung cancer; in Palm Springs, California. His voice, marinated in New Yorkese, reverberated through a career of street-tough characters in plays like A Hatful of Rain, movies like Pork Chop Hill and Lovers and Other Strangers and a plethora of TV roles.

DIED. MAY SARTON, 83, author and poet; in York, Maine. Sarton's seven decades of poems, fiction and personal journals were championed by feminists and college students. The same personal honesty that spurred her to reveal her lesbianism in 1965 informed her clear-eyed explorations of the human condition, from love and individualism in early poetry collections like Encounter in April (1937) and Inner Landscape (1939), to her musings on aging in such journals as After the Stroke (1988) and Encore: A Journal of the 80th Year (1993).

DIED. JUAN MANUEL FANGIO, 84, five-time Formula One world auto-racing champion during the 1950s (a record that still stands); known for his technical artistry on the track and his gentlemanly behavior off it; in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

DIED. CONTENT PECKHAM, 86, who joined TIME magazine in 1934 and became one of its first female senior editors; in Englewood, New Jersey. Peckham was the creator of TIME's fact-checking system.

DIED. STEPHEN SPENDER, 86, British essayist, poet; in London. Along with his friends W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Spender retained rigorous standards of literary craft while rejecting the introspection of predecessors like T.S. Eliot in favor of a more worldly and socially aware art. The Pylons, for example, is Spender's lyrical tribute to the towers of an electrification system, and Vienna is a poetic recounting of a leftist uprising. Spender's brief membership in the Communist Party in the '30s would result in a lifetime of determined anticommunism, climaxed by his 15 years with Encounter magazine, which Spender left in the '60s after its links to the CIA were revealed. In later years, Spender concentrated on prose, from a 1951 memoir World Within World to an appreciation of '60s protest, The Year of the Young Rebels.

DIED. PATSY RUTH MILLER, 91, silent-film actress; in Palm Desert, California. By the age of 16, the convent-educated Miller was a supporting player in Camille (1921), starring Rudolph Valentino. Two years later, she earned her niche in film history as Esmeralda, the gypsy girl literally swept off her feet by Lon Chaney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. After the talkies drove Miller from the screen in 1931, she became an award-winning writer of short stories and radio scripts.