Milestones

By Melissa August, Val Castronovo, Matthew Cooper, Daren Fonda, Lina Lofaro, Benjamin Nugent, Desa Philadelphia, Julie Rawe and Alain L. Sanders

ENGAGED. EMERIL LAGASSE, 40, Food Network celebrity chef; to ALDEN LOVELACE, 33, a real estate broker. No word on who's catering the wedding.

ENGAGED. NEWT GINGRICH, 56, former House Speaker; to CALLISTA BISEK, 33, with whom he had an extramarital affair that was revealed last year during Gingrich's divorce from his second wife.

DIED. GREG BARNES, 17, Columbine High School basketball star who lived through last year's bloodbath; by a suicide hanging; in Littleton, Colo. Friends said he'd shown no signs of trouble.

DIED. STEVE REEVES, 74, sword-and-sandal-epic actor who pumped his Mr. Universe physique into the popular role of Hercules in a series of films in the 1950s and '60s; of lymphoma complications; in Escondido, Calif.

DIED. JOHN CARDINAL O'CONNOR, 80, Archbishop of New York and the Vatican's leading U.S. spokesman; in New York City (see Eulogy, below).

DIED. JONAH JONES, 90, Grammy Award-winning "easy-listening" jazz trumpeter and nightclub performer; in New York City. His versions of On the Street Where You Live and Baubles, Bangles and Beads became hits.

DIED. PHAM VAN DONG, 94, Vietnam's tough and erudite Prime Minister for three decades during the war against the U.S. and the country's subsequent reunification; in Hanoi. A founder of the Viet Minh and an architect of the communist revolution that drove out the French colonials in 1954, he became communist chief Ho Chi Minh's steadfast administrative workhorse.

DIED. PENELOPE FITZGERALD, 83, late-blooming, prizewinning British author of The Bookshop, Offshore and The Blue Flower; in London. She was born into a literary family but didn't begin writing until her 60s. Her subtle, quasi-autobiographical novels often focused on people struggling to cope.