Milestones

By Reported By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, Kate Novack and Victoria Rainert

RESIGNING. ARI FLEISCHER, 42, CHRISTIE TODD WHITMAN, 56, and TOMMY FRANKS, 57; from top Bush Administration posts; in Washington. Fleischer will step down after 2 1/2 years as press secretary, serving as the President's relentlessly on-message spokesman on everything from the Enron scandals to the war in Iraq; to work in the private sector. Whitman, after a rocky tenure as chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, said she was leaving because she and her husband were tired of having a "commuter" marriage. Franks, the Army general who commanded U.S. forces during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is retiring after 36 years in the military. "My wife reminds me frequently of how long I've worn [the uniform]," he said.

MARRIED. RUDOLPH GIULIANI, 58, former two-term mayor of New York City; to JUDITH NATHAN, 48; by current Mayor Mike Bloomberg; in New York City. The marriage, the culmination of a high-profile romance conducted in the midst of Giuliani's messy split from wife Donna Hanover, is the groom's third, the bride's second.

CHARGED. CHRISTINE NEAL, 49, and MARCY SPIWAK, 49, parents of students at Illinois' Glenbrook North High, the school attended by senior girls who earlier this month hazed juniors in an ugly ritual in which students were splattered with feces, pig intestines and mud; with delivering beer to a minor and allowing underage drinking at her home, respectively; following misdemeanor battery charges against 15 students; in Skokie, Ill. Neal, who has not commented, and Spiwak, who denied knowing about drinking in her home, face a maximum of a year in jail.

SUSPENDED. RICK BRAGG, 43, Pulitzer prizewinning, Alabama-born reporter for the New York Times; after his editors discovered that he used uncredited material from a freelance reporter in a story about oystermen in Apalachicola, Fla.; reportedly for two weeks; in New York City. The move followed the resignation of another Times reporter, Jayson Blair, after the discovery of numerous mistakes and fabrications in his stories.

DIED. FRANK WHITE, 69, ex-Governor of Arkansas, one of only two people to defeat Bill Clinton in an election; of a heart attack; in Little Rock, Ark. During Clinton's troubled first term as Governor, White switched parties, ran against Clinton in 1980 and won. White was best known for signing a law, later struck down by a federal court, requiring science teachers who taught the theory of evolution to include "creation science."

DIED. DAVID IVES, 84, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) pioneer; in San Francisco. During his 14 years as head of Boston's WGBH, that station became PBS's largest programming supplier, responsible for developing such PBS staples as Masterpiece Theatre, Frontline and Nova, many with British pedigrees. His station also introduced Americans in 1974 to the British cult comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

DIED. IRENE OPDYKE, 85, reluctantly famous international speaker who hid Jews during World War II and later published the memoir In My Hands; near her home in Yorba Linda, Calif. As a Polish Catholic forced to work in a munitions factory by Nazi captors, she became the housekeeper of SS officer Eduard Rugemer. When he found out she was helping Jews who worked in his laundry go into hiding, he threatened to expose them unless she became his mistress. She never revealed her experiences until a college student called in the 1970s, conducting a survey on whether the Holocaust really happened. "That put me on fire," she said. "I was there."