MILESTONES

By KATHLEEN ADAMS, LINA LOFARO, MICHAEL QUINN, JEFFERY C. RUBIN, ALAIN L. SANDERS AND SIDNEY URQUHART

ENGAGED. LARRY KING, 61, talk-show host, and DEANNA LUND, 57, actress; in Los Angeles. No date has been set for the wedding, which according to King will be his fifth (other published estimates make it his seventh--at least). Lund, who appeared in the '60s science-fiction television series Land of the Giants, shares with some of her predecessors blond hair, a whirlwind courtship (five weeks) and, of course, a prenuptial agreement.

BACK ON EARTH. VALERY POLYAKOV, 52, physician and cosmonaut; after a recordsetting 437 days and 18 hours in space on board the Russian Mir space station; in Kazakhstan. During his 14-1/2 months in orbit, Polyakov circled the earth about 7,000 times, covering a distance of 250 million miles.

RELEASED. MIKE TYSON, 28, once and possibly future world heavyweight champion; from the Indiana Youth Center after serving three years for the rape of a beauty pageant contestant; in Plainfield, Indiana. Tyson leaves prison trimmed down to his fighting weight of 215 lbs.

DIED. JAMES L. "BUD" WALTON, 73, billionaire who with his older brother Sam opened the single store in 1962 that eventually grew into the Wal-Mart discount chain, the largest retailer in the country; following surgery for a stomach aneurysm; in Little Rock, Arkansas.

DIED. SIDNEY KINGSLEY, 88, playwright; in Oakland, New Jersey. Kingsley's stage works were known for their flinty realism and social crusading. Dead End decried the slums of New York, inspiring New Deal public-housing legislation (forever tagging the young actors who appeared in the film version as "The Dead End Kids"). The 1933 Pulitzer-prizewinning Men in White proselytized for abortion rights-and created much of the narrative vocabulary for all medical melodramas that followed. Kingsley's 1949 blend of Freud and fisticuffs, Detective Story, had a similar impact on the now ubiquitous, then trailblazing cops-and-crooks-and-crime genre.