NEWS LITE\Marriage too breathtaking.

Byline: News Lite is compiled by Karen Duffy from Daily News staff and wire reports.

Actor Charlie Sheen says he is divorcing his wife of nearly six months, model Donna Peele, because he was suffocating and "had to come up for air."

In an interview scheduled to air Monday and today, the actor told "Entertainment Tonight" that he married the wrong person and really wasn't ready to get hitched anyway.

"I couldn't breathe. I like breathing too much. I had to come up for air," he said.

Sheen, 30, who wed Peele on Sept. 3 after a six-week, whirlwind courtship, said he should have taken more time to get to know her.

In the weeks before his marriage, Sheen testified in the trial of Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss, admitting he had ordered Fleiss' call girls at least 27 times, running up a tab of more than $50,000.

Good taste last refuge of snobs?

Roseanne, the queen of crass, a contributor to The New Yorker? It's no joke.

Two writers at the highbrow magazine quit in protest over the comedian's involvement in The New Yorker's new "Women's Issue," which Roseanne helped design.

A magazine spokeswoman was quick to stress that Editor Tina Brown called all the shots for the 200-page issue, which hit newsstands Monday.

Roseanne's contribution was to attend two days of West Coast meetings at which she urged Brown to include nontraditional women writers. The sitcom star also posed for Annie Leibovitz with her bare-bottomed infant son.

"No, Roseanne was not an editor in the textual sense," writes James Wolcott, the magazine's television writer. "But she has the eye of an editor in her ability to pluck one good idea out of a pile of so-so ones and connect it to larger shifts in society."

Wolcott dismisses critics who say that the "semicolons our forefathers had died for were being sacrificed in a bonfire of cheap celebrity."

"The resistance to Roseanne is often a sort of rhetorical class warfare carried on under the guise of Good Taste," Wolcott writes. "It's the last refuge of a snob."

Tokyo: Finders aren't keepers

The Japanese capital may well be the best place in the world to lose your wallet.

According to statistics released Monday, Tokyoites went to police last year with 2,726,694,200 yen - about $26 million - they had found.

Topping the list of good Samaritans was a 19-year-old man who found the equivalent of $190,000 wrapped in newspaper in a toilet stall.

He turned the money over to police, but got it back six months later when no one claimed it.

Another person turned in a handbag with about $95,000 inside - but the owner recovered it.

The finders' honesty is impressive enough, but it's accompanied by great patience, too: Police generally spend a half-hour or more filling out a detailed report on found items, and the finder has to wait until they are finished.

Loni embracing life in the cup of 'C'

There's less of Loni Anderson these days. The actress, who excised Burt Reynolds from her life, proudly reports that she has also taken care of another pain in the neck, having undergone her second breast-reduction surgery. "They were taking over my life," the 50-year-old tells Mr. Showbiz on the Internet's World Wide Web. "I think of it now as a science-fiction movie, like 'Doo-doo, doo-doo.' You wake up one morning and 'Oh, no!' "

She added, "I was pretty happy with my C cup. That moved into a D cup, that moved into a double D, that moved into an E, and pretty soon, like, your life is a bra. I went to the plastic surgeon and said, 'Enough is enough, back to the C cup, please.' "

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PHOTO

Photo (1) The 1996 Westminster Best of Show winner Brady, a 4-year-old clumber spaniel, mugs for a phot with his mouth full. Associated Press (2) Newlyweds Charlie Sheen and Donna Peele pose for a photo on Sept. 3. (3) Roseanne Arnold Irks writers