NEWS LITE : PUFF'S PHONE FLAP CHANGES FLIGHT PLAN.

No less than The New York Times reports a weekend airline drama involving Puff Daddy and a cell phone. He was settling into his first-class seat at New York's La Guardia on a Saturday-night Delta flight to Atlanta when he got into what one witness says sounded like a romantic conversation with someone named Sandra - which doesn't much rhyme with Jennifer, as in Lopez, whom Puff Daddy has been dating.

Anyhow, as the plane pulls from the gate, Daddy says loudly into the phone: ``You can't do this to me.'' Then says he wants off the plane.

It goes back to the gate, where baggage handlers get his stuff out of the cargo bay.

Ex-Beatle escorts non-date to movies

Sir Paul McCartney showed up at Monday's British premiere of the latest James Bond movie with ex-model Heather Mills, whom he previously declared he's not dating. Pierce Brosnan's intended, Keely Shaye-Smith, was loaded down with $5 million in diamonds.

Reynolds' disease prompts activism

Debbie Reynolds has a new cause: osteoporosis.

The 67-year-old actress was diagnosed this year with the bone-thinning disease that caused her grandmother to become stooped and weakened.

``I don't want the same thing to happen to me. Nowadays, with all we know about detecting and preventing osteoporosis, there's little reason I, or any other woman, should not take steps to blunt the impact of bone loss,'' she said.

Reynolds has joined a campaign to urge older women to get a bone-mineral density test to diagnose osteoporosis.

She said she is happy she took the test.

``Otherwise, I would be finding out by falling on the floor with a bone collapse,'' she said.

Love work well, author tells kids

Marc Brown, the children's author who created the bespectacled aardvark Arthur, passed on some advice to second-graders that he once got from a teacher.

``If you want to be successful, do what you love doing and do it as well as you can,'' he said Monday at Skipwith Elementary School in Richmond, Va. ``It was the best advice I ever got.''

Brown took that advice more than 20 years ago, after he lost his job teaching art at Boston's Garland College when the school closed. Brown was figuring out what to do next when his 4-year-old son, Tolon, asked him for a happy bedtime story about a ``weird animal.''

He worked on the character for six months before he got it right with the first Arthur book, ``Arthur's Nose.'' Since then, more than 28 million Arthur books have been sold and a PBS show airs in 60 countries.

For the boys? Peacekeepers cheer Chelsea in Kosovo

``Where's Chelsea?''

The question rocketed around the huge Camp Bondsteel military base Tuesday in the American-controlled sector of Kosovo as word spread that Chelsea Clinton was accompanying President Clinton on his morale-boosting visit to Yugoslavia.

The first daughter drew all the attention when she preceded her father into a tent where he was about to give a speech. Within moments, the 19-year-old college sophomore was in the midst of U.S. troops, smiling and reaching out to shake their hands. She was such a hit that the president's arrival failed to stir much notice.

Taking the stage with little fanfare, Clinton said, ``From the reception you gave my daughter, I thought he (the introducer) was going to say I was Chelsea's father, too.''

Chelsea, taking a break from classes at Stanford University, accompanied the president throughout his 10-day trip to Turkey, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and the Yugoslav republic of Kosovo.

Stewart ices sunrise trek; New Year's bash changed to beach

Martha Stewart, party planner extraordinaire, called off plans to watch the millennium's first sunrise from the top of Maine's Cadillac Mountain after realizing the hike is no walk in the park.

Stewart and 17 guests set out on a practice trek in February ice and snow to the summit of the Acadia National Park peak which, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory, will be the first spot in the continental United States to see the sun rise in 2000.

``We found the trails too icy, steep and circuitous for any of us to reach the 1,532-foot summit before daybreak,'' Stewart wrote in a special millennium issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine.

Stewart and the guests at her home on Mount Desert Island, about 160 miles northeast of Portland, Maine, instead drove to a beach and took a more leisurely two-mile hike to a ledge overlooking Frenchman Bay.

The group was so struck with the stunning sunrise that Stewart said she will celebrate the first dawn of 2000 the same way, followed by a grand breakfast at her place.

Guests will dress in fuzzy bathrobes and eat fruit from candied grapefruit shells, tall blueberry muffins and pancakes that are a cross between popovers and crepes.

They will drink from giant cafe au lait mugs and wipe their fingers on fine Irish linen. Names written on egg-shaped rocks ``borrowed'' from the park will serve as place cards.

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

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo: (1) Chelsea Clinton greets U.S. soldiers at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo during a visit with the president.

(2) Stewart

(3) Reynolds