'Xena''s Lucy Lawless will produce a baby warrior

BABY BOOM Make room for a warrior infant — “Xena” star Lucy Lawless, 31, has announced that she’s pregnant with child No.2. Lawless, who married Rob Tapert — executive producer of the show – a year ago, is expected to give birth in October. Lawless has a 10-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

CASTING “One True Thing” star Renee Zellweger is in final negotiations to star opposite Jim Carrey in “Me, Myself, and Irene,” the new Bobby and Peter Farrelly (“There’s Something About Mary”) comedy for 20th Century Fox. The film, which could start shooting this summer, follows a Rhode Island state trooper (Carrey) whose two split personalities fall in love with the same woman (Zellweger).

TUBE WATCH So long, farewell to NBC’s longest-running soap opera, “Another World.” After 35 years, NBC has decided to cancel the daytime serial, which will air its final show on June 25. NBC will replace “Another World” with a new soap, “Passions”…. In its second on-air apology in four months, CBS’ “60 Minutes” announced through correspondent Lesley Stahl that it had run an inaccurate report about drug smuggling. The apology was the result of a settlement agreement with Rudy Camacho, a San Diego customs director who claimed that he was slandered in a 1997 investigative piece. The report showed a memo — supposedly written by Camacho — that asked custom agents to show preferential treatment in border crossings to a company later linked to a Mexican drug cartel. Camacho proved he never wrote the memo produced for the story.

OBITUARY Country entertainer Boxcar Willie — who adopted the stage persona of a freight-train hobo — died yesterday of leukemia at home in Branson, Mo. The 67-year-old performer had canceled his 1999 season of shows after finding out that his illness, which was diagnosed in 1996, had returned. A regular on the Branson scene since 1987, Boxcar Willie performed six or more times a week for nine months a year until his health worsened.

LEGAL BRIEF Parents of three students killed in a Kentucky high schooler’s shooting spree in 1997 have announced their intention to file a $130 million suit against a number of media companies, including PolyGram Films and Time Warner, the producers and distributors of Leonardo DiCaprio’s star vehicle, the 1995 Jim Carroll biopic “Basketball Diaries.” Two Internet porn-site owners and videogame corporations such as Nintendo, Sega, and Sony Computer Entertainment are also named in the lawsuit. The parents claim the killer’s obsession with Web porn, violent videogames, and “Basketball Diaries” incited his shooting spree on Dec.1, 1997.

WINNERS Teachers, apparently, need no instruction when it comes to winning Pulitzer Prizes. Among this year’s winners, announced yesterday: Columbia University creative writing professor Michael Cunningham received the fiction award for ”The Hours,” based on the life of novelist Virginia Woolf. (”Hours” also won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award and was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle’s award for fiction.) John McPhee, a journalism professor at Princeton, won the award in the nonfiction category for his work on ”Annals of the Former World,” his 25th book. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, professors at Brooklyn College and John Jay College, respectively, won the Pulitzer for history with ”Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” — a superheavyweight category considering that the book tips the scale at 1,400 pages. Margaret Edson, a kindergarten teacher at Atlanta’s Centennial Place Elementary, won the drama award for ”Wit,” a play that’s currently being performed at New York’s Union Square Theater.