Cameraman Didn’t Want Her to Be a Shooting Star

--Lillian Jackson, who heads an anti-crime group in Mobile, Ala., was the star of an unscheduled TV drama. While Jackson, coordinator of March Against Crime, was being interviewed for a TV news report in the building where she caught a burglary suspect, she came upon two more burglary suspects in another room. Jackson said she pointed her .38-caliber pistol at the two, but one got away. “I had a bead on him and was going to shoot the escaping one, or fire over his head, and the newsman said, ‘Don’t shoot him, Lillian, don’t shoot him, Lillian. I’ve got him on camera,’ ” she said. WKRG-TV cameraman Johnny Sartin captured the episode on videotape. Police charged a 26-year-old man with third-degree burglary in the incident. The other suspect remained at large. On May 5, Jackson and other group members were preparing for a garage sale in the building when she heard someone upstairs and called police. “The officers went in through the front,” she said. “I went to the back with my gun. When he came out, I told him to hold it and marched him right to the officers.”

--Howard Nemerov will become the “new ambassador for the republic of letters” as the third person to be named poet laureate of the United States, James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, said. Nemerov--currently a distinguished professor at Washington University in St. Louis--will succeed Richard Wilbur and Robert Penn Warren in holding the job, which was created in 1985. As poet laureate, Nemerov will give a public poetry reading and lecture, advise the library on literary programs and recommend new poets to be included in the library’s archive of recorded poetry and literature. Nemerov, 68, served as a consultant in poetry to the library in 1963. He won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in poetry in 1978.

--Princess Alia, eldest daughter of Jordan’s King Hussein, is to wed 26-year-old commoner Mohammed Anwar Farid Saleh. Princess Alia said her fiance is doing his military service in the Royal Engineers. The English-educated princess, 32, has a son, Hussein, from a previous marriage that ended in divorce in 1983. She is the daughter of King Hussein’s first wife, Princess Dina. Princess Alia manages the Royal Stables near Amman.