NEWS LITE : NAMES IN THE NEWS `BARNEY MILLER' STILL COP FAVORITE.

People still remember Hal Linden from ``Barney Miller,'' especially the NYPD.

``Half the people call me Barney, half call me Hal,'' says Linden, who's alternating in the role of Scrooge with Roddy McDowall in ``A Christmas Carol'' at New York's Madison Square Garden.

More importantly, the former TV police captain still has clout on the force.

When his taxicab was stopped by police after running a traffic light recently, the actor took command.

``I got out of the car, went over to the cop, told him I had told the driver I was in a rush,'' Linden said in Sunday's New York Daily News. ``The cop looked at me and said, `OK, Captain, we'll let him go.' ''

``Barney Miller,'' a sitcom about NYPD detectives, ran on ABC from 1975-1982.

``Cops loved that show,'' the 66-year-old Linden said. ``I think it was the most realistic depiction of a police squad room as was ever presented.''

Ex-pilot's book tells of suicidal thoughts

Former Air Force pilot Kelly Flinn says she pondered suicide before she resigned to avoid a court-martial for lying about an affair with a married man.

Flinn's book, ``Proud to Be,'' is excerpted in the Nov. 24 issue of Newsweek. She gives her version of the affair with Mark Zigo, a married man at the Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and the subsequent investigation that forced her out of the service.

``I had never been a depressed person in my life,'' wrote Flinn, the nation's first and only female B-52 pilot. ``Now I went to bed every night praying to God that I wouldn't wake up in the morning. I never actually attempted suicide. But I thought about it, hard.''

Flinn, 26, resigned in May and took a general discharge rather than face adultery, lying and disobeying an order charges in a court-martial.

``Shooting myself would have been too messy, though. I didn't want my parents to have to clean up a mess,'' she wrote. ``So I'd go to a drugstore and look at all the sleeping pill racks and think about which pills would work best.''

Osmond dons coat for shows in Utah

A chance to work in his home state persuaded Donny Osmond to don his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat once again.

The 39-year-old Osmond, who lives in Provo, Utah, retired from the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical ``Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat'' last year after playing Joseph in a five-year world tour.

Lloyd Webber wanted Osmond to appear in a videotaped version. Osmond, whose wife, Debbie, is expecting their fifth child in March, would not go on the road again but was willing to do a five-week run in Salt Lake at the University of Utah. It begins Jan. 15.

Offbeat

Pet owners in northern Spain searching for the perfect mate for their dog, cat or bird now have a new option: a matchmaking service.

Happy Animals will find companions for pets who want to reproduce but also for those who are simply bored or lonely.

Client pets will be registered in the agency's database with a photograph and a short description of the qualities they are seeking in a life partner.

Fans flock, see white crustacean

Bill Coppersmith says the traffic in his fish market in Raymond, Maine, has never been so intense, ``what with visits by curious folks and the television and newspapers.''

Coppersmith, a 20-year veteran of lobster fishing off Casco Bay, peered into his holding tanks at the cause of all the attention.

``It's the white lobster,'' he said. ``There's none anywhere else and now I've caught it and the whole world wants to have a look.''

Coppersmith, 40, said he caught the white lobster the morning of Nov. 10 and ``had to look twice before I believed it.''

The lobster weighs a little more than a pound, and though it was earlier estimated by Coppersmith to be 7 years old, is now believed by him and others who fish for lobster to be closer to 20.

Barney Hamlin, the store manager, said he and Coppersmith had telephoned nationwide, but could not find another lobster like the white one, which they have named Lincoln.

At the University of Maine's Lobster Institute, director Robert Bayer said that albino lobsters were extremely rare. He said he had seen one other specimen, near Kittery on the New Hampshire border, some 15 years ago.

Coppersmith has no plans to eat his lobster.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1) Which way to tropics?

Jonathan Gay, left, and Ron Bird try to capture a wayward pink flamingo near Shirley's Bay in Ottawa on Sunday. The men are part of a group made up of more than a dozen volunteers who tried to catch the bird. Their efforts, however, have failed so far.

Associated Press

(2) Flinn