APPOINTED. EHUD BARAK, 53, former army chief of staff and swiftly rising star in the soldier-statesman tradition of Israeli politics; as Foreign Minister in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Shimon Peres; in Jerusalem. A daring veteran of undercover operations, Barak commanded a hit team in 1973 that assassinated three P.L.O. leaders in their Beirut apartments. Soon after his January retirement from the military, ending 35 years' service, Barak joined the Labor Party and catapulted into the political arena in a style reminiscent of his mentor, the late Yitzhak Rabin. Widely regarded as a future Prime Minister-in-training, Barak has the extensive background in guarding Israel's security that complements Peres' more dovish reputation.

GRANTED. JONATHAN POLLARD, 41, American Jew and convicted spy serving a life sentence in the U.S. for espionage on behalf of Israel; on the 10th anniversary of his arrest; Israeli citizenship, by outgoing Interior Minister Ehud Barak; in Jerusalem. Pollard, a U.S. Navy analyst who was nabbed outside the Israeli embassy in Washington as he was begging for entry, was found to have relayed large amounts of highly classified intelligence material to his Israeli controller. Lately Israeli public opinion has swung behind the campaign to secure his release. A sympathetic play, titled Pollard, was a hit in Tel Aviv last year.

RALLYING. ANDREAS PAPANDREOU, 76, Greece's three-time Prime Minister; from pneumonia after being admitted to the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center; in Athens. Two days after his hospitalization, the Athens stock exchange closed at a six-month low, reflecting widespread unease about Papandreou's frail health and his failure to name a successor. The Prime Minister has been plagued by an Athens newspaper publisher's campaign against his wife and chief of staff Dimitra Liani-Papandreou. His illness forced cancellation of a meeting with disgruntled members of his socialist party PASOK. Although the Athenian press is dubious, his 13 doctors insist that the Prime Minister is recovering.

DIED. LOUIS MALLE, 63, France's versatile film director and a pioneer of postwar realism; of lymphoma complications; in Beverly Hills. A tweed-jacketed iconoclast, Malle thumbed convention on both sides of the Atlantic with his frank treatment of subjects such as incest in Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart, 1971) and erotic obsession in Damage (1992). Perhaps his most poignant film remains the award-winning Au Revoir les Enfants (Goodbye Children, 1987), a memoir of his days at a Roman Catholic school that was concealing Jewish children from the Gestapo. Malle called it "the one film I would like to be remembered for." After a 15-year intercontinental marriage to actress Candice Bergen and near fatal open-heart surgery in 1992, Malle made peace with his bourgeois devils, enjoying the Berlin Philharmonic, French literature and even truffles in his last years.

DIED. LAILA MURAD, 77, Egyptian singer and actress hailed as "the Cinderella of Arab cinema"; in Cairo. Murad, who starred in a total of 28 films from the 1930s to the '50s, was welcomed in Arab households as the spunky girl next door. She enchanted audiences in such musical comedies as Ghazl El-Banat (Feminine Flirtations, 1948). Murad disappointed her fans by retiring in 1955, when she was the highest-paid actress in Egypt. Always reclusive, Murad refused to give interviews in her final years and left the question of her reportedly Jewish background unanswered.