By HANNAH BEECH

AWARDED. To CORAZON AQUINO, 65, charismatic former President of the Philippines, the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for international understanding; in Manila. The widow of assassinated opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. captured one of Asia's most prestigious prizes for her leadership in restoring democracy to the Philippines by peacefully deposing strongman Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

AILING. NICK LEESON, 31, baby-faced bond trader whose $1.38 billion losses brought down Barings, Britain's oldest merchant bank, with colon cancer; in a Singapore prison hospital. Having served more than two years of his six-and-a-half year prison sentence for fraud, Leeson is applying for early release because of his medical condition.

FREED. THOMAS MCMAHON, 50, Irish Republican Army killer, who shook Britain in 1979 by murdering Earl Mountbatten, India's last colonial viceroy and cousin of Queen Elizabeth II; in Dublin. Six other guerrillas were let go earlier this month under the auspices of last April's Northern Ireland peace agreement, which allows early release of prisoners whose paramilitary sponsors observe the region's fragile cease-fire. Hundreds more convicted criminals could be released in coming months.

AWAKENED. DANIEL NIVEL, 44, French policeman who became an unwitting symbol in the fight against soccer hooliganism when a mob of German World Cup fans beat him senseless seven weeks ago, from a coma; in a Lille, France hospital. Germany offered to withdraw from the soccer tourney because of the violent attack, and the German Football Federation has raised nearly $300,000 for Nivel's medical bills. Doctors say the father of two could suffer irreversible brain damage.

DIED. ALFRED SCHNITTKE, 63, revolutionary German-Russian composer whose collage-like creations veered from challenging concertos to cheeky operas; in Hamburg. Risking Soviet condemnation and censorship, Schnittke created a medley of musical modernism, plopping an electric guitar riff in a non-denominational requiem and kickstarting his Fourth Violin Concerto with an atonal cadenza that angered classical-music purists.

DIED. SHARI LEWIS, 65, gleeful puppeteer and ventriloquist, who breathed life into a woolly sock and created Lamb Chop, a squeaky-voiced icon that charmed generations of television viewers; in Los Angeles. Lewis filled her Emmy-winning children's show with entertaining and educational chatter between her motley menagerie of puppets, including rambunctious Charlie Horse and the ever-befuddled Hush Puppy.

DIED. TODOR ZHIVKOV, 86, former Bulgarian despot, whose Stalinist style of suppression included expelling 310,000 ethnic Turks and throwing some 200,000 political opponents into gulags; in Sofia. The longest-serving Soviet-bloc strongman paid fealty to the Kremlin for 35 years, but his subservience ultimately led to his downfall when reformist Mikhail Gorbachev sanctioned a bloodless coup that deposed Zhivkov in 1989.