Presidents

In the span of a single week -- from the day Arlen Specter turned Democratic to the moment Congress passed the White House's budget blueprint and on through the opening of a spot on the Supreme Court -- President Obama crossed a fateful line: From now on, it's his country. Every president inherits a tangle of problems from his predecessor. War and recession, natural disaster and foreign crises.

Back in the 1990s, when he was a television reporter who relished tweaking the government, Mauricio Funes accepted an invitation from the president to dine at his home and receive an award. Funes asked if he could tape the ceremony for his mother. The president, Armando Calderon Sol, consented. Then, at the moment of the toast, Funes launched into a scathing rebuke of Calderon and what Funes considered to be government abuse and corruption.

Candles flicker, petals scatter and bouquets slowly wilt at the spot where Benazir Bhutto was slain. Although some passers-by still break down in tears at the sight of this makeshift shrine, the pressing question for many Pakistanis as the outpouring of grief over her assassination subsides is whether President Pervez Musharraf will manage to survive this crisis, as he has so many others. In the first days after the Dec.

Eight years ago, George W. Bush's stay-at-home proclivities, seen by some as evidence of a lack of interest in the world beyond U.S. borders, became a troublesome issue as he ran for the White House. As the president approaches his final year in office, his agenda is so heavily booked that he is already scheduled to touch down on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

Beginning his final year in office with low approval ratings, a Democratic Congress and a nation fixated on choosing his successor, President Bush is preparing a State of the Union speech for Monday that will accentuate unfinished business and lay out modest goals.

A.J. Duffy won a second term Thursday as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, the city's powerful teachers union. The 64-year-old special education teacher won 58.7% of the vote, and will avoid a runoff. "That's big," Duffy said. "That's an affirmation by the membership that voted. Despite the missteps I might have taken, they acknowledged that I've done a good job. And they acknowledged I've always been there for members."

Mark G. Yudof has his work cut out for him if, as expected, he becomes the next president of the 10-campus University of California system in the midst of a gloomy state budget that threatens staff reductions and more student fee hikes. But UC regents who nominated the current head of the University of Texas system Thursday to the top UC post said they had confidence in Yudof's leadership abilities in both good and bad times.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Mark G. Yudof, the head of the University of Texas system, was formally hired Thursday to be the next president of the University of California and given a $828,084 annual compensation package that triggered protests from some students and employees. The Board of Regents voted unanimously to hire Yudof, and its chairman, Richard C.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee charged Saturday that President Bush has no plan for pacifying Iraq in his last nine months in office, and intends to "muddle through and hand the problem off to his successor." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who this week will preside over a long-awaited hearing on Iraq, said in the Democrats' weekly radio address that because Bush's year-old troop increase has not led Iraqi groups to settle their differences, it has been a failure.

To many students at UCLA, Charles E. Young is a building or a street, not a breathing, teaching human being. After all, two prominent features of the Westwood campus are the Charles E. Young Research Library and Charles E. Young Drive, both named for the charismatic chancellor who led UCLA for nearly 30 years until he retired in 1997.