Students Bulgaria

Bowing to mounting pressure, Bulgarian President Petar Mladenov submitted his resignation Friday amid swirling controversy over remarks caught on videotape last December in which he talked about using tanks to disperse an anti-government protest. Mladenov's letter of resignation was read on national television at 8 p.m., meeting a deadline set by striking students in an ultimatum issued earlier in the day. His decision to step down sent thousands of Bulgarians into the streets to rejoice.

Bowing to mounting pressure, Bulgarian President Petar Mladenov submitted his resignation Friday amid swirling controversy over remarks caught on videotape last December in which he talked about using tanks to disperse an anti-government protest. Mladenov's letter of resignation was read on national television at 8 p.m., meeting a deadline set by striking students in an ultimatum issued earlier in the day. His decision to step down sent thousands of Bulgarians into the streets to rejoice.

Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula has drawn a record number of students from all over the world this year, bringing total enrollment to 203, college officials said. Students in the freshman class come from 21 states, Canada, Bulgaria, England, Ghana and Lithuania. Last year, two students from Bulgaria and Poland came to the private Catholic college, and two more students from Bulgaria and three students from Lithuania arrived this year, said spokesman John A. Holecek.

Students and teachers from the Hueneme Elementary School District will visit Bulgaria despite political unrest in the capital city of Sofia, officials said. Twenty students and six teachers from Blackstock and E.O. Green junior high schools will tour the Eastern bloc country as part of an exchange that began last year. Parents had been concerned about violence in the country, Blackstock Principal Tom Haas said.

The McGrath family has carved a wide swath in the county's agricultural history over the last 130 years. There's even a street or two and a state park named after them. The first McGrath, an Irish immigrant named Dominick, began farming in the county in 1871, and McGraths have been growing food ever since. Dominick had 13 children, most of whom became farmers.

Pope John Paul II, who embarked in high spirits on a swing through Eastern Europe a week ago, grimly returned home Tuesday, praising former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and praying that liberalizing reforms in the Soviet Union survive his fall. "Faced with the news that comes from the Soviet Union, our prayers become even more intense to ask God that that great country may be spared further tragedy.

All right, all you 8-foot foreign exchange students from Bulgaria, all you point-makers and point-shavers, all you funky dunkers from inner-city projects and precision chest-passers from suburban driveways, all you Cal States and Loyolas and Central Northern A&M Wesleyans, all you patent-leathered assistant coaches and itchy-trigger-fingered clock operators, and all you strategy-conscious, press-credentialed ("What were you thinking about when you took the shot?") inquiring minds out there.

Stephen Quake has the full lips and startling blue eyes of a cherub in a Renaissance painting, and the only sign that he is old enough to teach at a top academic institution is his corona of thinning curls. Wearing an olive-green golf shirt, loosely fitting khaki pants and sandals--the equivalent of formal attire among Caltech's lab rats--he ushers his visitor into an office where papers are stacked precariously high.