By JUAN A. LOZANO, Associated Press Writer
GALVESTON, Texas - Minutes after a jury sentenced him to 25 years in prison for severely burning his daughter in a microwave, a teary-eyed Joshua Mauldin listened one more time to details about the pain he had caused his child.

His daughter Ana’s foster mother fought back tears as she detailed how after being injured, the girl’s left hand was so burned that there was no skin, no muscle, no fat, only tendon and bone.

Ana suffered second- and third-degree burns to her left ear, cheek, hand and shoulder and has required several skin grafts. Part of her left ear had to be amputated.

Her foster mother, Heather Croxton, testified about Ana’s screams as she’s undergone painful surgeries and physical therapy that will continue for years.

“There is no excuse for your actions and I hate that one day you will be set free and allowed to move on with your life while Ana continues to pay for your actions,” she told Mauldin during her emotional victim impact statement Wednesday.

Mauldin, 20, was sentenced after jurors deliberated for 6 1/2 hours over two days. They also fined him $10,000.

Jurors had rejected Mauldin’s claim he was insane at the time he put his then-2-month-old daughter in a Galveston hotel-room microwave and turned it on for 10 to 20 seconds. They convicted him Tuesday of felony injury to a child.

Just before putting her in the microwave in May 2007, Mauldin had punched Ana and placed her in the room’s safe and refrigerator.

Prosecutors had wanted Mauldin to be sentenced to the maximum of life in prison.

But Galveston County prosecutor Xochitl Vandiver said she was satisfied with the decision. Mauldin has to serve at least half his sentence before being eligible for parole.

“I feel Ana will be well into adulthood when her father (is paroled) and that in and of itself is a great thing,” she said.

Sam Cammack III, Mauldin’s attorney, had asked jurors to consider his client’s long history of mental illness and sentence him to probation so he could be treated at a hospital.

Cammack expressed disappointment in the sentence. “He still doesn’t get the treatment for mental illness that he needs,” Cammack said. “He’s not going to get that in prison.”

Jurors did not wish to comment after the trial concluded.

Prosecutors said Mauldin hurt his daughter because he was angry that he was in a loveless marriage and he didn’t want to take care of the infant. They also said Mauldin had a history of violence and of lying about being mentally ill to get out of trouble.

Cammack said Mauldin has been wracked by mental illness since he was 10. Mauldin claimed he started hallucinating when he was left alone in the hotel room with his daughter, feeling like mud was running up his body and consuming him.

Mauldin at first told police his daughter had been severely sunburned, later changing his story and saying he had accidentally spilled hot water on her while making coffee.

After the sentence was handed down, Joanie Mauldin still insisted her son was insane. She blamed herself for not getting her son help and for Ana’s injuries.

“I pray he gets help. But I don’t see it happening in a penitentiary,” she said, insisting her son loved his daughter. “Nobody in their right mind would cook a child.”

The girl’s mother, Eva Mauldin, refused defense attorneys’ requests to testify and lives in Arkansas. A trial to terminate the Mauldins’ parental rights is scheduled for April.

By ARON HELLER, Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM - A mathematical puzzle that baffled the top minds in the esoteric field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades has been cracked — by a 63-year-old immigrant who once had to work as a security guard.
 
Avraham Trahtman, a mathematician who also toiled as a laborer after moving to Israel from Russia, succeeded where dozens failed, solving the elusive “Road Coloring Problem.”

The conjecture essentially assumed it’s possible to create a “universal map” that can direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of starting point. Experts say the proposition could have real-life applications in mapping and computer science.

The “Road Coloring Problem” was first posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss, an Israeli-American mathematician, and a colleague, Roy Adler, who worked at IBM at the time.

For eight years, Weiss tried to prove his theory. Over the next 30 years, some 100 other scientists attempted as well. All failed, until Trahtman came along and, in eight short pages, jotted the solution down in pencil last year.

“The solution is not that complicated. It’s hard, but it is not that complicated,” Trahtman said in heavily accented Hebrew. “Some people think they need to be complicated. I think they need to be nice and simple.”

Weiss said it gave him great joy to see someone solve his problem.

Stuart Margolis, a mathematician who recruited Trahtman to teach at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, called the solution one of the “beautiful results.” But he said what makes the result especially remarkable is Trahtman’s age and background.

“Math is usually a younger person’s game, like music and the arts,” Margolis said. “Usually you do your better work in your mid 20s and early 30s. He certainly came up with a good one at age 63.”

Adding to the excitement is Trahtman’s personal triumph in finally finding work as a mathematician after immigrating from Russia. “The first time I met him he was wearing a night watchman’s uniform,” Margolis said.

Originally from Yekaterinburg, Russia, Trahtman was an accomplished mathematician when he came to Israel in 1992, at age 48. But like many immigrants in the wave that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, he struggled to find work in the Jewish state and was forced into stints working maintenance and security before landing a teaching position at Bar Ilan in 1995.

The soft-spoken Trahtman declined to talk about his odyssey, calling that the “old days.” He said he felt “lucky” to be recognized for his solution, and played down the achievement as a “matter for mathematicians,” saying it hasn’t changed him a bit.

The puzzle tackled by Trahtman wasn’t the longest-standing open problem to be solved recently. In 1994, British mathematician Andrew Wiles solved Fermat’s last theorem, which had been open for more than 300 years.

Trahtman’s solution is available on the Internet and is to be published soon in the Israel Journal of Mathematics.

Joel Friedman, a math professor at the University of British Columbia, said probably everyone in the field of symbolic dynamics had tried to solve the problem at some point, including himself. He said people in the related disciplines of graph theory, discrete math and theoretical computer science also tried.

“The solution to this problem has definitely generated excitement in the mathematical community,” he said in an e-mail.

Margolis said the solution could have many applications.

“Say you’ve lost an e-mail and you want to get it back — it would be guaranteed,” he said. “Let’s say you are lost in a town you have never been in before and you have to get to a friend’s house and there are no street signs — the directions will work no matter what.”

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Five years after launching the U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush is making some of his most expansive claims of success in the fighting there. Bush said last year’s troop buildup has turned Iraq around and produced “the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden.”
Massive anti-war demonstrations were planned in downtown Washington to mark Wednesday’s anniversary of the war, which has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops. Across the river at the Pentagon, Bush was to give a speech to warn that backsliding in recent progress fueled by the increase of 30,000 troops he ordered more than a year ago cannot be allowed.

“The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists’ defeat,” he said in excerpts the White House released Tuesday night. “We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast — the terrorists and extremists step in, fill the vacuum, establish safe havens and use them to spread chaos and carnage.”

Bush added: “The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable, yet some in Washington still call for retreat.”

Democrats took a different view.

“On this grim milestone, it is worth remembering how we got into this situation, and thinking about how best we can get out,” said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. “The tasks that remain in Iraq — to bring an end to sectarian conflict, to devise a way to share political power and to create a functioning government that is capable of providing for the needs of the Iraqi people — are tasks that only the Iraqis can complete.”

The president’s address sought to shift the nation’s focus from economic ills to the security gains in Iraq, part of a series of events the White House planned around the anniversary and an upcoming report from the top U.S. figures in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

Vice President Dick Cheney just completed a two-day visit to view Iraq developments in person. Expected GOP presidential nominee John McCain also went to Iraq this week.

Cheney, asked during an ABC interview about strong opposition in the United States to the continuing war, said he wasn’t worried about that.

“I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls,” he said in a segment of the interview broadcast Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”

Cheney added: “Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succceeded if he hadn’t had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there.”

Before top Pentagon officials and hundreds of others, Bush planned to trace the war’s “high cost in lives and treasure” and thank those who have fought in, planned and assisted the U.S. military effort. In the excerpts, he defended the war as necessary at first, now, and for an undefined future until Iraq is stable enough to stand on its own.

“The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around — it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror,” the president said.

“For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be the place where al-Qaida rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al-Qaida out. In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his terror network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated.”

Bush appeared to be referring to recent cooperation by local Iraqis with the U.S. military against the group known as al-Qaida in Iraq, a mostly homegrown, Sunni-based insurgency. Experts question how closely — or even whether — the group is connected to the international al-Qaida network. As for bin Laden, he is rarely heard from and is believed to be hiding in Pakistan.

Iraq no longer dominates the public debate and tops voters’ concerns. With the economy taking a tumble, things improving by some measures in Iraq and much attention riveted on the 2008 presidential race, Iraq has faded from the front burner.

Bush has successfully defied efforts by the Democratic-led Congress to force troop withdrawals or set deadlines for pullouts. The U.S. has about 158,000 troops in Iraq. That number is expected to drop to 140,000 by summer in drawdowns meant to erase all but about 8,000 troops from last year’s increase.

It is widely believed that Bush will in April endorse a recommendation from Petraeus for no additional troop reductions, beyond those already scheduled, until at least September. This so-called pause in drawdowns would be designed to assess the impact of this round of withdrawals before allowing more that could jeopardize the gains.

The surge was meant to tamp down sectarian violence in Iraq so that the country’s leaders would have space to advance legislation considered key to reconciliation between rival Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities. The idea is that such political progress would weaken or even end the still-potent insurgency.

But the gains on the battlefield have not been matched by political progress, and violence may be increasing again. The Iraqis do not yet have a law for sharing the nation’s oil wealth. Also unfinished is a plan for new provincial elections.

As of Monday, at least 3,990 members of the U.S. military have died in Iraq. More than 29,000 U.S. service members have been injured in the war, which has cost the U.S. roughly $500 billion.

By Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — When U.S. forces crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq in the pre-dawn hours of March 20, 2003 , the military set out to shock and awe the Middle East with the swiftest transformation the region had ever seen.
Five years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, it’s the U.S. military that’s been transformed. The efficient, tech-savvy Army , built, armed and trained to fight conventional wars against aggressor states, is now making deals with tribal sheiks and building its power on friendly conversations with civilians.

Instead of planning for quick, decisive battles against other nations, as it was five years ago, today’s American military is planning for protracted, nuanced conflicts with terrorist groups, insurgents, guerrillas, militias and other shadowy forces that seldom stand and fight.

The staples of American military doctrine that have developed since the Civil War — artillery, armor, air power, speed and overwhelming force— are of limited use against enemies who blend into civilian populations.

Five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq , the military is being reconfigured to fight insurgencies, but its evolution has been an unplanned, improvised affair, a series of course corrections in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . Some changes have been simply last-ditch efforts to stop the violence against Iraqis and U.S. troops, and some say the changes impair the military’s ability to fight a conventional war against a “peer competitor.”

Divisions are dispersed into what the military calls a more modular Army so smaller units can be moved throughout Iraq . The military has rolled out new vehicles to thwart high-powered explosives. It’s set up new training centers and given captains and colonels far more leeway to lead at the local level, not simply follow a general’s orders.

Pentagon leaders call this the military of the future.

“Clearly the training now is almost exclusively focused on COIN (counterinsurgency) because that’s the fight we are in. And it will continue that way as long as the fight stays at the level that it is,” said Adm. Michael Mullen , chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview with McClatchy .

In the last five years, the military has gained “speed, agility (and) flexibility that . . . we didn’t have as a much heavier force” a few years ago, Mullen said.

It’s a big departure from the transformation that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld promised in the months leading up to the war. Under his plan, the Army would be smaller and rely more on precision air attacks and the latest technology.

Indeed, the war in Iraq was supposed to last a few weeks. The U.S. would dispatch the Iraqi military, overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, install a new government led by Iraqi exiles and introduce freedom, democracy and a market economy.

Within days, however, the U.S. lost control. Looters took to the streets, and an insurgency took root. The U.S. installed an American occupation government and tried to secure a hostile nation rather than a grateful one.

Back then, there was little talk of counterinsurgency. But the new Army Field Manual puts counterinsurgency on a par with conventional war. “Winning battles and engagements is important but alone is not sufficient,” it states. “Shaping the civil situation is just as important to success.”

But while the Army has intellectually embraced counterinsurgency, it hasn’t said how it will build a force that can fight both conventional wars and counterinsurgency campaigns. How should it train its soldiers? What kind of enemy will the U.S. face? So far, military leaders cannot agree on those fundamental questions.

By adopting a new mode of warfare, “the Army is a python that has just swallowed a pig,” said a U.S. Army officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more candidly. “It’s not clear to me it understands how hard the digestion process is going to be.”

“The Army is going to have to build organizations optimized to do (post-combat) stability operations, and that’s not what this Army wants to do,” the officer added.

Lt. Col. John Nagl , who co-authored the U.S. military’s 2006 counterinsurgency manual with Gen. David Petraeus , now the top American military commander in Iraq , questions whether the Army is serious about counterinsurgency.

“The real question is: How does the Army react to the (new field manual)? Can the Army transform itself to be as effective as possible in future battles, which are going to look a lot like Iraq and Afghanistan ?” Nagl said in an interview with McClatchy .

Some think that Iraq is a temporary problem and that the U.S. shouldn’t engage in nation-building, as called for under counterinsurgency strategy.

Some think the Army isn’t prepared for both kinds of war. Pete Geren , the secretary of the Army , testified on Capitol Hill last month that as the Army steps up counterinsurgency training, it’s losing its conventional war skills.

“Our goal is full-spectrum readiness. And right now we’re— we’re not able to claim that,” Geren said. “We are not able to properly organize, train and equip for the rest of the spectrum of operations.”

Gen. George Casey , the Army chief of staff, has repeatedly warned that the Army is strained by having 160,000 troops in Iraq . Other Army leaders estimate that the U.S. must reduce its deployment to 12 combat brigades from the current 18 or find itself at the “breaking point.”

The war in Iraq has required some soldiers to serve multiple tours of up to 15 months and to remain in uniform longer than they signed up for. Before the war started, soldiers generally served six-month tours in combat zones.

Mullen acknowledged the friction between counterinsurgency and conventional warfare.

“I think that (tension) will be constructive, and actually with what we learned through counterinsurgency, potentially very creative tension as we move to the next several years to get back to a broader spectrum of training.”

The military’s embrace of counterinsurgency came only in the last 18 months as soldiers noted measurable security improvements in Iraq . In the early years of the war, only a handful of military commanders spoke of the importance of economic development, respecting civilians and employing military might cautiously.

Back then, many ridiculed using “soft power” against what they considered a ruthless enemy. Soldiers said they were in Iraq to fight.

These days in Iraq , soldiers say they’re likely to spend the rest of their careers in places such as Iraq , reaching out to civilians and fighting major battles only occasionally. Instead of generals giving orders from behind the front lines, captains and colonels will be forced to adapt as they maneuver through local, tribal politics. And many soldiers say those mid-level leaders will base their decisions on their experiences in Iraq .

Sgt. John Pierce Senkarik , 25, of 1st Brigade, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, is serving in Diyala province, and could be one of them. Senkarik, of Pensacola, Fla. , comes from a family imbued with military history, and he once thought he’d fight the same kind of battles his forebears did. But since he signed up, he said, he’s seen a transformation within the Army .

Senkarik, who’s serving his second tour in Iraq , said he plans to stay in the military so the Army can capitalize on his experiences there.

“The Army is filled with junior leaders and middle-level leaders who have a vast amount of combat experience in counterinsurgency, in urban combat,” he said. Mid-level officers will lead and be “responsible for the up-and-coming Army .”

( Steve Lannen of the Lexington Herald-Leader contributed from Diyala province, Iraq .)

HONOLULU - Some investigative work by a New York couple has led to return of a McKinley High School ring 33 years after it was lost on Waikiki. McKinley alumnus Bernard Yuen had given his 1973 class ring to a girlfriend in 1975.

The girl had left the black onyx ring on a beach towel, but then forgot about it when she picked up the towel.

Brian and Jodi Sheley of Adams Center, N.Y., got the ring from an uncle from Hawaii years ago and used the Internet to track down Yuen, whose initials BJKY were inscribed on the ring. They speculate it was found by someone with a metal detector.

The Sheleys, who told their story to WNYF-TV in New York on Valentine’s Day, used the Internet to find McKinley and the 1973 class president who was a friend of Yuen and recognized the initials.

The girlfriend has moved to California, and Yuen is married to someone else.

But he’s got the ring back.