Negligence

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. ordered a detailed inquiry yesterday of purchasing irregularities at the Maryland Port Administration that resulted in a computer company receiving $1.2 million since 1995 without submitting a competitive bid for the work. "This is terrible negligence here," Ehrlich said. State transportation officials say they only recently discovered problems surrounding an agreement between the port and a computer services vendor, Gaithersburg-based Global eXchange Services, which has operated a component of a cargo tracking system since 1995.

Three survivors of the fatal Seaport Taxi tragedy in March filed a $17 million lawsuit yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court, alleging that the owner and operator of the Lady D were "negligent and careless" by ordering the vessel into the choppy waters of the city harbor during an impending storm. In their suit, Thomas Pierce, 60, of New Jersey, who lost his wife and daughter in the accident, and Eric Jahnsen, 25, and Sarah Kernagis, 23, of North Carolina, said that the boat owner, the nonprofit Living Classrooms Foundation, and the operator, Baltimore Harbor Shuttle, could have prevented the March 6 accident.

A 19-year-old Baltimore woman is suing Harbor Hospital, charging that it lost, misfiled and failed to read a critical X-ray, delaying the diagnosis of what she says is now a terminal cancer. Harbor Hospital officials said they could not comment because the matter is in litigation. In the malpractice suit filed this week in Baltimore City Circuit Court, Britney Bownes and her mother, Joyce Oliver, contend that radiologists at Harbor Hospital's family-care clinic misfiled an X-ray of Bownes' left knee that was taken when she visited the clinic March 30, 2001.

ALGIERS, Algeria - Algerians largely ignored allegations of vote tampering yesterday and heralded the landslide re-election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as their first genuinely free and competitive election since gaining independence in 1962. Thursday's vote had been widely watched in the Middle East as a test of whether Africa's second-largest country could rediscover a path of democratization after a civil war that claimed an estimated 120,000 lives. When they awoke yesterday, many Algerians were surprised to discover that the powerful military establishment had held to its pledge of neutrality, breaking a long tradition of anointing the president.

Two families are suing Howard County General Hospital, alleging that negligence by the institution - and mistakes made by its doctors - contributed to the violent deaths of their children during separate incidents in 2001. Kevin Allen Virgil, who committed suicide after shooting at his girlfriend and barricading himself in his Ellicott City apartment, and Benjamin Morgan Hawkes, who fatally stabbed and bludgeoned his mother and a teen-ager staying at their Ellicott City home, had been treated at the hospital for psychiatric ailments within days of the violence.

A woman treated last year at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center filed a malpractice claim against the hospital yesterday, saying an intern had "negligently" cut an artery in her neck while trying to establish intravenous access. According to the lawsuit, Dezirea M. Claxton of Baltimore visited Bayview's emergency department Nov. 5 and was admitted for further tests and treatment. Several days later, two physicians examined the 49-year-old in her room and said they had to place a catheter in a vein in her neck because they couldn't use those in her arms.

The company that makes the controversial ephedra-based diet supplement Xenadrine RFA-1 has filed a motion to include the Orioles as a third-party defendant in the $600 million lawsuit brought by the widow of Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler. Nutraquest, formerly known as Cytodyne Industries, hopes to establish that the team was responsible for Bechler's death from heatstroke, though Broward County (Fla.) medical examiner Joshua Perper pointed to his ingestion of three Xenadrine capsules before a spring training workout as one of the major contributing factors in the tragedy.

An Anne Arundel County jury in the malpractice case against pediatrician Stephen A. Liverman found yesterday Liverman's medical practice, Pediatric Consultants of Annapolis, liable for some of the $6.4 million in damages. Jurors, who last week found Liverman negligent in the 1992 treatment of Crofton newborn Patrick Shea, reconvened yesterday to determine whether Pediatric Consultants of Annapolis should be held responsible for a portion of the award. The jury had found Liverman and Anne Arundel Medical Center liable for damages last week.

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - Two Marines here negligent-homicide charges in the death of an Iraqi prisoner who had been left alone with other prisoners in that country after being interrogated, Marine officers said yesterday. Six other Marines are charged with hitting and kicking prisoners and then lying about their behavior to military investigators. All eight belong to the 2nd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. Maj. Clark A. Paulus and Lance Cpl. Christian Hernandez face negligent-homicide charges in the death of a 52-year-old Iraqi prisoner found dead in June at a prisoner camp run by the 1st Marine Division near the central Iraqi town of Nasiriyah.

WASHINGTON - The accident that flooded the Quecreek mine in Pennsylvania last summer, riveting the nation to a rescue mission that saved nine miners, could have been avoided if the mining companies had realized they were using out-of-date maps, federal safety investigators said yesterday. Two mining companies and a surveying company were negligent for relying on an inaccurate map of an adjacent, flooded mine that had been abandoned 30 years earlier, according to the report issued by the investigators from the Department of Labor.