Quake

ABOARD THE USNS COMFORT - -The Navy's Baltimore-based hospital ship arrived close enough to Haiti to take aboard its first patients Tuesday night - providing urgent care to two severely injured quake victims transported from an aircraft carrier near Port-au-Prince. Doctors were treating a 20-year-old man suffering from a spinal fracture and bleeding in the brain and a 6-year-old boy with a fractured pelvis. The patients were brought aboard well before the ship reached its destination and hours after the crew had finished its latest round of training exercises.

Free-agent shortstop Miguel Tejada has traveled to Haiti to help the victims of last week's devastating earthquake. Tejada, a six-time All-Star and former Oriole, arranged for a van full of food, water and medicine to be taken to Port-au-Prince on Sunday, and the Dominican Republic native took a helicopter to the Haitian capital. An estimated 100,000 or more people have died in Tuesday's magnitude-7.0 quake. Pro basketball: The Maryland GreenHawks (1-4) lost their home opener, 124-114, to the Buffalo Stampede in a Premier Basketball League game Saturday night at Wootton High School.

The horrific images of collapsed buildings and rows of decomposing bodies lying in the streets of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, have left no doubt as to the magnitude of the human catastrophe that occurred there. One of the worst natural disasters this hemisphere has seen in recent memory, the most powerful earthquake to strike Haiti in 200 years, has hit squarely in the nation least able to cope with it. Haiti has long been the poorest nation in the Americas, and years of dictatorship and corruption have made it especially vulnerable to such a calamity and unable to recover on its own. Within hours of Tuesday's quake, President Barack Obama pledged to assist in the massive international relief effort now under way. Owing to Haiti's proximity and the country's long historical ties to America, it's clear the U.S. must take the lead in search-and-rescue operations and in the reconstruction of Haiti's devastated infrastructure.

Orioles outfielder Felix Pie said he immediately felt a deep sadness when he heard about Tuesday's catastrophic earthquake that rocked Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His emotions quickly turned to worry for his extended family, many of whom live in the Caribbean nation that is considered the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. "It's very sad, and you start, like, worrying. I know my mom has family in Haiti and my pop, too," Pie said. "But my mom called me and told me not to worry, that my family over there is OK. And my pop called me to tell me the same thing."

ONNA, Italy - The calls from America kept coming, but Paolo Paolucci's answer stayed the same: "Gabriella is dead." A sigh, a gasp and, in the near distance, the sounds of hands and machines digging at the stone, mortar and splintered wood of broken homes and crumpled buildings scattered for miles in eerie heaps beneath mountains thick with snow. Paolucci's elderly mother and his sister, Gabriella, were two of the dead as the toll from Monday's magnitude 6.3 earthquake rose to 235. Fifteen people remained missing.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Rescue teams and family members searched frantically for survivors late yesterday in a string of villages in southwestern Pakistan where at least 170 people were killed by a powerful earthquake. Thousands of people were left homeless by the predawn temblor in the rural area, where many residents live in mud-brick homes that collapsed with the force of the magnitude 6.4 quake. Authorities said the death toll could rise as rescuers enter remote villages that had been cut off by landslides.