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A gunman coolly drew a weapon from his pocket and opened fire at a Pentagon security checkpoint on Thursday in a point-blank attack that wounded two police officers before the suspect was fatally shot.

The two officers suffered grazing wounds and were being treated in a hospital, said Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police. The shooter, identified as John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., died hours after being admitted to a hospital in critical condition, authorities said. They had no motive for the shooting.

There were signs, however, that Bedell may have resented the military and had doubts about the facts behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the back yard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a coverup.

The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., for cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

The shooter walked up to the checkpoint at the Pentagon’s subway entrance in an apparent attempt to get inside the fortified Defense Department headquarters. “He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” no more than five feet away, Keevill said. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.” The Pentagon officers returned fire with semiautomatic weapons.

NBC News reported that one of the wounded officers was shot in the leg and the other was hit in the shoulder.

Bedell’s death was confirmed early Friday by Beverly Fields, chief of staff of the D.C. medical examiner’s office; and Leigh Fields, medical legal investigator for the office. Both said Bedell’s body had arrived at the medical examiner’s office.

The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon — the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 — came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings. In the immediate aftermath Thursday, investigators did not think terrorism was involved but were not ruling that out and did not discuss possible motives.

President Barack Obama was closely following the case with updates from the FBI through his homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Bedell, 36. They also said they were speaking with a second man, who might have accompanied the shooter, and were running his name through databases. Hard money training.

The 40 retirees enjoying summer vacation at a seaside campground nestled under pine trees knew they had to move fast after Chile’s powerful earthquake struck.

They didn’t make it. The tsunami came in three waves, surging 200 yards into this Pacific Ocean resort town and dragging away the bus they’d piled into, hoping to get to high ground. Most of those inside were tourists, and only five of their bodies had been found by Monday, firefighters and witnesses said.

Pelluhue’s horror underscored the destruction wrought by Saturday’s pre-dawn 8.8-magnitude quake and the tsunami that ravaged communities along Chile’s south-central coast — those closest to the quake’s epicenter. Chile’s death toll reached 723, and most died in the wine-growing Maule region that includes Pelluhue.

Survivors here found about 20 bodies, and an estimated 300 homes were destroyed. Most residents were aware of the tsunami threat; street signs pointed to the nearest tsunami evacuation route. The ruins of homes, television sets, clothes, dishwaters and dead fish cover the town’s black sand beaches.

“We ran through the highest part of town, yelling, ‘Get out of your homes!’” said Claudio Escalona, 43, who fled his home near the campground with his wife and daughters, ages 4 and 6. “About 20 minutes later came three waves, two of them huge, about 18 feet each, and a third even bigger. That one went into everything.”

“You could hear the screams of children, women, everyone,” Escalona said. “There were the screams, and then a tremendous silence.”

Destruction is widespread and food scarce all along the coast — in towns like Talca and Cauquenes, Curico and San Javier. In Curanipe, the local church served as a morgue. In Cauquenes, people quickly buried their dead because the funeral home had no electricity.

President Michelle Bachelet said authorities were flying hundreds of tons of food, water and other basics into the region.

After the quake rocked the gritty port town of Talcahuano, Marioli Gatica and her extended family huddled in a circle on the floor of their seaside wooden home, listening to the radio by a lantern’s light.

They heard firefighters urging citizens to stay calm and stay inside. They heard nothing about a tsunami — until it slammed into their house with an unearthly roar. Gatica’s house exploded with water. The family was swept below the surface, swirling amid loose ship containers and other heavy debris that smashed buildings into oblivion all around them.

“We were sitting there one moment and the next I looked up into the water and saw cables and furniture floating,” Gatica said.

Two of the giant containers crushed Gatica’s home. A third grounded between the ocean and where she floated, keeping the retreating tsunami from dragging her and other relatives out to sea. Her 11-year-old daughter, Ninoska Elgueta, clung to a tree as the wave retreated.

All the family survived except Gatica’s 76-year-old mother, Nery Valdebenito, Gatica said. “I think my mother is trapped beneath” the house.

Firefighters with search dogs examined the ruins of her home. The group leader drew his finger across his neck: No one alive there.

Close to 80 percent of Talcahuano’s 180,000 people are homeless, with 10,000 homes uninhabitable and hundreds more destroyed, Mayor Gaston Saavedra said.

“The port is destroyed. The streets, collapsed. City buildings, destroyed,” Saavedra said.

In Concepcion, the biggest city near the epicenter, rescuers drilled through thick concrete to look for survivors trapped inside a toppled 70-unit apartment building. Firefighters had pulled 25 survivors and nine bodies from the structure.

Chile’s defense minister has said the navy made a mistake by not immediately activating a tsunami warning. He said port captains who did call warnings in several coastal towns saved hundreds of lives.

In the village of Dichato, teenagers drinking on the beach were the first to shout the warning when they saw a horseshoe-shaped bay empty about an hour after the quake. They ran through the streets, screaming. Police joined them, using megaphones. Hard money training.

Police fired tear gas and imposed an overnight curfew to control looters who sacked virtually every market in this hard-hit city as Chile’s earthquake toll surpassed 700. President Michelle Bachelet promised imminent deliveries of food, water and shelter for thousands living on the streets.

“We are confronting an emergency without parallel in Chile’s history,” Bachelet declared Sunday, a day after the magnitude-8.8 quake — one of the biggest in centuries — killed at least 708 people and destroyed or badly damaged 500,000 homes. Bachelet said “a growing number” of people were recorded as missing.

In Concepcion, 320 miles (515 kilometers) south of Santiago, firefighters pulling survivors from a toppled apartment building had to pause because of tear gas fired at looters who wheeled away everything from microwave ovens to canned milk at a damaged supermarket across the street.

Ingenious looters used long tubes of bamboo and plastic to siphon gasoline from underground tanks at a closed gasoline station.

Eduardo Aundez, a Spanish professor, watched with disgust as a soldier patiently waited for looters to rummage through a downtown store, then lobbed two tear gas canisters into the rubble to get them out.

“I feel abandoned” by authorities, he said. “We believe the government didn’t take the necessary measures in time, and now supplies of food and water are going to be much more complicated.”

Looters even carted off pieces of a copper statue of South American independence fighter Bernardo O’Higgins next to a justice building.

Efforts to determine the full scope of destruction were undermined by an endless string of terrifying aftershocks that turned more buildings into rubble — and forced thousands to set up tents in parks and grassy highway medians.

“If you’re inside your house, the furniture moves,” said Monica Aviles, pulling a shawl around her shoulders to ward off the cold as she sat next to a fire across the street from her apartment building.

As if to punctuate her fear, an aftershock set off shuddering and groaning sounds for blocks around.

“That’s why we’re here,” she said.

In another part of the city, eight Peruvian families shared a four-story building — the bravest living inside the cracked building, the others in tents out front.

“We’ve received help from the neighbors, from passing taxis and from other people who have offered us a coat or something to eat,” said Samantha Fernandez, who offered space to boyfriend Jose Luis Jacinto after he fled his room during after the quake.

Bachelet signed a decree giving the military control over security in the provinces of Concepcion and Maule and announced a 9 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew for all non-emergency workers.

She ordered troops to help deliver food, water and blankets and clear rubble from roads, and she urged power companies to restore service first to hospitals, health clinics and shelters. Field hospitals were planned for hard-hit Concepcion, Talca and Curico.

Bachelet also ordered authorities to quickly identify the dead and return them to their families to ensure “the dignified burials that they deserve.”

Bachelet, who leaves office March 11, said Chile needs field hospitals and temporary bridges, water purification plants and damage assessment experts — as well as rescuers to help relieve exhausted workers.

Defense Minister Francisco Vidal acknowledged the navy made a mistake by not immediately activating a tsunami warning after the quake hit before dawn Saturday. Port captains in several coastal towns did, saving what Vidal called hundreds of lives. Thirty minutes passed between the quake and a wave that inundated coastal towns.

The quake damaged houses, bridges and highways in Santiago, the capital, though a few flights managed to land at the airport and subway service resumed. Concepcion’s airport remained closed to commercial traffic.

Rescuers searched for an estimated 60 people trapped inside a new, 15-story apartment building that toppled onto its side in Concepcion. Firefighters were lowering a rescuer deep into the rubble when tear gas fired at looters across the street forced them to pause their efforts.

Police officer Jorge Guerra took names of the missing from tearful relatives and friends.

“There are people alive. There are several people who are going to be rescued,” he said — though the next people pulled from the wreckage were dead.

The sound of chain saws, power drills and sledgehammers mixed with the whoosh of a water cannon fired at looters and the shouts of crowds that found new ways into a four-story supermarket each time police retreated. Some looters threw rocks at armored police vehicles outside the Lider market, which is majority-owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Across the Bio Bio River in the city of San Pedro, looters cleared out a shopping mall. A video store was set ablaze, two automatic teller machines were broken open, a bank was robbed and a supermarket emptied, its floor littered with mashed plums, scattered dog food and smashed liquor bottles.

“They looted everything,” said police Sgt. Rene Gutierrez, 46. “Now we’re only here to protect the building — what’s left of the building.”

The quake generated waves that lashed coastal settlements, leaving behind sticks, scraps of metal and masonry houses ripped in two. A beachside carnival in the village of Lloca was swamped in the tsunami. A carousel was twisted on its side and a Ferris wheel rose above the muddy wreckage. Adobe buildings in Talca’s town center were flattened.

State television showed scenes of devastation in coastal towns and on Robinson Crusoe Island, where it said the tsunami drove almost 2 miles (3 kilometers) into the town of San Juan Bautista. Officials said at least five people were killed there and more were missing.

Bus terminals overflowed with vacationers in Chile’s provinces trying to check on their homes. Chile’s summer vacation period ends Monday.

In Washington, the State Department urged Americans to avoid tourist and other nonessential travel to Chile. U.S. citizens in Chile were asked to contact family and friends in the United States, whether by telephone, Internet or cell-phone text messaging.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton planned to briefly visit Santiago on Tuesday as part of a five-nation Latin America trip. Hard money training.

Ten U.S. Baptist missionaries were charged with kidnapping Thursday for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti to a hastily arranged refuge just as officials were trying to protect children from predators in the chaos of a great earthquake.

The Haitian lawyer who represents the 10 Americans portrayed nine of his clients as innocents caught up in a scheme they did not understand. But attorney Edwin Coq did not defend the actions of the group leader, Laura Silsby, though he continued to represent her.

“I’m going to do everything I can to get the nine out. They were naive. They had no idea what was going on and they did not know that they needed official papers to cross the border,” Coq said. “But Silsby did.”

The Americans, most members of two Idaho churches, said they were rescuing abandoned children and orphans from a nation that UNICEF says had 380,000 even before the catastrophic Jan. 12 quake.

But at least two-thirds of the children, who range in age from 2 to 12, have parents who gave them away because they said the Americans promised the children a better life.

The investigating judge, who interviewed the missionaries Tuesday and Wednesday, found sufficient evidence to charge them for trying to take the children across the border into the Dominican Republic on Jan. 29 without documentation, Coq said.

Each was charged with one count of kidnapping, which carries a sentence of five to 15 years in prison, and one of criminal association, punishable by three to nine years. Coq said the case would be assigned a judge and a verdict could take three months.

The magistrate, Mazard Fortil, left without making a statement. Social Affairs Minister Jeanne Bernard Pierre, who has harshly criticized the missionaries, refused to comment. The government’s communications minister, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, said only that the next court date had not been set.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said the U.S. government was still waiting for a report from its Embassy.

“But the 10 are accused of violating Haitian law and the case is proceeding under Haitian law through a transparent judicial process,” Duguid said.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. was open to discuss “other legal avenues” for the defendants, an apparent reference to the Haitian prime minister’s earlier suggestion that Haiti could consider sending the Americans back to the United States for prosecution.

But it’s unlikely the Americans could be tried back home, according to Christopher J. Schmidt, an expert on international child kidnapping law in St. Louis, Mo. U.S. statutes may not even apply, he said, since the children never crossed an international border.

Silsby waved and smiled faintly to reporters but declined to answer questions as the Baptists were whisked away from the closed court hearing back to the holding cells where they have been held since Saturday. People rendered homeless by the quake sat idly under tarps in the parking lot, smoke rising from a cooking fire.

Coq complained about conditions at the judicial police lockup where the Americans were being held. He said they are sleeping on the floor without blankets and aren’t being provided with adequate food. He said he had delivered pizza and sandwiches.

Silsby had already been planning to create an orphanage for Haitian children in the Dominican Republic. When the earthquake struck she recruited other church members to help kick her plans into high gear. The 10 Americans rushed to Haiti and spent a week gathering children for their project.

Most of the children came from the quake-ravaged village of Callebas, where residents told The Associated Press that they handed over their children to the Americans because they were unable to feed or clothe them after the earthquake. They said the missionaries promised to educate the children and let relatives visit.

Their stories contradicted Silsby’s account that the children came from collapsed orphanages or were handed over by distant relatives. She said the Americans believed they had all the paperwork needed — documents she said she obtained in the Dominican Republic — to take the children out of Haiti.

“They are very precious kids that have lost their homes and families and are so deeply in need of, most of all, God’s love and his compassion,” she told the AP in a jailhouse interview Saturday.

The assistant pastor of Silsby’s church in Meridian, Idaho, said neither Central Valley Baptist Church nor any of the missionaries’ relatives had any comment about the decision to charge the Americans. Drew Ham had defended the missionaries on Wednesday, saying they were putting the childrens’ interests first at a time of chaos.

The children are being cared for at the Austrian-run SOS Children’s Village in Port-au-Prince. An official there, Patricia Vargas, said none of the children who are old enough to talk have said they were orphans. Hard money training.

The U.S. government said on Sunday it would resume military evacuation flights to the United States for badly injured Haitian earthquake victims after a four-day suspension over cost and treatment questions.

The White House said the flights were expected to begin again within 12 hours. Medical workers in Haiti had said the suspension put seriously injured patients at risk.

“Having received assurances that additional capacity exists both here and among our international partners, we determined that we can resume these critical flights,” White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement.

In another headache for U.S. officials, 10 Americans face a court hearing in Port-au-Prince on Monday after their arrest on suspicion of trafficking children.

The five men and five women from an Idaho-based charity deny wrongdoing after they were arrested trying to take 33 children to the neighboring Dominican Republic without documents proving adoptions had taken place or that the children were orphaned by the quake.

On a more positive note, food distribution to quake survivors, which has been chaotic at times in recent weeks, went more smoothly on Sunday using a coupon system that targeted women as recipients of the rations.

Nearly three weeks after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed up to 200,000 Haitians and left up to 1 million more homeless, a huge U.S.-led international relief operation has been struggling to help injured and hungry survivors.

Hundreds of patients have already been evacuated to the United States for treatment, most to Florida hospitals. But Florida’s governor had asked the federal government to share the burden, triggering a halt in the Medevac flights.

The White House statement on Sunday said patients were being identified for transfer, doctors were making sure it was safe for them to fly and that pediatric care was being prepared aboard the aircraft where needed.

The state of Florida is identifying hospitals to receive the patients, Vietor added.

He said Haiti’s government had estimated there were more than 200,000 injuries from the January 12 quake.

CHILD TRAFFICKING FEARS

Haitian authorities have held the 10 Americans from the New Life Children’s Refuge group in custody in Port-au-Prince since their arrest late on Friday at the Malpasse border crossing with the Dominican Republic.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the Americans could face serious accusation.

“We did not arrest Americans, we arrested kidnappers,” Bellerive told Reuters. “We just hope that the people were acting in good faith and that they were doing what they were doing to try to help the children.”

Laura Silsby, a leader of the Idaho group, told CNN, “The truth ultimately is that we came here to help the children, and we know that God will reveal truth.” She earlier told Reuters the group had permission from the Dominican Republic to bring the children to an orphanage there.

The children have been taken to an orphanage in Haiti run by international aid group SOS Children’s Villages.

“All these children had no papers, no passports or anything and as the children came to us they were hungry, they were thirsty and the little baby was really dehydrated,” orphanage head George Willard said.

Bellerive told CNN in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he was worried about the risk of illegal adoptions and child trafficking. “We have already reports of a lot of trafficking (of children) and even of organ trafficking,” he said, while citing no specific cases.

A coupon-based system to feed the masses of homeless earthquake victims was expanded in Port-au-Prince on Sunday.

More than 200 U.S. troops fanned out around a sprawling refugee camp in the capital’s Champs de Mars plaza at dawn for the distribution of 1,650 bags of rice.

The rice was given only to women who had received numbered coupons from relief workers who had identified those most in need in the sprawling camp, said Jacques Montouroy of the Catholic Relief Services group running the distribution.

“You have to install discipline. … This is the only way for food to trickle down to everybody,” said Montouroy.

In recent weeks, some food handouts turned unruly and violent, with mobs of hungry, desperate quake survivors overwhelming aid workers and their U.N. peacekeeper escorts. Hard money training.

Haiti’s government has declared the search and rescue phase for survivors of the earthquake over, the United Nations said Saturday, with little hope of finding more people alive 10 days after much of the capital was reduced to rubble.

The statement from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs comes the day after an Israeli team reported pulling a man out of the debris of a two-story home and relatives said an elderly woman had been rescued.

Spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said she was unable to comment on the rescue reports. But she said the government’s Friday afternoon decision didn’t mean rescue teams still searching for survivors would be stopped from carrying out whatever work they felt necessary.

“It doesn’t mean the government will order them to stop. In case there is the slightest sign of life, they will act,” she told The Associated Press.

She added, however, that “except for miracles, hope is unfortunately fading.”

Some 132 people were pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams since the Jan. 12 disaster, she said. Humanitarian relief efforts are still being scaled up in the capital Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, Leogane and other areas affected by the quake, Byrs said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said Saturday no decision had yet been taken to halt their search and rescue operations.

The Israeli delegation was initially intended to be in Haiti for two weeks. However the spokeswoman, who could not be named citing military regulations, said it was continuously assessing the situation to see whether they should continue or not.

The 7.0-magnitude quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. Countless dead remained buried in thousands of collapsed and toppled buildings in Port-au-Prince, while as many as 200,000 have fled the city of 2 million, the U.S. Agency for International Development reported.

About 609,000 people are homeless in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, and the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million people could leave Haiti’s destroyed cities for rural areas already struggling with extreme poverty.

On Saturday, some are expected to gather for the funeral of the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, near the ruins of his cathedral.

Far away, celebrities and artists made impassioned pleas Fridaycelebrities for charitable donations during an internationally broadcast telethon.

“The Haitian people need our help,” said George Clooney, who helped organize the two-hour telecast. “They need to know that they are not alone. They need to know that we still care.”

Scores of aid organizations, big and small, have stepped up deliveries of food, water, medical supplies and other aid to the homeless and other needy in seaside city. But obstacles remained at every turn to getting help into people’s hands.

“I want to leave but I don’t have any money. I don’t know where to go,” said Demonere Mirlande, a 33-year-old mother who lost her home but survived along with her three young children.

‘I felt the house dancing around me’
On Friday, the Israeli team that rescued 21-year-old Emmannuel Buso said relatives approached asking for help. They pulled away the debris of a two-story home and called out. To everyone’s surprise, Buso responded.

The slender student and tailor with deep-set eyes emerged so ghostly white that his mother told rescuers she thought he was a corpse. In an interview with The Associated Press, he described coming out of the shower when the quake hit.

“I felt the house dancing around me,” Buso said from a bed in an Israeli field hospital. “I didn’t know if I was up or down.”

He told of passing out in the rubble, dreaming at times that he could hear his mother crying. The furniture in his room had collapsed around him in such a way that it created a small space for him amid the ruins of the house. He had no food. When he got desperately thirsty, he drank his urine.

“I am here today because God wants it,” Buso said. Hard money training.

Haitian officials are planning a massive relocation of 400,000 people from makeshift camps to the outskirts of the capital as the U.S. government tackles repairs to the damaged main port — dual efforts to help residents survive the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake.

The plan to temporarily relocate thousands is aimed at staving off the spread of disease at hundreds of squalid settlements across the city where homeless families have no sanitation and live under tents, tarps or nothing at all.

“They are going to be going to places where they will have at least some adequate facilities,” Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President Rene Preval, said Thursday. He said the mass relocations could start by the end of the month.

The announcement came as hope faded for finding more survivors of the Jan. 12 quake in its rubble and some rescue crews began packing up. Relief workers focused squarely on keeping survivors alive.

To that end, the U.S. Army, Navy and Coast Guard are looking to repair the Haitian capital’s only functional industrial pier, which is key to the country’s receipt of massive aid shipments. Officials say success of the project, which involves underwater construction teams and Navy divers surveying the damage, also is critical to the nation’s long-term recovery.

Only four ships have been able to dock at the partially damaged pier since the earthquake. Unloading is lengthy and difficult because 15-inch wide cracks run through the dock, allowing only one truck to drive on it at a time. The port’s cranes now tip dangerously into the sea or were rendered useless.

The damage is so extensive that the military has no way of telling how long it will take before ships can dock and unload in large quantities.

“I wouldn’t even ask my workers to risk it, I don’t trust it,” said Georges Jeager Junior, a businessman who plans to shift his port operations to Cap Haitien, the country’s remote second city far to the north. The change means goods will have to be driven at least 12 hours overland on Haiti’s horrendous roads to reach the capital. Because of this, Jeager Junior expects prices to soar for at least a year. He predicts that rice, for instance, would more than triple from its pre-quake prices, to $100 for a 50 kilogram (110 pound) bag.

Other port issues are hampering fuel shipments. The quake damaged a privately owned sea terminal on the edge of Cite Soleil, considered Haiti’s most dangerous slum, that serves as the nation’s main oil terminal. Supervisor Dominique Cineas said about a quarter of the terminal’s infrastructure was destroyed, and no tanker has been able to land since the quake. A long line of tanker trucks drew down dwindling reserves.

The troubles at the port and other built-in bottlenecks into this desperately poor, damaged nation have left many of the hundreds of thousands of victims desperate.

On the waterfront Thursday, sporadic rounds of gunfire rang out from the nearby downtown commercial area. Scavengers continued to rampage through collapsed and burning shops even though U.S. troops were patrolling.

At a building in the Carrefour neighborhood, where the multi-faith Eagle Wings Foundation of West Palm Beach, Florida, was to distribute food, stick-wielding quake victims from a nearby tent camp stormed the stores and made off with what the charity’s Rev. Robert Nelson said were 50 tons of rice, oil, dried beans and salt. Fights broke out as others stole food from the looters.

Haiti’s government estimated a toll of 200,000 dead, as reported by the European Commission. It said 250,000 people were injured and 2 million homeless in the nation of 9 million.

At the south of the bay, near the earthquake’s epicenter, Navy and Coast Guards have set up a triage center amid the rusting motorboats, with dozens of military doctors treating the most urgent casualties on the lawn.

“The injured seem to just keep showing up,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chris Worth. “We’ve been working from dawn to dusk since getting here.”

Emergency medical centers elsewhere had dire shortages of surgeons, nurses, their tools and supplies have backed up critical cases.

Doctors said patients were dying of sepsis from untreated wounds and they warned of potential outbreaks of diarrhea, respiratory-tract infections and other communicable diseases in the hundreds of makeshift camps. A team of epidemiologists was on its way to assess that situation, the Pan American Health Organization said.

“A large number of those coming here are having to have amputations, since their wounds are so infected,” said Brynjulf Ystgaard, a Norwegian surgeon at a Red Cross field hospital.

Across Port-au-Prince, food was reaching tens of thousands, but the need was much greater. At the airport, the U.S. military is reporting a waiting list of 1,400 international relief flights seeking to land on Port-au-Prince’s single runway, where 120 to 140 flights were arriving daily.

Perhaps no one was more desperate than the 80 or so residents of the damaged Municipal Nursing Home, in a slum near the shell of Port-au-Prince’s devastated cathedral. The quake killed six of the elderly, three others have since died of hunger and exhaustion, and several more were barely clinging to life.

“Nobody cares,” said Phileas Justin, 78. “Maybe they do just want us to starve to death.” Hard money training.

A powerful aftershock struck Haiti on Wednesday, shaking buildings and sending screaming people running into the streets only eight days after the country’s capital was devastated by a major earthquake.

The magnitude-6.1 temblor was the largest aftershock yet to the apocalyptic Jan. 12 quake that shattered Haiti’s capital. It was not immediately clear if it caused additional damage or injuries.

The new quake hit at 6:03 a.m. (1103 GMT) about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northwest of the capital of Port-au-Prince and 13.7 miles (22 kilometers) below the surface.

Wails of terror rose from frightened survivors as the earth shuddered at 6:03 a.m. The U.S. Geologic Survey said the quake was centered about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northwest of Port-au-Prince and was 13.7 miles (22 kilometers) below the surface.

Last week’s magnitude-7 quake killed an estimated 200,000 people in Haiti, left 250,000 injured and made 1.5 million homeless, according to the European Union Commission. A massive international aid effort has been launched, but is struggling with overwhelming logistical problems.

Still, search-and-rescue teams have emerged from the ruins with some improbable success stories — including the rescue of 69-year-old ardent Roman Catholic who said she prayed constantly during her week under the rubble.

Ena Zizi had been at a church meeting at the residence of Haiti’s Roman Catholic archbishop when the Jan. 12 quake struck, trapping her in debris. On Tuesday, she was rescued by a Mexican disaster team that was created in the wake of Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake.

Zizi said that after the quake, she spoke back and forth with a vicar who also was trapped. But after a few days, he fell silent, and she spent the rest of the time praying and waiting.

“I talked only to my boss, God,” she said. “And I didn’t need any more humans.”

Doctors who examined Zizi on Tuesday said she was dehydrated and had a dislocated hip and a broken leg.

Elsewhere in the capital, two women were pulled from a destroyed university building. And near midnight Tuesday, a smiling and singing 26-year-old Lozama Hotteline was carried to safety from a collapsed store in the Petionville neighborhood by the French aid group Rescuers Without Borders.

Crews at the cathedral compound site Tuesday recovered the body of the archbishop, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, who was killed in the Jan. 12 quake.

Authorities said close to 100 people had been pulled from wrecked buildings by international search-and-rescue teams. Efforts continued, with dozens of teams sifting through Port-au-Prince’s crumbled homes and buildings for signs of life.

But the good news was overshadowed by the frustrating fact that the world still can’t get enough food and water to the hungry and thirsty.

“We need so much. Food, clothes, we need everything. I don’t know whose responsibility it is, but they need to give us something soon,” said Sophia Eltime, a 29-year-old mother of two who has been living under a bedsheet with seven members of her extended family.

The World Food Program said more than 250,000 ready-to-eat food rations had been distributed in Haiti by Tuesday, reaching only a fraction of the 3 million people thought to be in desperate need.

The WFP said it needs to deliver 100 million ready-to-eat rations in the next 30 days. Based on pledges from the United States, Italy and Denmark, it has 16 million in the pipeline.

Even as U.S. troops landed in Seahawk helicopters Tuesday on the manicured lawn of the ruined National Palace, the colossal efforts to help Haiti were proving inadequate because of the scale of the disaster and the limitations of the world’s governments. Expectations exceeded what money, will and military might have been able to achieve.

So far, international relief efforts have been unorganized, disjointed and insufficient to satisfy the great need. Doctors Without Borders says a plane carrying urgently needed surgical equipment and drugs has been turned away five times, even though the agency received advance authorization to land.

A statement from Partners in Health, co-founded by the deputy U.N. envoy to Haiti, Dr. Paul Farmer, said the group’s medical director estimated 20,000 people are dying each day who could be saved by surgery. Hard money training.

A few miles north of the busted-down buildings in Port-au-Prince, up a hillside where cows graze, an empty hole awaits the dead. Rectangular, 20 feet deep and wide, 100 feet long, it is one of the newest mass graves, but there are many more.

The government’s dump trucks have been dropping off bodies here since Friday. No one counts, takes pictures or searches for names. In some places, legs and arms of strangers are knotted together in a frozen dance, but here the ground has been leveled by a backhoe that has erased all but the tiniest scraps of life.

Look and see: a torn photo of a mustached man in a silver tie; a canceled American passport for an infant born in Stamford, Conn.; and a shred of purple pantyhose never to lure a lover again.

“They have buried so many people here,” said Voissine Careas, 60, a farmer chopping brush nearby with a machete. “And now, they are digging holes for more.”

Along with everything else stolen by last week’s earthquake, Haitians must now add another loss: the ability to identify and bury the dead. Funeral rites are among the most sacred of all ceremonies to Haitians, who have been known to spend more money on their burial crypts than on their own homes.

It is the product in part of familiarity with death — the average life span of a Haitian is 44 — but also the widespread voodoo belief that the dead continue living and that families must stay connected forever to their ancestors.

“Convening with the dead is what allows Haitians to link themselves, directly by bloodline, to a pre-slave past,” said Ira Lowenthal, an anthropologist who has lived in Haiti for 38 years. He added that with so many bodies denied rest in family burial plots, where many rituals take place, countless spiritual connections would be severed.

“It is a violation of everything these people hold dear,” Mr. Lowenthal said. “On the other hand, people know they have no choice.”

In and around Port-au-Prince, the usually high standard for memorials and burials has been upended. The streets have fewer bodies now but the morgue is overwhelmed, and funeral parlors — those that have not collapsed — have more bodies than they can possibly embalm.

The wooden coffins seen in the first few days after the earthquake, lashed to trucks and station wagons, have also become harder to find. In the narrow streets behind the national cemetery where most of them are built, carpenters said they lacked wood and electricity to make more.

“They bury you like a dog,” said Pegles Fleurigine, 51, in an alleyway where he has built coffins for more than a decade. “They don’t bury you in caskets.” Hard money training.

Rescuers pulled a dehydrated but otherwise uninjured woman from the ruins of a luxury hotel in the Haitian capital early Sunday, an event greeted with applause from onlookers witnessing rare good news in a city otherwise filled with corpses, rubble and desperation.

“It’s a little miracle,” the woman’s husband, Reinhard Riedl, said after hearing she was alive in the wreckage. “She’s one tough cookie. She is indestructible.”

For many, though, the five days since the magnitude-7.0 quake hit have turned into an aching wait for the food, water and medical care slowly making its way from an overwhelmed airport rife with political squabbles. And while aid is reaching the country, growing impatience among the suffering has spawned some violence.

Nobody knows how many died in Tuesday’s quake. Haiti’s government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies — not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Associated Press.

The Pan American Health Organization now says 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Bellerive said 100,000 would “seem to be the minimum.”

A U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman declared the quake the worst disaster the international organization has ever faced, since so much government and U.N. capacity in the country was demolished. In that way, Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva, it’s worse than the cataclysmic Asian tsunami of 2004: “Everything is damaged.”

Truckloads of corpses were being trundled to mass graves Saturday. Search teams also recovered the body of Tunisian diplomat Hedi Annabi, the United Nations chief of mission in Haiti, and other top U.N. officials who were killed when their headquarters collapsed.

Experts have said rescue of people trapped beneath wreckage after three days is unlikely. But an American team pulled a woman alive from a collapsed university building where she had been trapped for 97 hours. Another crew got water to three survivors whose shouts could be heard deep in the pancaked ruins of a multistory supermarket.

At the Hotel Montana, the son of co-owner Nadine Cardoso said he could hear her voice from the rubble, and the effort to pull her to safety began. Twelve hours later, with more than 20 friends and relatives of the prominent community member watching early Sunday, she was lowered from a hill of debris on a stretcher.

The rescue was bittersweet for Cardoso’s sister, because rescuers also told Gerthe Cardoso they had abandoned a search for her 7-year-old grandson after an aftershock closed a space where he was believed to be.

“Well, we can’t have them both,” she said after her sister was saved.

Later Sunday. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expected to arrive in Haiti to discuss aid delivery, which appeared to be speeding up.

Florence Louis, seven months pregnant with two children, was one of thousands of Haitians who gathered at a gate at the Cite Soleil slum, where U.N. World Food Program workers handed out high-energy biscuits for the first time.

“It is enough because I didn’t have anything at all,” said Louis, 29, clutching four packets of biscuits.

The Haitian government has established 14 distribution points for food and other supplies, and U.S. Army helicopters scouted locations for more. Aid groups opened five emergency health centers. Vital gear, such as water-purification units, was arriving from abroad.

On a hillside golf course, perhaps 50,000 people were sleeping in a makeshift tent city overlooking the stricken capital. Paratroopers of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division flew there Saturday to set up a base for handing out water and food.

After the initial frenzy among the waiting crowd, when helicopters could only hover and toss out their cargo, a second flight landed and soldiers passed out some 2,000 military-issue ready-to-eat meals to an orderly line of Haitians.

But aid delivery was still bogged down by congestion at the Port-au-Prince airport, quake damage at the seaport, poor roads and the fear of looters and robbers.

“Many people are just fleeing to the countryside, they are looking for a place to stay and for food,” said Enel Legrand, a 24-year-old Haitian volunteer aid worker.

The airport congestion also touched off diplomatic rows between the U.S. military and other donor nations. France and Brazil both lodged official complaints that the U.S. military, in control of the international airport, had denied landing permission to relief flights from their countries.

Haitian President Rene Preval, speaking with the AP, urged all to “keep our cool and coordinate and not throw accusations.”

As relief teams grappled with on-the-ground obstacles, U.S. leadership promised Saturday to step up aid efforts. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited and pledged more American assistance. President Barack Obama met with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in Washington and urged Americans to donate to Haiti relief efforts. Hard money training.