Japanese Train Passengers Push 32-Ton Train Car To Free Woman Stuck In Gap

TOKYO -- Dozens of Japanese train passengers pushed a 32-ton train carriage away from the platform to free a woman who had fallen into the 20-centimeter (eight-inch) gap between the train and platform during the busy morning rush hour Monday.
The act of heroism was captured by a newspaper photographer, whose photo of the rescue ran in the Yomiuri daily's evening edition.
A public announcement that a passenger was trapped prompted about 40 people to join train officials to push the carriage, whose suspension system allows it to lean to either side, according to the Yomiuri newspaper, Japan's largest daily.
The unnamed woman in her 30s was then pulled out uninjured to applause from onlookers at JR Minami-Urawa station, just north of Tokyo.
After just an eight-minute delay, the train went on its way.

Michael Madison To Be Charged In Discovery Of Bodies In Trash Bags: Cops

EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A suspicious odor unearthed one body in a trash bag in a rundown neighborhood here, and then two more were found over the weekend, and police expected Monday to charge a man who indicated he might have been influenced by a serial killer whose home was found littered with bodies a few years ago.
Police and volunteers scoured about 40 empty homes Sunday until their search was suspended, with no immediate plans to resume, said East Cleveland Police Chief Ralph Spotts.
He identified the suspect as 35-year-old Michael Madison and said Madison was to be charged Monday but did not elaborate.
An odor led to the discovery Friday of one body in a garage. Two others were found Saturday – one in a backyard and the other in the basement of a vacant house. The victims were found about 100 to 200 yards apart, and authorities believed they were killed in the past six to 10 days.
The bodies of the three women were all wrapped in plastic bags in fetal positions. "It didn't look like a person could actually fit in the bag," Spotts told residents and activists who gathered Sunday to search.
They're part of the latest in a series of high-profile cases involving the disappearance of women from the Cleveland area.
In 2009, the mostly nude bodies of 11 women were found in garbage bags and plastic sheets throughout the Cleveland home of Anthony Sowell, who was convicted in 2011 of murdering the women and sentenced to death. In May, three women who vanished separately about a decade ago were found captive in a rundown house. The owner of the house, a former school bus driver, has pleaded not guilty to kidnap, rape and other crimes.
Madison threatened about a month ago to attack women in the same fashion as Sowell, said Eric Wilson, a neighbor who saw Madison frequently. Mayor Gary Norton said Madison gave similar indications to authorities.
"He said some things that led us to believe that in some way, shape, or form, Sowell might be an influence," Norton told The Associated Press.
Madison was arrested Friday after a police standoff. A woman at a small white house at an address for Madison said the family was shocked by the allegations. She identified herself as a family member and answered a few questions through the blinds of a window Sunday but refused to come out or give her name. It wasn't clear whether Madison has an attorney.
Madison was classified as a sex offender in 2002 when he was sentenced to four years in prison for attempted rape, according to court records. He had previous convictions in 2000 and 2001 for drug-related charges.
Wilson and others said Madison was a neighborhood fixture, constantly walking up and down streets and seen everywhere. Teenager Daniqwa Martin said Madison had offered her a ride in the past but she always declined.
One neighbor, Nathenia Crosby, said she was familiar with Madison and had seen him walking through the neighborhood. She said she had told him to stop chatting with her daughter and warned him after seeing him talk to her cousin.
"It's very scary, especially when he used to be talking to my daughter," said Crosby, 48. "But I told him he was too old to be talking to my daughter because she was only 19. When I found out how old he was, I said, `You need to move on, she's too young.' "
Detectives continued to interview Madison, Norton said. He said authorities have "lots of reasons" to suspect there are more victims, but he refused to say why.
Spotts indicated that Madison's comments haven't provided clarity on whether more bodies might be found.
"He really hasn't stated that there's any more, but he hasn't said anything that would make us think that there's not," Spotts said.
All three bodies were found in the fetal position, wrapped in several layers of trash bags, Norton said. The bodies were in advanced stages of decomposition and it would take several days to identify them and how they died, Cuyahoga County medical examiner Dr. Thomas P. Gilson said Sunday.
Martin, 16, said she smelled the odor Tuesday but ignored it, thinking it was a dead animal.
About three dozen volunteers, including community anti-crime activists, fanned out Sunday morning across yards, through vacant houses and along a railroad to help police search. The chief advised them to watch for missing floor boards as they looked inside houses. One young searcher crawled under a board screwed across a door to go inside a house.
Barbara Stirtmire, part of a local motorcycle club whose members were pitching in to search Sunday, said she came to help because she knows so many people in the area and herself has a teenage daughter.
"It doesn't make the city look good, I know that," said Stirtmire, 31, who works at a nearby auto parts store. "But as far as everybody coming together, it's beautiful."
The neighborhood in East Cleveland, which has some 17,000 residents, has many abandoned houses and authorities want to be thorough, the mayor said.
"Hopefully, we pray to God, this is it," he said.
___
Welsh-Huggins can be reached on Twitter at . Associated Press writers Kantele Franko in Columbus, Dan Sewell in Cincinnati and Peggy Harris in Philadelphia contributed to this report. https://twitter.com/awhcolumbus

What do doctors think of Obamacare?

 

The doctor is . . . skeptical about the Affordable Care Act. And clueless, too.
A new survey shows that an overwhelming percentage of physicians don't believe that their states' new health insurance exchanges will meet the Oct. 1 deadline for those key Obamacare marketplaces to begin enrolling the uninsured.
Just 11 percent of doctors believe those exchanges will be open for business that day.
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But those doctors, by a wide margin, also said they are "not at all familiar" with how a number of important aspects of those exchanges and plans offered on them will work—aspects that will directly affect their bottom lines. More than 65 percent of them gave that answer to all but one of the questions asking their familiarity with plan benefits levels, contracted rates with insurers, patient coverage terms and the claims process.
(Read more: Obama lauds his health care law)

Shane Jackson, president and COO of LocumTenens.com, which conducted the survey, said the results are potential red flags for not only the finances of those physicians' offices, but also for their patients, who "rely on their doctor for a lot of information."
"They expect to a large degree that their doctors understand how this is all going to work," said Jackson, whose company is a full-service physician staffing agency and online industry job board.
Noting that an important goal of the Affordable Care Act is enrolling the uninsured in insurance plans—which will theoretically put more money in doctors' pockets—Jackson said, "As major stakeholders and advocates in this effort, physicians should be educated about how these changes will impact them, their patients and their prospective patients."
(Read more: This could put Obamacare in the ER)
"Our survey shows that for the most part, they are in the dark," Jackson said. "Doctors, they're seeing patients and they don't have time or motivation to get up to speed on this, but they're going to have to because it's going to impact them."
Jackson said that the "the major lack of awareness" among both doctors and patients "is troubling."
Please rate your familiarity with the following aspects of state insurance exchanges:
How the policies purchased from state exchanges will impact your business:
Extremely familiar: 2.84%
Very familiar: 4.38%
Moderately familiar: 15.54%
Slightly familiar: 20.79%
Not at all familiar: 56.46%
Contracted rates with payers in the exchange:
Extremely familiar: 2.20%
Very familiar: 3.74%
Moderately familiar: 12.33%
Slightly familiar: 16.08%
Not at all familiar: 65.64%
Patient coverage terms (i.e. cancellation policy and grace periods):
Extremely familiar: 2.20%
Very familiar: 3.08%
Moderately familiar: 11.67%
Slightly familiar: 15.42%
Not at all familiar: 67.62%
Claims Process:
Extremely familiar: 1.98%
Very familiar: 2.86%
Moderately familiar: 11.45%
Slightly familiar: 13.22%
Not at all familiar: 70.48%
LocumTenens.com polled 479 independent physicians for the recent survey, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percent, with a 95 percent confidence level.
Doubts about exchanges
Those doctors, on average, believe they will see a 13.4 percent increase in the number of patients coming to their practices after the state health exchanges go into effect. Those exchanges, a pillar of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law, are being set up to enroll uninsured people, many of whom will receive government subsidies to purchase insurance from companies that choose to sell plans through the marketplaces.
But more than 55 percent of the doctors don't expect the exchanges to begin enrollment as scheduled this fall, and 34 percent don't know if the enrollment will begin on time—a degree of skepticism that tracks overall cool or negative public opinion about Obamacare.
Jackson said he was "amazed" that just 11 percent of doctors were "saying their exchanges would be ready."
A huge number of doctors—89 percent—said they believed that consumers had not been adequately educated about how the exchanges' policies will function, and more than 9 percent didn't know if there had been adequate education of consumers. Just 1.6 percent believed consumers had been adequately educated about the exchange's policies.
More than 56 percent of doctors said they were "not at all familiar" with how insurance policies purchased on the exchanges will affect their business, and another 21 percent were only "slightly familiar."
(Read more: Obamacare delay could save jobs)
That question was the only one in which the level of utter lack of familiarity among doctors about aspects of the exchanges was even close to 50 percent. The other questions showed significantly higher levels of ignorance.
More than 67 percent were totally unaware of the coverage terms for patients, including cancellation and grace periods.
Nasty surprises
Jackson said that doctors who don't have an understanding of those coverage terms could be in for a nasty surprise once the new plans go into effect.
That's because under the rules of the exchange, a patient can go up to three months without paying premiums and still not get their coverage formally dropped by an insurers—but the insurer isn't obligated to pay claims incurred during the second and third month if that person isn't paying their premiums for that time, Jackson said.
Those rules could mean that doctors end up eating the cost of the care they have already provided, or have their receivables stay unpaid for longer stretches of time.
"Just from a business perspective for doctors and practices, that's a huge thing they need to get their arms around," Jackson said. His survey found just 5.2 percent of doctors were either "extremely familiar" or "very familiar" with patient coverage terms.
An even a greater number of doctors, 70.5 percent, don't have any idea on how the claims process will work.
And nearly 66 percent were completely unfamiliar with what the contracted rates with payers in the exchanges will be.
"I think it's logical to say that they're not necessarily seeking out all of the relevant information," Jackson said of the large percentage of doctors unfamiliar with many aspects of the exchanges.

Kate Middleton Labor: Duchess Of Cambridge Goes Into Labor With Royal Baby

Kate Middleton has gone into labor!
Buckingham Palace confirms that the Duchess of Cambridge has been admitted to St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, where she will give birth to her first child. In accordance with her pre-announced birth plan, Kate is being attended to by Dr. Marcus Setchell, the Queen's former gynecologist, with Dr. Alan Farthing assisting.
St Mary's Hospital is where Princess Diana gave birth to Princes William and Harry and where Princess Anne gave birth to her children. At this time, we don't know the sex of the baby, as the duke and duchess chose not to find out before the birth. Despite previous reports that Kate is "too posh to push," she'll be having a natural birth.
As for the baby's gender? We'll have to wait until a proclamation is posted on the gate of Buckingham Palace. Our best wishes go out to the royal couple!
Good luck, Kate!