'They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!': Obamacare confusion reigns as frustrated patients walk out of hospitals without treatment

• MailOnline spoke with patients who were told they would have to pay their bills in full if they couldn't prove they had insurance
• One was faced with a $3,000 hospital room charge and opted to leave the hospital after experiencing chest pains
• 'Should I be in the hospital? Probably,' she said
• Another, coughing in the cold, walked out without receiving a needed chest x-ray
• Consumers face sticker-shock from medical costs under the new Obamacare system, made worse if they can't prove they're insured
• As many as one-third of new enrollees' applications have seen problems when the government transmits them to insurance companies

Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can't determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.

Patients in a close-in DC suburb who think they've signed up for new insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are in force, and health care administrators aren't taking their word for it.

Dallas police said they arrested an 11-year-old girl early Saturday who is believed to have stabbed a family member nine times in an Oak Cliff apartment.

The victim, 41-year-old Toshia Edmonson, survived the stabbing and remained in at Methodist Dallas Medical Center on Saturday. Police said they couldn't release the nature of Edmonson's relationship to the child. They also wouldn't give out the girl's name. That information is kept private when the arrested person is a minor.

"It's family violence. That's all I can say," said Cpl Monica Cordova, a department spokeswoman.

According to a police report, the girl was dropped off at Edmonson's apartment on Village Fair Drive near Interstate 35E and Ledbetter Drive at around 11:45 p.m. Friday. The girl told police that she was angry to be home. She said that Edmonson reacted by shoving her into a sofa and threatening to give her away, the report said. The girl then waited for Edmonson to go to sleep, grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed her in the head, neck and shoulder, the report said.

A woman in Leslie County, Kentucky is crediting Facebook for saving her life.

Susann Stacy says her husband, Donnie Stacy, heard her on the phone in the bathroom and, when she exited it, confronted her about who she had been talking to. When she failed to answer his question, he brutally beat her with his handgun.

She claims that he then ripped out the phone line, leaving her with no way to call 911, as she had no cell reception in her house. She did, however, have WiFi access, so she took a picture of her bloody, beaten face and posted it on Facebook with the words, "Help please anyone."

Many of her friends who saw the image called 911, and deputies arrived at the residence shortly thereafter.

Leslie County Sheriff's Deputy Sam Mullins said that she had suffered "several lacerations to the head. They appeared to be bad but we really couldn't tell at the time, due to her hair was matted to her, and the blood."

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis, six-in-ten Americans (60%) say that "humans and other living things have evolved over time," while a third (33%) reject the idea of evolution, saying that "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." The share of the general public that says that humans have evolved over time is about the same as it was in 2009, when Pew Research last asked the question.

About half of those who express a belief in human evolution take the view that evolution is "due to natural processes such as natural selection" (32% of the American public overall). But many Americans believe that God or a supreme being played a role in the process of evolution. Indeed, roughly a quarter of adults (24%) say that "a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today."

These beliefs differ strongly by religious group. White evangelical Protestants are particularly likely to believe that humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. Roughly two-thirds (64%) express this view, as do half of black Protestants (50%). By comparison, only 15% of white mainline Protestants share this opinion.

There also are sizable differences by party affiliation in beliefs about evolution, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown. In 2009, 54% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats said humans have evolved over time, a difference of 10 percentage points. Today, 43% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats say humans have evolved, a 24-point gap.

These are some of the key findings from a nationwide Pew Research Center survey conducted March 21-April 8, 2013, with a representative sample of 1,983 adults, ages 18 and older. The survey was conducted on landlines and cellphones in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3.0 percentage points.

Hundreds of Albertans are lining up to get flu shots as the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 climbs in the province, with residents saying they are getting vaccinated out of concern for little children.

The line at Calgary's mass immunization clinic at the Brentwood Village Shopping Centre had people waiting for more than 45 minutes Thursday afternoon, with many adults bringing toddlers.

There have been 965 lab-confirmed cases of influenza in Alberta as of Jan. 1, with the H1N1 strain representing 920 of those cases. The flu has hit 357 people in the Calgary zone, which extends beyond city limits, and 345 of those cases are H1N1, a strain that emerged in 2009. Influenza has sent 103 people to the hospital in the Calgary zone.

"That is just the tip of the iceberg," Judy MacDonald, medical officer for health for Alberta Health Services' Calgary zone, told reporters at the Brentwood clinic Thursday.

"We expect that there's much more influenza circulating in our communities that has not been lab-confirmed."

Mvuleni Fana was walking down a quiet alleyway in Springs - 30 miles east of Johannesburg - on her way home from football practice one evening when four men surrounded her and dragged her back to the football stadium. She recognised her attackers. One by one, the men raped her, beating her unconscious and leaving her for dead.

The next morning, Mvuleni came round, bleeding, battered, in shock, and taunted by one overriding memory - the last thing they said to her before she passed out: "After everything we're going to do to you, you're going to be a real woman, and you're never going to act like this again".

Corrective rape is a hate crime wielded to convert lesbians to heterosexuality - an attempt to 'cure' them of being gay. The term was coined in South Africa in the early 2000s when charity workers first noticed an influx of such attacks.

But despite recognition and international coverage, corrective rape in the region is escalating in severity, according to Clare Carter, the photographer behind these images. This is amid a backdrop of parts of the country "becoming more homophobic", as one recent victim asserts.

Compared to many of South Africa's victims, Mvuleni was lucky: she survived. At least 31 women in the past 15 years did not. In 2007, to cite one incident, Sizakele Sigasa, a women's and gay rights activist, and her friend Salone Massooa, were outside a bar when a group of men started heckling and calling them tomboys. The women were gang raped, tortured, tied up with their underwear and shot in the head. Executed. No one was ever convicted.

Mvuleni's case was also unusual as, unlike 24 out of 25 rapes that even reach trial in South Africa, two of her attackers were convicted and imprisoned for 25 years. The others remain at large.

Ever since a 1998-2000 report by the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs ranked South Africa as highest for rapes per capita, it has repeatedly been described as the rape capital of the world: 500,000 rapes a year; one every 17 seconds; one in every two women will be raped in her lifetime. Twenty per cent of men say the victim "asked for it", according to a survey by the anti-violence NGO, CIET. A quarter of men in the Eastern Cape Provinces, when asked anonymously by the Medical Research Council, admitted to raping at least once - three quarters of whom said their victim was under 20, a tenth said under 10. A quarter of schoolboys in Soweto described "jackrolling" - the local term for gang rape - as "fun".

If ever there were two states that were going to be pioneers in legalizing marijuana, they were Colorado and Washington. Smoking pot has been an accepted part of life in both places for decades.

This week, the world's only state-licensed marijuana retailers, legally permitted to sell pot for recreational use, opened their doors in Colorado. By all accounts, business was brisk. The state of Washington expects to follow suit in a few months, as officials there have found the process of building a state-regulated marijuana industry from the ground up a little more complicated.

This was all permitted as a result of referendums that were held in both states in 2012, when residents voted in favour of ending marijuana prohibition and treating the drug much like alcohol. Now, the world is watching to see what unfolds - will it lead to anarchy and depravation? Or will life in both jurisdictions continue on pretty much as normal, while state coffers get infused with a fresh source of revenue?

Colorado is expecting to gross $578-million annually from marijuana sales. Washington calculates it will bring in about $2-billion in the first five years. That is nothing to sneeze at. And you can bet that legislators around the United States are eyeing the grand experiment and imagining what they would do with all that cash.

A Malaysian boy aged six has been accused of raping his five-year-old cousin in a case believed to be the one of the first of its kind in the world.

Doctors discovered she had been sexually penetrated after a medical check-up - and despite initial scepticism a consultant urologist at the Kuala Lumpur Hospital said it was possible for a child that young to have an erection.

The extraordinary case came to light after the children's grandmother found them naked and playing 'mothers and fathers' at the family home in the town of Pendang, Kedah - a rural area covered with paddy fields

A former Christian pastor has decided to give atheism a try by "living for a year without God."

Ryan J. Bell, who recently explained his journey in a Huffington Post blog entry, was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. While he inevitably decided to become a pastor, Bell now realizes that there was always a tension present in his faith walk.

But for the past 22 years, he said he has either served as a preacher or has been in school learning how to be a more effective pastor - until now. Bell's journey into atheism didn't come all at once.

An eastern Kentucky woman says Facebook helped save her life, after she posted a bloody picture of herself following a brutal pistol-whipping by her husband, Raw Story reported.

Susann Stacy said the incident began when her husband, Donnie Stacy, confronted her about a conversation she had on the phone. When Susann failed to respond to his questions, Donnie began to assault her with the handgun.

Susann said her husband then pulled out the phone line leaving her with no way to call 911 and no reception on her phone.

However, with some quick thinking, Stacy used the WiFi in her house to turn to social media for help. Stacy posted a confronting 'selfie' with the words, "Help please anyone," prompting many of her friends who saw the image to call 911.

A short time after, deputies arrived on the scene and found the handgun near their son's tire swing in the backyard. Donnie had left the house but deputies soon caught up with him nearby and arrested him.

Leslie County Sheriff's Deputy Sam Mullins said Susann suffered "several lacerations to the head. They appeared to be bad but we really couldn't tell at the time, due to (the fact) her hair was matted to her, and the blood," WKYT-TV reported.