Do Employees Appreciate Embroidered Shirts In Los Angeles County?

bytimothyharvard

The investment in embroidered shirts in Los Angeles County may be something you have thought about but have not put into place yet. You worry about the investment. Is this something your team can appreciate and wants from you? It can be hard to tell in some situations. However, the addition of a high quality product like this really can impress your workers and it can help your employees to stand out, too. Consider a few details.

A Quality Uniform Matters

When you invest in your team, they notice and they care. For example, if you hand out t-shirts or basic polos to every person, they see themselves as one of the many. They do not feel important or special. Anyone could be wearing that shirt. ON the other hand, with the investment in embroidered shirts on Los Angeles County, you suddenly gain something a bit better to offer to your employees. They now see their name, the company’s name, and the logo with it. They know you have invested in them. This is a personal investment. And, it really helps employees to see that they stand out.

From the point of view of the customer, this is a very good thing as well. These shirts stand out because they show you care about choosing the right employees to do the job. Investing in your employees means your company is good for the community, too.

The fact is, the investment in embroidered shirts in Los Angeles County is an easy decision to make. It does not cost much more, but it creates a lot of prestige and support from your workers and from your customers. They appreciate what you are putting into your business as much as you appreciate the work they do for you.

Rower Tuijn halfway across Pacific in record attempt

Monday, July 9, 2007

Dutch adventurer Ralph Tuijn has reached the halfway point of his attempt to be the first person to row across the Pacific Ocean unaided.

The 16,000 kilometre journey from the coast of Peru to the seaside city of Brisbane, Australia, the widest section of the Pacific, has never been crossed absolutely unaided by a rower, and Tuijn says just nine people have rowed it even with assistance.

Tuijn reached the central point of his crossing, an insignificant point of water in the ocean, 111 days after setting off from Peru in March. He has been making good progress, and has since cut his estimated time of arrival in Brisbane by a month.

The Dutchman, who now expects to reach his destination on October 20, has kept in touch with those tracking his movements through daily internet postings from his laptop computer, including his wife Winnie. His boat, the Zeeman Challenger, is a seven-metre custom plywood vessel.

Tuijn has overcome a variety of obstacles to reach the halfway point. He is suffering from the constant attention of sharks, who often bump his boat and disrupt his attempts at sleep. One particular shark, dubbed ‘Gomulka’ by Tuijn, has been trailing the adventurer’s boat for extended periods.

He has also accidentally burnt himself when he spilled hot water on his foot whilst trying to make coffee, apparently also from a shark ‘bump’. He is also forced to manually pump water for cooking and drinking after his automatic water pump broke down not long into his journey.

“Physically everything feels great and I can’t help feeling that I could do this for 500 days, but mentally it’s still hard to be on your own for such a long time”

His vessel has no motors or sails, but relies on his physical rowing power to move. The boat does have a solar power system to provide energy for his laptop, a telephone and a global positioning system.

Tujin, who is raising money for a children’s home in Mumbai, India, is rowing at an average speed of 58 kilometres each day. His diet consists of freeze-dried foods and fish, which are keeping him physically well-conditioned despite tiring mentally.

Tuijn is a serial adventurer and experienced rower. He has rowed across the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, as well as cycled across Russia and the icy terrain of Greenland.

What The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief ACT Means For You

By Calum MacKenzie

On December 20, President Bush signed a law that is meant to help homeowners who are facing foreclosure or who sell their homes in a short sale. Before this law, the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007, if your bank or lender forgave a portion of your mortgage debt because the value of your home had decreased, the IRS treated the forgiveness as taxable income.

That meant that if your mortgage lender forgave $15,000 in mortgage debt because your house was worth $15,000 less than your remaining mortgage balance, the IRS treated it as earned income. When you filed your taxes, you were required to add that amount to your annual income and pay taxes on it at your regular tax rate. Just when you most needed a break, you ended up owing taxes on $15,000 in phantom income.

Not for the next three years. Under the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, taxpayers can exclude up to $2 million of forgiven mortgage debt on their principal residence in 2007, 2008 or 2009. If you’re married filing separately, you can exclude up to $1 million in forgiven debt from your income.

What is mortgage forgiveness?

Mortgage forgiveness is a term that has become more familiar in the real estate market over the past couple of years. In essence, anytime that a lender accepts less than the full amount of the debt owed in full payment of a mortgage, the difference between the amount owed and the amount accepted is ‘forgiven’.

Let’s take a look at Sue and Jim. They took advantage of a great adjustable rate mortgage to buy a home for $350,000 four years ago. The payments were manageable until the adjustable rate did what adjustable rates do – and thanks to the changes in the housing market and the sub-prime lending market, they are now facing foreclosure. To make things even worse, the best offer that they can get on the home for which they paid $350,000 is $275,000. Although they still owe $330,000 on the mortgage, their lender agrees to accept the $275,000 as full payment of the remainder of the mortgage, forgiving $55,000 of the debt.

Under the Old Rules The IRS Gets Their Cut

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULXdkLQiN2w[/youtube]

When a bank or other mortgage lender forgives your loan or any part of it, they send you a 1099C in the amount of the debt forgiven. You are then required to count the amount on the 1099C as taxable income along with your earned income and wages. Sue and Jim from the paragraph above would have got a 1099C from their old lender. When they file their taxes for the year, that $55,000 would be added to their earned income, adding the insult of having to pay taxes on income they never saw. Instead of relief, they’d end up owing the IRS a hefty chunk of change at the next tax term.

The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act Changes Everything

Well, not exactly everything. If you’re forced into a short sale, you’ll still get a 1009C from your lender, and you’ll still have to file that with your taxes. Now, however, you’re allowed to exclude the forgiven amount up to $2 million ($1 million if you’re married, filing separately) from your taxable income. In other words, while it’s still counted as income, you won’t have to pay taxes on that amount of your income.

Who Qualifies for the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Exclusion?

According to the IRS, you’ll qualify for this tax exclusion whether you mortgage debt is forgiven as part of a refinancing or if it’s forgiven in connection with a foreclosure. In order to qualify for the exclusion, the following conditions must apply:

– The debt forgiven must be on a mortgage for your principal residence. The principal residence is qualified based on the amount of time that you lived in it over the past five years.

– The mortgage forgiveness must be because of loss of value in your home or because of a forced short sale in connection with a mortgage foreclosure. A forgiveness that is given in return for services performed for the lender is not allowed.

– The debt must be forgiven between January 1, 2007 and January 1, 2010.

– The debt forgiveness must be on the mortgage used to buy your home.

How to Claim the Debt Relief Exclusion

In order to claim the debt relief exclusion, you’ll need to show the IRS how much of the debt has been forgiven. That will require some calculation on your part, because the IRS wants to see the fair market value of your home as well as the amount of your mortgage that was forgiven. Often, when the lender makes out the 1099C or 1099A, they may just put the value of the loan in the field that’s reserved fair market value of the home. In some cases, the 1099C or 1099A may not include the fair market value at all.

Like your math teacher, the IRS wants to see your work. When you submit your taxes, you’ll need to include documentation of the fair market value of the home as well as your calculations. If the fair market value of your home – the price that it was sold for – is not listed on the 1099C form, you may do best to hire an appraiser to document the fair market value.

The calculations can get complex if you’ve taken out home equity loans or a second mortgage on your home as well as the primary mortgage. In this case, special considerations may apply. For instance, the income exclusion only qualifies for ‘acquisition indebtedness’ – money that’s spent to buy your home, build a new home or that you use to make substantial improvements to your home.

Suppose you bought a house 10 years ago and paid $80,000 for it with a 100% loan. The Florida land boom was very good to you, and five years later your home had increased in value to $200,000. You took advantage of lower interest rates to do a cash-out refinance for $150,000, paid off the remainder of the original mortgage and pocketed $70,000. When time comes to sell, though, you can only get $100,000 for the property and your lender agrees to a short sale because the home has decreased in value, forgiving $50,000 of the loan amount. Can you use the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Exclusion to avoid taxes on the $50,000?

That depends, says the IRS, on what you did with the cash-out part of the loan refinance. If you used the money from the refi to pay college tuition or your daughter’s wedding, then you’ll have to pay taxes on the forgiven amount. If, on the other hand, you used it to make major improvements to your home, then it qualifies for the exclusion – but you’d better be able to prove the expenditures. If you’re audited, you may need to provide your original warranty deed, or your HUD-1 form. You may need to show cancelled checks, receipts and invoices to show the cost of improvements you made.

Filing For the Debt Forgiveness Exemption

The new law came at the end of the year, after the tax forms for this year had been printed, so you won’t find anywhere on the tax forms to make the calculations you’ll need to prove you qualify for the exemption. The IRS is suggesting that those who are facing a short sale or foreclosure this year use electronic tax preparation software. The private software companies have worked hard to update their own forms so that you can do all the necessary calculations within the software, then print out the results so that you can attach them to your completed tax return.

About the Author: Calum MacKenzie is REALTOR focusing on Tampa real estate, New Tampa real estate and Wesley Chapel real estate.

Source: isnare.com

Permanent Link: isnare.com/?aid=227911&ca=Finances

News briefs:April 28, 2005

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Contents

  • 1 UK Attorney General raised legal doubts over Iraq invasion
  • 2 New Italian government gets confidence from the House
  • 3 European human rights body condemns U.S. “torture” at Guantanamo Bay
  • 4 Munch’s “The Scream” might have been burned
  • 5 Lebanon government wins ‘vote of confidence’
  • 6 CIA gives up search and interrogation on Iraq WMDs
  • 7 Dutch mayors support legalisation of cannabis
  • 8 Dorothy’s dress from Wizard of Oz sells for £140,000
  • 9 Hunter Tylo to rejoin the cast of “Bold and Beautiful”
  • 10 Boeing secures $11bn of aircraft deals
  • 11 News Bullets from Wikipedia’s current events

As increase in digital music sales slows, record labels look to new ways to make money

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Every September, the Apple iPod is redesigned. Last year saw the release of the iPod Nano 5th generation, bringing a video camera and a large range of colours to the Nano for the first time. But as Apple again prepares to unveil a redesigned product, the company has released their quarterly sales figures—and revealed that they have sold only 9m iPods for the quarter to June—the lowest number of sales since 2006, leading industry anylists to ponder whether the world’s most successful music device is in decline.

Such a drop in sales is not a problem for Apple, since the iPhone 4 and the iPad are selling in high numbers. But the number of people buying digital music players are concerning the music industry. Charles Arthur, technology editor of The Guardian, wrote that the decline in sales of MP3 players was a “problem” for record companies, saying that “digital music sales are only growing as fast as those of Apple’s devices – and as the stand-alone digital music player starts to die off, people may lose interest in buying songs from digital stores. The music industry had looked to the iPod to drive people to buy music in download form, whether from Apple’s iTunes music store, eMusic, Napster or from newer competitors such as Amazon.”

Mark Mulligan, a music and digital media analyst at Forrester Research, said in an interview that “at a time where we’re asking if digital is a replacement for the CD, as the CD was for vinyl, we should be starting to see a hockey-stick growth in download sales. Instead, we’re seeing a curve resembling that of a niche technology.” Alex Jacob, a spokesperson for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the worldwide music industry, agreed that there had been a fall in digital sales of music. “The digital download market is still growing,” they said. “But the percentage is less than a few years ago, though it’s now coming from a higher base.” Figures released earlier this year, Arthur wrote, “show that while CD sales fell by 12.7%, losing $1.6bn (£1bn)in value, digital downloads only grew by 9.2%, gaining less than $400m in value.”

Expectations that CDs would, in time, become extinct, replaced by digital downloads, have not come to light, Jacob confirmed. “Across the board, in terms of growth, digital isn’t making up for the fall in CD sales, though it is in certain countries, including the UK,” he said. Anylising the situation, Arthur suggested that “as iPod sales slow, digital music sales, which have been yoked to the device, are likely to slow too. The iPod has been the key driver: the IFPI’s figures show no appreciable digital download sales until 2004, the year Apple launched its iTunes music store internationally (it launched it in the US in April 2003). Since then, international digital music sales have climbed steadily, exactly in line with the total sales of iPods and iPhones.”

Nick Farrell, a TechEYE journalist, stated that the reason for the decline in music sales could be attributed to record companies’ continued reliance on Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, saying that they had considered him the “industry’s saviour”, and by having this mindset had forgotten “that the iPod is only for those who want their music on the run. What they should have been doing is working out how to get high quality music onto other formats, perhaps even HiFi before the iPlod fad died out.”

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When Jobs negotiated a deal with record labels to ensure every track was sold for 99 cents, they considered this unimportant—the iPod was not a major source of revenue for the company. However, near the end of 2004, there was a boom in sales of the iPod, and the iTunes store suddenly began raking in more and more money. The record companies were irritated, now wanting to charge different amounts for old and new songs, and popular and less popular songs. “But there was no alternative outlet with which to threaten Apple, which gained an effective monopoly over the digital music player market, achieving a share of more than 70%” wrote Arthur. Some did attempt to challenge the iTunes store, but still none have succeeded. “Apple is now the largest single retailer of music in the US by volume, with a 25% share.”

The iTunes store now sells television shows and films, and the company has recently launced iBooks, a new e-book store. The App Store is hugely successful, with Apple earning $410m in two years soley from Apps, sales of which they get 30%. In two years, 5bn apps have been downloaded—while in seven years, 10bn songs have been purchased. Mulligan thinks that there is a reason for this—the quality of apps simply does not match up to a piece of music. “You can download a song from iTunes to your iPhone or iPad, but at the moment music in that form doesn’t play to the strengths of the device. Just playing a track isn’t enough.”

Adam Liversage, a spokesperson of the British Phonographic Industry, which represents the major UK record labels, notes that the rise of streaming services such as Spotify may be a culprit in the fall in music sales. Revenues from such companies added up to $800m in 2009. Arthur feels that “again, it doesn’t make up for the fall in CD sales, but increasingly it looks like nothing ever will; that the record business’s richest years are behind it. Yet there are still rays of hope. If Apple – and every other mobile phone maker – are moving to an app-based economy, where you pay to download games or timetables, why shouldn’t recording artists do the same?”

Well, apparently they are. British singer Peter Gabriel has released a ‘Full Moon Club’ app, which is updated every month with a new song. Arthur also notes that “the Canadian rock band Rush has an app, and the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor – who has been critical of the music industry for bureaucracy and inertia – released the band’s first app in April 2009.” It is thought that such a system will be an effective method to reduce online piracy—”apps tend to be tied to a particular handset or buyer, making them more difficult to pirate than a CD”, he says—and in the music industry, piracy is a very big problem. In 2008, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimated that 95% of downloads were illegitimate. If musicians can increase sales and decrease piracy, Robert says, it can only be a good thing.

“It’s early days for apps in the music business, but we are seeing labels and artists experimenting with it,” Jacob said. “You could see that apps could have a premium offering, or behind-the-scenes footage, or special offers on tickets. But I think it’s a bit premature to predict the death of the album.” Robert concluded by saying that it could be “premature to predict the death of the iPod just yet too – but it’s unlikely that even Steve Jobs will be able to produce anything that will revive it. And that means that little more than five years after the music industry thought it had found a saviour in the little device, it is having to look around again for a new stepping stone to growth – if, that is, one exists.”

Category:Chili Finger Incident

Friday, May 6, 2005

On Thursday the 24th of March, 2005, Anna Ayala, a woman from Las Vegas, claimed to have found a human finger in her bowl of chili at a Wendy’s restaurant located at 1405 Monterey Highway, just south of downtown San Jose, California, owned by Fresno-based Jern Management. The finger, which probably belonged to a woman as it had a long and manicured fingernail, did not belong to any of the restaurant employees. The food supplies were seized by officials to be traced back to its manufacturers, while the restaurant was permitted to open again later with chili prepared from fresh ingredients.

Contents

  • 1 Aftermath
  • 2 Investigation centers on Ayala
  • 3 Twists and turns
  • 4 Ayala arrested
  • 5 Ayala transferred to San Jose
  • 6 Finger’s owner identified
  • 7 Recently Edited headlines

[edit]

Wikinews reporter David Vasquez drove his car up to the drive-thru menu and found that chili was still on the menu, at a price of US$1.19 for a small serving. He also witnessed workers unloading supplies from a semi-trailer truck in the restaurant’s parking lot, and carting them into the back door of the establishment.

Initially, county health officials said Ayala was fine and the finger had been cooked, which would have killed any bacteria in the finger. However, on March 27, officials admitted they were not so sure anymore. Tests were done on the finger to determine this. Dr. Martin Fenstersheib, Santa Clara County’s health officer, said that even if the finger was still raw when Ayala bit into it, the risk was low that she would have become infected with anything. However, he advised that Ayala should undergo a series of precautionary follow-up tests.

Sales at Wendy’s went down because of the incident. Wendy’s International, Inc. (WEN) closed at US$39.43 on Thursday the 24th, and as the stock exchange was closed for the Good Friday holiday, traders did not weigh in the stock until the next Monday.

By Tuesday the 5th of April, officials had still not succeeded in tracking down the owner of the finger. The fingerprint on the detached digit has been run through an FBI database as well as the local criminal database in Santa Clara County, but no matches were found. According to Rich Reneau, who was leading the investigation at the time, the fingerprint was marginal, and the likelihood of finding a match was slim.

Wendy’s stock did not go down significantly and was trading at US$39.37 that morning.

[edit]

The next day, on Wednesday the 6th, Las Vegas police searched the home of Anna Ayala. About a dozen officers conducted the search at Ayala’s home at Maryland Parkway and Serene Street at about 4 p.m. local time (23:00 UTC), according to witnesses at the scene. Ayala and other residents were handcuffed and brought out of the house. Ayala said that her teenage daughter, Genesis Reyes, had torn shoulder ligaments as a result of the search. The Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a photo of Reyes wearing a sling in their Friday edition. In San Jose, police spokeswoman Gina Tepoorten confirmed to reporters that investigators had served the warrant in cooperation with Las Vegas police on Wednesday, but she refused to reveal specific details about the warrant. By that time, Wendy’s was offering a US$50,000 reward for information leading to the source of the finger.

Research by the Associated Press uncovered Ayala’s history of lawsuits. Ayala successfully won her suit for medical expenses against the national El Pollo Loco chicken-chain, a previous employer, after her daughter Genesis contracted salmonella poisoning, allegedly from eating at the restaurant. However, Ayala lost another suit against General Motors in 2000 claiming that a wheel fell off her car. She also started a sexual harassment suit against her former boss in 1998. A total of 13 lawsuits in California and Nevada had been filed. Ayala replied the focus should be on Wendy’s, and not her record of lawsuits. Nick Muyo, a spokesman for the San Jose Police department, said not to expect new information in the case for at least a week.

[edit]

On Wednesday the 13th there was a potential new lead in the investigation. A spotted leopard had torn off part of a finger from an owner of exotic animals, Sandy Allman, in Pahrump, Nevada. The portion of Allman’s torn off finger was approximately the same size – 1 1/2-inches long. Pahrump is approximately 45 miles away from Las Vegas. Carol Asvestas, who owns an exotic animal sanctuary, told the San Jose Mercury News she witnessed the leopard tear off the finger. She reported the incident to a hotline run by Wendy’s offering the US$50,000 reward. Cindy Carroccio told the San Jose Mercury News that the finger was not reattached, and that the clinic “gave it back to her (Allman) in a little bag of ice.” On the same day the lead was announced, Ayala decided to drop her lawsuit against Wendy’s, due to emotional stress.

However, when Allman’s prints were sent to San Jose police, they didn’t match. Two days later, on Friday the 15th, Wendy’s doubled the reward to US$100,000. The company revealed that employees had passed polygraph tests. Wendy’s continues to claim that there is no evidence that the finger ever entered their supply chain, pointing to a lack of any accidents among the workers at their suppliers. Wendy’s tip line had received reports from across the United States, from “folks who either have lost a finger, or know somebody who lost a finger,” San Jose police Sgt. Nick Muyo told the Associated Press.

[edit]

On Thursday the 21st of April, Anna Ayala was arrested at or near her home in Las Vegas on Thursday evening, in connection with the case, shortly after Wendy’s finished its own internal investigation. According to court documents, she has been charged with one count of attempted grand larceny related to the chili case, and one count of grand larceny in an unrelated real estate deal, and is being held without bail in Clark County, Nevada, pending extradition. A press conference by the San Jose Police and Wendy’s was held on Friday, April 22, at 13:00 PDT. The charge related to the case states the finger could not have been prepared at Wendy’s, where the chili is heated to 170 degrees for 3 hours. There is also an inconsistency in Ayala’s account of finding the finger and claiming it caused her to vomit compared with police saying there was no vomit at the scene. The incident has caused Wendy’s 2.5 million dollars worth of damages, which Ayala could be criminally responsible for. Until recently, the San Jose police had not accused Ayala of planting the finger herself.

The unrelated charge stems from an incident, also in San Jose, when Ayala allegedly received an $11,000 down payment on a mobile home she did not own.

Ayala was incarcerated at the Clark County Detention Center, awaiting a fugitive review hearing on Tuesday, April 26, 2005, at 7:30 a.m. local time. She was processed and given inmate ID 01964047. Her case number was 05F07229X. Ayala waived extradition at the hearing, and her attorney said they were ready to come to San Jose to defend against the charges.

[edit]

On Friday, May 6, 2005, Ayala was transported to San Jose, California. Ayala was booked into the main Santa Clara County jail, and is awaiting arraignment. Ayala will likely be arraigned on Monday or Tuesday at the Santa Clara County Superior Court, according to Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney David Boyd.

On September 9, 2005, Ayala pleaded guilty to conspiring to file a false claim and attempted grand theft, and was scheduled to be sentenced on November 2, 2005. She faced up to ten years in prison, and her husband faced up to 13 years behind bars.

[edit]

Until the middle of May, the owner of the finger still had not been found.

But on May 13, 2005, police announced that they had identified the finger tip as belonging to an associate of Ayala’s husband [1]. The associate had lost his finger tip in an industrial accident at an asphalt company[2] in December, 2004. Police had received the information from an undisclosed caller to Wendy’s hot-line.

Photos related to this incident:

[edit]

Pages in category “Chili Finger Incident”

The Onion: An interview with ‘America’s Finest News Source’

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Despite the hopes of many University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) students, The Onion was not named after their student center. “People always ask questions about where the name The Onion came from,” said President Sean Mills in an interview with David Shankbone, “and when I recently asked Tim Keck, who was one of the founders, he told me the name—I’ve never heard this story about ‘see you at the un-yun’—he said it was literally that his Uncle said he should call it The Onion when he saw him and Chris Johnson eating an onion sandwich. They had literally just cut up the onion and put it on bread.” According to Editorial Manager Chet Clem, their food budget was so low when they started the paper that they were down to white bread and onions.

Long before The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Heck and Johnson envisioned a publication that would parody the news—and news reporting—when they were students at UW in 1988. Since its inception, The Onion has become a veritable news parody empire, with a print edition, a website that drew 5,000,000 unique visitors in the month of October, personal ads, a 24 hour news network, podcasts, and a recently launched world atlas called Our Dumb World. Al Gore and General Tommy Franks casually rattle off their favorite headlines (Gore’s was when The Onion reported he and Tipper were having the best sex of their lives after his 2000 Electoral College defeat). Many of their writers have gone on to wield great influence on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert‘s news parody shows.

And we are sorry to break the news to all you amateur headline writers: your submissions do not even get read.

Below is David Shankbone’s interview with Chet Clem and Sean Mills about the news empire that has become The Onion.

Contents

  • 1 How The Onion writes an issue
  • 2 The headlines
  • 3 The features and the columnists
  • 4 The photojournalism
  • 5 What The Onion will not publish
  • 6 Reactions to Onion stories
  • 7 The Presidential Seal
  • 8 The Onion’s readership
  • 9 Future features
  • 10 Handling national tragedies
  • 11 The Onion movie and Onion News Network
  • 12 Relationship with other satirical news programs
  • 13 Unsolicited material
  • 14 Source

Borneo bridge collapse kills at least three as vehicles fall

Saturday, November 26, 2011

At least three people died today and seventeen more were injured after a road bridge collapsed on the Indonesian island of Borneo. At least three cars, several motorbikes, and a public bus all fell into the Mahakam River.

The bridge was constructed from concrete roughly a decade ago to resemble California’s Golden Gate Bridge, and links the East Kalimantan towns of Tenggarong and Samarinda. Police say there is no indication of why it failed. Completed in 2001, work started in 1995 and locals called it “Kalimantan’s Golden Gate Bridge.”

The wounded have been hospitalised, some with broken bones. The scene at the bridge, in Kutai Kartanegara district, was filled with screams in the aftermath of the collapse. The suspension bridge was erected by state-owned builders PT Hutama Karya and one segment has fallen into the water. Some vehicles are close to entirely submerged, and Indonesia Today suggests as many as 100 people may be injured. One damaged car was left inverted and suspended above the water.

Harmoni Adi, head of a search and rescue agency, said “[t]he death toll is likely to increase,” after the 4:30pm local time collapse, with rescuers in Tenggarong searching the river for survivors. Some people swam ashore after falling from the structure, which spanned 700 metres. An eyewitness described heavy traffic on the bridge when it came down.

 This story has updates See Borneo bridge collapse: death toll reaches four, many remain missing, November 27, 2011,Death toll from Borneo bridge collapse reaches eleven, November 28, 2011