A Reminder That Life Is Fragile and Precious; L.A.’s Rebuild Could Be Hurt by Immigration Crackdowns–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Jan. 20, 2025

Indy Digest: Jan. 20, 2025

Big, important news is spewing forth like water out of a firehouse today—including the fact that the richest man in the world, a close adviser to the president, actually gave what seems to be a couple of Nazi salutes at an inauguration event today.

We’ll be covering all of the Trump administration news in the coming days, weeks and months. But today, I’d rather use this intro space to offer up a reminder, as we do here periodically, that life is a precious thing.

Today, I’m grieving the loss of two friends who have died recently.

I met Frank when he and his roommate and partner, Jim, were semi-regulars at the weekly Geeks Who Drink trivia night I helped coordinate a while back. Frank became a good friend as I learned he was a kind soul; he didn’t blink when I asked him once for help moving a couch.

However, he also struggled with drug addiction.

I hadn’t seen him in years, in part due to the pandemic, and in part due to the hold drugs had on him. I sent him a hello via Instagram last summer at some point, but I never heard back.

Just after the first of the year, Jim posted on Facebook that “Frankie,” as Jim called him, had died of a drug overdose. Finances had taken him away from home, and he apparently fell in with the wrong people.

This morning, we got the news that our downstairs neighbor, Kran Clay (as he’s known on Facebook), had passed away.

Klay was a handsome, muscular man when we met him after he moved into our apartment complex. At the time, he was active in the local leather community as Mr. Tool Shed.

To say Klay was outspoken is an understatement … in fact, he may be the most outspoken person I’ve ever known, sometimes to a fault. He had an infectious laugh, and was incredibly full of himself—but he was also kind. He would often take a cocktail out to the pool, and sing along to music blaring from his apartment. At times, I found that annoying.

Today, I really miss it.

A while back, he got very sick from meningitis. The disease took its toll, damaging his heart and requiring a heart-valve replacement. Eventually, that replacement failed, and Clay had been battling the medical world for months to get treatment.

According to a neighbor, Clay called an ambulance on Friday and was taken to Desert Regional Medical Center. (I was out of town at the time.) Yesterday, he passed away.

There’s a lot going on in the world … A LOT. But life goes on. Make sure you show your friends and family that you love them as often as you can, and live your life to its fullest. You never know when the final day will come for one of those loved ones—or for you.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Last year’s deal between the state and Google to help fund news organizations has—to the surprise of nobody, really—hit a major obstacle. Politico explains: “The University of California, Berkeley will not host a planned $125 million partnership between state officials and tech giant Google meant to fund cash-strapped local newsrooms, leaving the state scrambling to fulfill the landmark journalism deal. … The school’s decision now leaves state lawmakers without a clear venue to host the program and adds further uncertainty to the controversial deal reached with Google last summer, billed as a first-in-the-nation solution to mitigate the impacts of readership moving online. Complaints that Google News’ aggregation has decimated the industry have been especially acute in California, where once leading national newspapers like the Los Angeles Times have suffered mass layoffs.”

• The Federal Trade Commission is suing PepsiCo for illegal price discrimination. CNN says: “The commission alleges that the retailer, whose name was redacted in the statement from commissioners, received ‘unfair pricing advantages’ that were not made available to others. A source familiar with the case told CNN that the retailer is Walmart. A Walmart spokesperson told CNN that the company did not have a comment about the lawsuit. The big-box retailer ‘consistently’ received promotional payments and advertising from PepsiCo, which owns major brands including Frito lay, Quaker and Gatorade, the FTC alleged. The benefits disadvantaged family-owned grocers, local convenience stores and even larger chains, according to the commission.”

• Bloomberg reports that a 2022 hack of AT&T may have compromised FBI informants. Yikes! A Wired magazine story says: “The cache of hacked AT&T records didn’t reveal the substance of communications but, according to the document, could link investigators to their secret sources. The data was believed to include agents’ mobile phone numbers and the numbers with which they called and texted, the document shows. Records for calls and texts that weren’t on the AT&T network, such as through encrypted messaging apps, weren’t part of the stolen data. AT&T publicly disclosed the breach in July and said it included six months worth of mobile phone customer data from 2022. The hackers threatened to sell the data unless the telecommunications company paid an extortion fee. A person with knowledge of the breach, who reviewed a sample of the stolen information, confirmed that it contained records of sensitive FBI communications: the call logs of at least one agent. The person asked not to be named because the information is private.”

• Could the president’s promised crackdown on immigration hamper rebuilding efforts in L.A.? The Los Angeles Times explores the possibility: “The breeze was tinged with smoke from the fires that burned through Pacific Palisades as dozens of workers finished up the brick facade of a sprawling home in the tony Brentwood Park neighborhood. The talk was in Spanish, an unremarkable fact given the language has been the lingua franca on most construction sites in Southern California for decades. But that fact could be at the center of a leviathan clash of interests: the need to rebuild thousands of homes that were incinerated on a scale the city had never seen before, and the promises of an incoming president to deport a good percentage of the workers who would be needed to get that colossal undertaking done. ‘Everyone is scared,’ said Melvin Merino, 36, a painter at the home. Workers ‘are reluctant to talk about their immigration status out of fear it may be shared with immigration officials.’ Even in a city that is supportive of the immigrant population, his fears could make him and others cautious to take jobs in high profile areas such as the fire zone.”

• Two meatpackers are paying fines for violating child-labor laws. The New York Times shares some of the horrifying details: “Perdue Farms and JBS, two of the country’s biggest meatpackers, will pay a combined $8 million after the Department of Labor found the companies relied for years on migrant children to work in their slaughterhouses. … Many food-processing and manufacturing companies outsource cleaning and other jobs to third-party staffing firms, which technically employ the workers and shield companies from any violations. Federal investigators found that children had been working at a Perdue plant on Virginia’s Eastern Shore as far back as 2020. The children, who had been hired by a staffing firm, worked late hours and performed dangerous tasks with electric knives and hot sealing tools. … JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, agreed to pay $4 million after investigators found that children as young as 13 were working overnight cleaning shifts at its slaughterhouses in states including Colorado, Minnesota and Nebraska.”

• And finally … from both the “WTF?!” and “People Suck” files comes this KCAL headline: “Two Oregon residents arrested for impersonating firefighters in Palisades Fire evacuation zone.” Some details: “On Saturday, Los Angeles Police Department officers were patrolling the fire area with local firefighters when they ‘observed a fire truck that did not appear to be legitimate,’ said a statement from LASD. They relayed the information to the sheriff’s department, at which point investigators with their Major Crimes Bureau were contacted to assist deputies who had pulled the pair over as they attempted to enter an evacuation zone. Upon contacting the two occupants of the truck, deputies noticed they were both wearing turnout gear,” LASD’s statement said. ‘The occupants claimed to be from “Roaring River Fire Department” in Oregon.’ Underneath their turnout gear, both individuals were wearing Cal Fire t-shirts and had helmets and radios to further look the part, deputies said. Investigators determined that the department was not actually a legitimate agency and that the fire truck they were driving was purchased through an auction.”

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