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Chiangrai Life Saga May Soon Become Hollywood Movie
Dad's frantic Thai search for son to be made into a Hollywood film
The book of Sean Felton’s mission to save then three-year-old Jobe, entitled Scared of the Dark, is to be released on both sides of the Atlantic next month.
But already Hollywood moguls are now vying to turn the tale into a cinema success.
Sean wants the financial rewards of a best-seller, not for himself but for the anonymous businessman who ploughed a small fortune into the £80,000 cost of getting Jobe back into Britain.
“I won’t reveal his name,” said the 40-year-old, “but he has been like a father to me. I can never repay him, but, hopefully, this will go some way towards it.”
Sean’s world fell apart on March 26, 2010, when he returned to his neat Norton Canes home in Staffordshire to discover wife Kim – married after a whirlwind romance in Thailand – and Jobe had vanished. A laughing Kim called three days later to inform him she’d spirited their child to Thailand.
The painter and decorator succeeded, where CID, his own MP, Interpol and even the Foreign Office had failed, in tracking them down by posing as an American playboy.
Kim, 31, was wooed on Facebook by the fictitious ‘Matt Young’, pictures of his Ferrari and promises of cash.
Kim, 31, was wooed on Facebook by the fictitious ‘Matt Young’, pictures of his Ferrari and promises of cash
Sean had to grease palms and brave bandits before confronting the pair in the squalid village of Chiang Rai, close to the Vietnamese border and at the heart of the narcotics freeway known as the Golden Triangle, where poppy crops, not English pounds, are the currency that counts.
Kim handed back the traumatised child for £1,000, ownership of a parcel of land in Thailand that Sean has purchased for more than £6,000, a laptop and agreement by the British Embassy she wouldn’t face prosecution in this country.
Watching the child yesterday playing boisterously with his Christmas presents – doting Dad beaming in the background – it’s hard to comprehend the ordeal he endured during six months hidden in the depths of a Thai jungle.
When Sean located Jobe, he was cowering in the corner of a hut on stilts, gnawing hungrily on an apple.
“I will never forget it,” recalled Sean, clearly shaken by the painful memory. “He had no eyes – they were, like, soulless. He was undernourished. His thumbnails had been ripped off and his teeth were chipped. I picked him up. He couldn’t speak. He was scared to death.
“He didn’t speak English – he had been that traumatised, it was just gibberish. You’ve got to remember, this is a child who had been spoilt to death. For him to be picked up and taken to Thailand – a totally different culture, totally different food – must have been devastating.
“For the first three months when I brought him back we slept together on the settee. He was scared of the monsters, he was scared of everything.
“He does still remember and we talk about his mother. We’ve got to the stage where we can talk about the difficult questions.”
Sean’s story is a salutary lesson to Englishmen of a certain age whose heads are turned by the fluttering lashes and pouts of beautiful Thai women half their age. Some of those bar girls are looking for something – and, more often than not, it isn’t love. Sean admits: “I was a fool – my own MP called me a fool. She conned me from the beginning. I think I was a customer in her eyes. She looked on the whole situation as a business. I thought I was being smart. The courtship was brilliant, it was one-in-a-million and I will probably never experience anything like it again.
“She copped me at the bar, next thing we were married, which was my doing. It was just a means of getting full British citizenship.”
He is adamant, however, that he didn’t travel to Thailand for the first time in 2004 looking for love.
Unlike mates who wanted to down lager at the bar, Sean wanted to visit tourist hotspots – and Kim, a stunning bar-worker at the Pattaya hotel, was more than willing to help. “It was the best holiday I ever had and, obviously, I had feelings for her.”
Sean was so smitten he returned three weeks later. “We went to Samui Island. That was paradise and as cheap as chips. I was living a life of luxury for next to nothing. At the end of the three weeks I proposed.
“People may say it happened too quickly, but it happens every day all over the world. If you meet someone you want to be with you do pop the question.”
The couple married on New Year’s Day, 2006, in Kim’s ramshackle village of Udon Thani.
Romance was painfully short. The doting Thai bride became moody and detached soon after arriving in Britain four months later. “She changed so much from the holiday romance to reality.”
And the scattered jigsaw pieces of her past slowly came together. Sean said: “Kim was crying in the bathroom, I thought she was homesick. She said she had something to show me. A finger on her right hand had been cut off from the knuckle. She said it was an accident while operating a rice machine, but the injury wasn’t new – she must’ve kept it from me. I found that frightening and found out later that can be the Thai punishment for stealing.”
He claims she later confessed to links with the burgeoning sex industry in her own country.
Sean tried to win back his wife with cash. Kim, now pregnant, protested their apartment was too small, so they rented a property while Sean purchased and renovated a Norton Canes home.
She wanted him to buy three-and-a-half acres in Thailand. He did. She spent nights out with fellow Thai brides. “No matter what you did for Kim, she was not happy,” he shrugged. “I would come, in there would be a houseful of Thai girls all eating. I always got the impression it was them and me. I was kidding myself, trying to still be the happy family. I had gone through a divorce before, when I was a kid, and didn’t want that.
“2009 was a hell of a year. She kept going out and was coming back at all hours. It was an unreal situation. She could be nice one minute and turn on you with the flip of a coin. She wouldn’t speak but, really, the only time she showed her temper was when I told her I wanted a divorce.
“She wanted me to pay for British citizenship and I said, ‘no way’. I was wiped out.”
It was then, Sean believes, his wife hatched the plot to take their child.
And he almost lost the lad forever.
With weeks gone and assorted agencies plus a private detective drawing a blank, Sean tripped by chance on to Kim’s Facebook account.
He posed as a rich American and became cyber friends with two Frenchmen she was pictured embracing. They gave away her location.
Thai police, bolstered by promises of booze and food, helped Sean find his family in Chiang Rai.
Sean has heard nothing from Kim since returning with their son – and that’s they way he wants it. “Yes, I am bitter. We’re still not divorced – I can’t afford it. I’m a full-time dad which is very, very hard financially.”
The holiday dream that turned into hell on earth cost Sean a successful business, his wealth and almost his sanity. But he has his precious son back.
He’s working on a second book, chronicling Jobe’s rehabilitation, and setting up a charity helping parents enduring the same plight – Abducted Angels.
Sean is also a lot wiser after learning a painful and costly lesson. To borrow from a well worn Trading Standards motto: if a tourist’s whirlwind romance in Thailand seems too good to be true… it probably is.

News
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.
According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.
Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.
Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.
Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.
To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.
Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.
On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.
Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

Pixa Bay
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.
TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.
When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.
And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.
Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.
A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.
Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.
But today, it feels more like reality.
Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.
SOURCE | CNN
News
2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Washington — Trump Media, The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.
The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.
The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.
The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.
Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.
Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.
The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.
The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.
SOURCE | AP
News
The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.
The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.
Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.
This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.
In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.
The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.
This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.
The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.
In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.
According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.
Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.
The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.
For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.
Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.
As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.
As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.
The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.
SOURCE: AP
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