Odd Thomas Odd Blog

Despite Jimmy Wales' petition to save Richard O'Dwyer now reaching in excess of 209,000 signatures,   V3.co.uk has today reported that the Home Office have confirmed they will still  not block the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer to the US to face charges of copyright infringement. With such a surge of support for Richard over the weekend - more than trebling in numbers since my last post - it is curious to note that there has been very little media coverage of the situation, that I have seen.  Admittedly, I watch very little television and do not read the papers, but both formats also present news items on their websites, which I do read.  So where are the articles?  Where is the news coverage that would normally accompany something that generates this much interest in a short space of time? Since 25 July 2012, when Richard's story came back to my attention, very few news outlets have been tracking the progression of the case and the rapid increase of sig...

Back in January, I got a bee in my bonnet after hearing about the attempt by the US to extradite Richard O'Dwyer  over some tenuous allegations, so I  wrote a rather clumsy letter to my local MP .  I did actually receive a response but have not published it on here as it seemed unfair to do so without the MP in question being aware, needless to say, the response was as measured as you would expect. Things seemed to go relatively quiet (at least, as far as I could see), until today when I started to see tweets by Richard's mother, Julia O'Dwyer , and have seen that - finally - people are starting to take notice, with the cause to #SaveRichard garnering support from the likes of Wikipedia founder  Jimmy Wales  and Labour MP Tom Watson . My own view is that Richard O'Dwyer is being used as an easy target by the US government, taking advantage of an unbalanced US-UK extradition agreement, in order to make a point.  But what point are they making? ...