Free Republic

Tom Christian, known as the Voice of Pitcairn for his half-century-long role in keeping his tiny South Pacific island, famed as the refuge of the Bounty mutineers, connected to the world, died at his home there on July 7. Mr. Christian, Pitcairn’s chief radio officer and a great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, the mutiny’s leader, was 77.

Local and state officials entered the temple of a secretive polygamist sect late Saturday, said lawmen blockading the road to the YFZ Ranch near Eldorado. The action comes hours after local prosecutors said officials were preparing for the worst because a group of FLDS members were resisting efforts to search the structure. The Texas Department of Public Safety trooper and Schleicher County sheriff’s deputy confirmed that officials have entered the temple but said they had no word on whether anything occurred in the effort. The incursion into the temple caps the three-day saga of the state’s Child Protective Services agency...

Pitcairn, the South Pacific home of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, has never been British territory and is instead the world's smallest and most isolated independent nation, a court was told yesterday. When the Royal Navy ship Swallow sighted the island in 1767 it sailed straight past and did not claim sovereignty, pausing only to name the outcrop after the midshipman who spotted it, Paul Dacre told the Pitcairn supreme court. "No attempt was made to claim the island on behalf of the monarch," he said. Mr Dacre, defending 13 islanders accused of rape and indecent assault, is arguing...

'Sins of a few' trouble Pitcairn By Michael Brooke BBC Pitcairn was colonised by the Bounty mutineers A couple of months ago I was looking down into the blue waters of Bounty Bay. The leaves of the coconut palms rattled in the south-easterly breeze. Pure white tropicbirds rode the updrafts sweeping the cliffs, the better to show off their extravagant red tail plumes. A commemorative plaque, erected in 1990, recorded the arrival of the Bounty mutineers 200 years earlier. I was on Pitcairn, home to a distinct culture and language. Close community Idyllic? Scarcely, for I knew that a legal...

Pitcairn Island, the tiny Pacific outpost colonised by the mutineers of HMS Bounty in the 18th century, has announced its first birth in 17 years.Emily Rose Christian, weighing 8lb 4oz (3.8kg), takes to 48 the population of the British administered island, which lies in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and Peru.Emily, born on Sunday, is a ninth generation descendant of Fletcher Christian, the English seaman who led the infamous mutiny against Captain Bligh in 1789 and then settled on the fertile two square mile lump of rock, establishing a puritanical community in which dancing and drinking...