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By Jan TenBruggencate Advertiser Science Writer

HONOLULU, Hawai‘i (June 26, 2001 – Honolulu Advertiser)---The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to wrap Tern Island in rock and steel to prevent it from washing away.

The rusting steel plates that for 50 years have held together the largest island within French Frigate Shoals are collapsing and threatening the erosion of the island.

Tern Island was an 11-acre sand spit when the U.S. Navy expanded it, establishing a rectangle of steel plates pounded into the reef and filled with coral debris. The work creates a mid-ocean runway 3,000 feet long and covering 34 acres.

The Navy left after World War II and the Coast Guard moved onto the island in 1952 to establish a Long-Range Aids to Navigation station.

The Coast Guard turned the island over to the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1979, and the service since then has staffed Tern with a small cadre of biologists who keep tabs on millions of sea birds,...

JAKARTA, Indonesia (June 28, 2001 - Joyo Indonesian News/Dow Jones Newswires/AP/TAPOL)---The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists called for the immediate release Thursday of two Belgian filmmakers kidnapped by separatists in Indonesia’s remote Irian Jaya province.

"Kidnapping journalists violates international humanitarian law and is certainly not a good public relations strategy," said the committee’s deputy director, Joel Simon, in a statement.

Johan van Den Eynde, 47, and Philippe Simon, 49, were taken hostage last month by the rebel Free Papua Movement.

The kidnappers have demanded permission to raise their outlawed separatist flag. There has been no demand for a monetary ransom.

The rebels have been involved in several kidnappings in Irian Jaya, which is also known as West Papua, and takes up the western half of New Guinea Island, about 4,000 kilometers (2,400 miles) east of Jakarta.

In 1996, the same group kidnapped several...