A 24-year-old woman has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of her sons over the last year.

Deputy Chief Warren Lemcke today announced the charges against Sarah Leung.

“Few incidents are more tragic than the death of a child but when that death is allegedly at the hands of the mother, it is unimaginable. And when it is two children, it is incomprehensible,” said Mr. Lemcke.

The remains of the first child were found wrapped in a plastic bag between two East Vancouver houses in April 2009.

A second investigation was launched this past March.

The first child was born on April 2, 2009 and the second on March 2 this year.

Deputy Chief Lemcke said police never found the remains of the second boy despite a proposed search of a landfill.

Police consulted outside experts, who said no evidence would likely be found.

He said Ms. Leung became pregnant after the death of the first child, but concealed her condition from police and her family.

He would not speculate on motive and added the father of the children was not involved.

He said Ms. Leung, who turned herself in Tuesday, has been co-operating with police.

She is to appear in provincial court today.

Mr. Lemcke said it had been a challenging case that took a long time due to the complexity of the investigation.

The key to restoring West Coast salmon runs lies in ensuring there is a wide diversity of stocks within a given species, say the authors of a landmark study of sockeye in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

While big salmon rivers such as the Fraser and Skeena in British Columbia, and the Columbia, which flows from B.C. to Oregon, have wild swings in productivity, the Bristol Bay area has remained remarkably stable, yielding average runs of 30 million fish annually since 1950.

Because of stock collapses last year, salmon fishing was widely closed throughout B.C., Washington, Oregon and California. On the Fraser, for example, all fishing was banned after an anticipated run of more than 10-million sockeye fell to around 1-million, leading to the calling of a federal commission of inquiry.

Bristol Bay, however, had another good year with the commercial fleet hauling in a catch worth US$120-million.

“Bristol Bay is a well known example of a sustainable fishery, where sockeye salmon have been caught in huge numbers reliably, year after year, since the first canneries were built in the late 1800s,” said Dr. Daniel Schindler, lead author of the study which appears Thursday on the cover of the science journal, Nature.

“In the last 50 years this fishery has produced more than $5-billion [worth] of salmon, making it one of the single most valuable fisheries in North America. Our study helps explain why the Bristol Bay sockeye fishery has been so reliable for so long,” he said in an interview from a field camp in Aleknagik, southwest Alaska.

Dr. Schindler and his co-author, Dr. Ray Hilborn, both of the University ofWashington School of Fishery Sciences, said Bristol Bay is steadily productive because there are so many different types of sockeye there.

He said having many different populations of salmon is like having a diversified stock portfolio, in which strong performers compensate for weak ones, smoothing out the bumps.

“Our study shows that the ‘portfolio effect’ is caused by small differences in how different populations of sockeye salmon respond to their environment. Some populations perform better in cold, wet years while others thrive while it’s hot or dry,” said Dr. Schindler.

“The net result is that each population experiences its own ups and downs based on environmental conditions and pure chance. But given sufficient diversity there are enough winners to make up for the losers every year across the rivers that produce salmon in Bristol Bay,” he said.

The concept that diverse ecosystems are more stable has long been accepted in science, but the Alaska study is unique because it looks at diversity within a single species.

While sockeye are classified as one species, there can be many different sockeye populations, or stocks, in any given river, each with physical or behavioral differences shaped by the environmental.

Dr. Schindler said when stocks become homogenized – as they do when hatcheries produce huge numbers of fish or development destroys a range of habitat – the result can be boom or bust cycles.

“We estimate that without the current diversity . . . the Bristol Bay fishery would close about ten times more frequently,” said Dr. Schindler.

“We believe this new evidence from our Bristol Bay salmon study is a game changer for managing species and entire ecosystems, because the lessons from this paper result in specific advice for natural resource management,” said Dr. Hilborn.

He said salmon should be managed to promote diversity, and that means protecting a wide range of habitat, avoiding a dependence on hatcheries, and keeping catches low enough that a wide variety of stocks is allowed to return to spawn.

Dr. Hilborn said there has been a recent shift in both Canada and the U.S. towards just that type of approach.

In B.C., for example, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 2008 adopted a wild salmon policy that stresses protecting diversity. That policy is in the process of being implemented.

“In some sense this [research] is supporting evidence for the direction that many agencies are currently going,” said Dr. Hilborn.

Engineers expect a giant sinkhole caused by the rains of Tropical Storm Agatha is seen in Guatemala City June 2, 2010. Collapsed roads and highway bridges complicated rescue efforts in Guatemala on Tuesday after Agatha drenched Central America, burying homes under mud and killing at least 180 people.

GUATEMALA CITY - Torrential rains brought by the first tropical storm of the 2010 season pounded Central America and southern Mexico, triggering deadly landslides. The death toll stood at 15 Sunday but authorities said the number could rise.

Tropical Storm Agatha made landfall near the border of Guatemala and Mexico on Saturday with wind speeds of up to 45 mph (75 kph), then weakened into a tropical depression before dissipating over the mountains of western Guatemala.

Although no longer even a tropical depression, Agatha still posed trouble for the region: Remnants of the storm were expected to deliver 10 to 20 inches (25 to 50 centimeters) of rain over southeastern Mexico, Guatemala and parts of El Salvador, creating the possibility of "life-threatening flash floods and mudslides," the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said in an advisory Sunday.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said Saturday night that the rivers in the country's south were flooding or close to it.

Colom said 4.3 inches (10.8 centimeters) of rain had fallen in Guatemala City's valley in 12 hours, the most since 1949.

As of Saturday night, 4,300 people were in shelters and authorities said the number could rise as figures come in from around the country.

Yesterday all servers in the U.S. went out on strike in a bid to get more RAM and better CPUs. A spokes person said that the need for better RAM was due to some fool increasing the front-side bus speed. In future, buses will be told to slow down in residential motherboards.

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