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The report found that monitored animal populations had fallen 69 percent since 1970

Wild populations of monitored animal species have plummeted nearly 70 percent in the last 50 years, according to a landmark assessment released Thursday that highlights “devastating” losses to nature due to human activity.

Featuring data from 32,000 populations of more than 5,000 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, the WWF Living Planet Index shows accelerating falls across the globe.

In biodiversity-rich regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean, the figure for animal population loss is as high as 94 percent.

Globally, the report found that monitored animal populations had fallen 69 percent since 1970.

Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, said his organisation was “extremely worried” by the new data. 

“(It shows) a devastating fall in wildlife populations, in particular in tropical regions that are home to some of the most biodiverse landscapes in the world,” he said.

Mark Wright, director of science at WWF, said the figures were “truly frightening”, particularly for Latin America.

“Latin America is renowned for his biodiversity of course, it’s really important for lots of other things as well,” he said. 

“It’s super important for regulating the climate. We estimate currently there’s something like 150 to 200 billion tonnes of carbon wrapped up in the forests of the Amazon.”

That is equivalent to 550 to 740 billion tonnes of CO2, or 10 to 15 times more than annual greenhouse gas emissions at current rates.

The index found that freshwater species had declined more than those found in any other habitat, with an 83-percent population fall since 1970.

The report found that the main drivers of wildlife loss are habitat degradation due to development and farming, exploitation, the introduction of invasive species, pollution, climate change and disease. 

Lambertini said the world needed to rethink its harmful and wasteful agricultural practices before the global food chain collapsed.

“Food systems today are responsible for over 80 percent of deforestation on land, and if you look at the ocean and freshwater they are also driving a collapse of fishery stocks and populations in those habitats,” he said.

With world leaders due to convene in Montreal for the COP15 biodiversity summit in December, the report authors called for an international, binding commitment to protect nature, similar to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

– ‘Need to act now’ –

The Living Planet Report argues that increasing conservation and restoration efforts, producing and consuming food more sustainably, and rapidly and deeply decarbonising all sectors can alleviate the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. 

It also calls for governments to properly factor into policymaking the value of services rendered by nature, such as food, medicine and water supply. 

“We need to stress the fact that nature loss is not just a moral issue of our duty to protect the rest of the world. It is actually an issue of material value, an issue of security for humanity as well,” said Lambertini.

Some areas experienced more population loss than others — Europe, for example, saw a wildlife population decline of 18 percent.

“But that also masks historic, very extreme losses of biodiversity,” said Andrew Terry, director of conservation at the Zoological Society of London, which helped compile the data. 

“We know that we’re coming out of (a) low point in the state of biodiversity in the northern hemisphere.”

In Africa, where 70 percent of livelihoods rely on nature in some form, the report showed a two-thirds fall in wildlife populations since 1970.

Alice Ruhweza, Africa regional director at WWF, said the assessment showed how there was a “huge human cost” when nature is lost.

She said young people in particular were concerned about wildlife preservation, and would push governments to implement greater protective measures. 

“We have a young, entrepreneurial and increasingly educated population that is showing more awareness around issues of nature,” said Ruhweza. 

“So the potential for transformative change is really significant. But the time is running short, and we need to act now.”

US space tourist Dennis Tito (L) shakes hands with his crew members Talgat Musabayev (C) and Yuri Baturin (R) after their landing near the Kazakh town of Arkalyk (some 300 km from Astana), 06 May 2001

Dennis Tito, an American entrepreneur who in 2001 became the first person to pay for their own space voyage, said Wednesday he plans to fly with his wife Akiko on a future SpaceX mission around the Moon.

The voyage will take place after Elon Musk’s company has finished developing its prototype Starship rocket and has flown a first commercial flight that will include Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.

“Since my first human spaceflight I continue to be passionate about space, and the possibilities it has for all humanity, which leads me to this mission” Tito, 82, told reporters on a call Wednesday. 

The weeklong mission would see Starship fly within 125 miles of the lunar surface before returning home.

Tito did not disclose how much he and Akiko had paid for their tickets, but said ten more seats remain open for others to sign up.

Maezawa, on the other hand, has chartered all the seats on his mission called “dearMoon,” set to fly no sooner than 2023 but likely much later.

In 2001, Tito paid $20 million to fly on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station, heralding the era of space tourism.

An aeronautics and astronautics engineer by training, Tito worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1960s, before founding the investment management firm Wilshire Associates in 1972.

Japanese born Akiko, a systems engineer who later moved to the finance industry and relocated to New York in 1995, added: “I want people to know that they can do whatever they set their mind to. 

“It’s never too late, no matter your age, race or gender.”

It’s unclear when SpaceX will commence commercial missions with Starship — a giant rocket that the company hopes to one day use to colonize Mars.

Musk has promised the rocket will complete its first orbital test this year, and a version of Starship has already been selected to be used as a lander for NASA’s Artemis missions to return humans to the Moon.

Aarti Matthews, director of Starship crew and cargo, said SpaceX envisaged the commercial missions as a step towards airline-like space operations.

An Australian laboratory experiment taught brain cells to play the video game Pong by responding to electronic stimuli

Neuroscientists have shown that lab-grown brain cells can learn to play the classic video game Pong, and could be capable of “intelligent and sentient behavior.”

Brett Kagan, who led a study published in the journal Neuron Wednesday, told AFP his findings open the door to a new type of research into biological information processors, complementing normal digital computers.

“What machines can’t do is learn things very quickly — if you need a machine learning algorithm to learn something, it requires thousands of data samples,” he explained.

“But if you ask a human, or train a dog, a dog can learn a trick in two or three tries.”

Kagan, chief scientific officer at Melbourne-based Cortical Labs, set out to answer whether there is a way to harness the inherent intelligence of neurons.

Kagan and colleagues took mice cells from embryonic brains, and derived human neurons from adult stem cells.

They then grew them on top of microelectrode arrays that could read their activity and stimulate them. The experiments involved a cluster of around 800,000 neurons, roughly the size of a bumblebee brain.

In the game, a signal was sent from the left or right of the array to indicate where the ball was located, and “DishBrain,” as the researchers called it, fired back signals to move the paddle, in a simplified, opponent-free version of Pong.

– ‘Sentient, but not conscious’ – 

One of the major hurdles was figuring out how to “teach” the neurons.

In the past, it has been proposed to give them a shot of the “feel good” hormone dopamine to reward a correct action — but that was difficult to achieve in a time-sensitive way.

Instead, the team relied on a theory called the “free energy principle” that was coined by the paper’s senior author Karl Friston, which says cells are hardwired to minimize unpredictability in their environments.

When the neurons succeeded in making the paddle hit the ball, they received “predictable” electrical signals. But when they missed, they were sent randomized, or “unpredictable” signals.

“The only thing that the neurons could do is actually get better at trying to hit the ball to keep their world controllable and predictable,” said Kagan.

DishBrain’s performance isn’t up to AI (artificial intelligence) or human standards, but “the fact we see any significant learning is really just evidence of how robust neurons are at processing information and adapting to their environment,” he added.

The team believes DishBrain is sentient — which they defined as being able to sense and respond to sensory information in a dynamic way — but drew the line at calling it “conscious,” which implies awareness of being.

DishBrain also tried out another task — the dinosaur game that appears in Google Chrome when no internet connection is found — and the preliminary results were encouraging, said Kagan.

For their next steps, the team plans to test how DishBrain’s intelligence is affected by medicines and alcohol — though Kagan himself is most excited by the future possibilities of biological computers based on this discovery.

“We compare it to the first transistor,” he said, the building block of modern electronics invented in 1947, which eventually led to today’s powerful digital computers.

“This is robustly conducted, interesting neuroscience,” said Tara Spires-Jones of the Centre for Discovery Brain Science at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study.

“Don’t worry, while these dishes of neurons can change their responses based on stimulation, they are not SciFi style intelligence in a dish, these are simple (albeit interesting and scientifically important) circuit responses.”

La Oroya, a town of 30,000 some 185 kilometers (115 miles) east of Lima, is considered one of the world's most polluted cities

Andean villagers in Peru told an inter-American rights court on Wednesday about how their health has suffered for decades due to environmental damage caused by a mining company extracting heavy metals in their midst.

The community of La Oroya accuses the government in Lima of having allowed the Doe Run Peru company, owned by US group Renco, to pollute at will while turning a blind eye to their fate.

“The State was like a father who ignored us,” 74-year-old villager Rosa Amaro told the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the first day of a hearing against the Peruvian government.

She was one of several residents to recount the effects of decades of exposure to heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic.

Watchdogs say La Oroya, a town of 30,000 some 185 kilometers (115 miles) east of Lima, is one of the world’s most polluted cities because of smelters refining lead, zinc, gold and copper in the area.

Amaro told the court, sitting this week in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, that she witnessed the hills surrounding her town become bare over time because “the plants would not grow.”

Through tears, she testified of residents struggling with burning throats and eyes, headaches and difficulty breathing.

Others told of tumors, muscular problems and infertility blamed on pollution from the smelters.

Amaro, who headed a local lobby group in La Oroya, said she was forced in 2017 to leave the town where she had lived all her life due to threats from the relatives of mine workers worried about their jobs if Doe Run were brought to account.

The plaintiffs claim the state also failed to investigate threats and harassment against them.

– ‘Compromised its obligation’ –

La Oroya residents sued the Peruvian government and obtained a partially favorable ruling in 2006 from the Constitutional Court, which ordered protective measures.

Last year the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigates suspected violations of human rights, said those measures were never implemented.

The commission found that the State had failed to regulate and oversee the behavior of the mining company and “compromised its obligation to guarantee human rights.”

It referred the matter to the court now sitting in Montevideo to determine reparations.

“My health is already destroyed. All I want is for future generations to be in good health,” plaintiff Yolanda Zurita, 63, told the court on Wednesday of her expectations from the process.

Doe Run Peru, which has operated in La Oroya since 1997, declared bankruptcy in 2009. 

Under a credit agreement, the company was handed to its miner employees who want to reopen the abandoned smelter.

Flood waters have hit across West Africa

About 500 people have died in Nigeria’s worst floods in a decade and 1.4 million others been displaced from their homes since the start of the rainy season, the government said.

Floods caused by abundant rains and poor infrastructure have affected vast swathes of Africa’s most populous country sparking fears they could worsen food insecurity and inflation. 

Nigeria’s Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs said Tuesday that “over 1.4 million persons were displaced, about 500 persons have been reported dead… and 1,546 persons were injured”.

“Similarly, 45,249 houses were totally damaged… while 70,566 hectares of farmlands were completely destroyed,” added the statement from the ministry’s Deputy Director Information, Rhoda Ishaku Iliya.

National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Manzo Ezekiel told AFP on Wednesday the latest figures were from last weekend.

While the rainy season usually begins around June, most deaths and displacements started “around August and September” Ezekiel added.

“We are taking all the necessary actions to bring relief to the people affected by the flood,” humanitarian affairs ministry official Nasir Sani-Gwarzo said.

Fuel scarcity caused long queues at petrol stations in the capital Abuja this week after tankers were blocked by floods in neighbouring states.

In southern Anambra state, 76 people died when a boat capsized  last Friday during flooding of the Niger River.

More abundant rains are expected in the coming weeks and months — the rainy season typically ends in November in northern states and in  December in the south. 

Until Thursday, “heavy rainfall is anticipated over parts of Taraba, Ebonyi, Benue and Cross Rivers State,” the  Meteorological Agency said on Facebook, adding that “flash flooding is likely”.

Floods were also caused by the release of water from several damns, a process that was meant to prevent excessive flooding.

The high level of damage caused is also because “people violate regional planning (rules), constructing (houses and buildings) near waterways,” said Ezekiel.

In 2012, 363 people died and more than 2.1 million were displaced from flooding. 

Sub-Saharan Africa is disproportionately affected by climate change and many of its economies are already struggling from ripple effects of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Rice producers have warned that the devastating floods could impact prices in the country of some 200 million people where rice imports are banned to stimulate local production.

The World Food Programme and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said last month that Nigeria was among six countries facing a high risk of catastrophic levels of hunger.

Flood waters have hit across West Africa

About 500 people have died in Nigeria’s worst floods in a decade and 1.4 million others been displaced from their homes since the start of the rainy season, the government said.

Floods caused by abundant rains and poor infrastructure have affected vast swathes of Africa’s most populous country sparkin fears they could worsen food insecurity and inflation. 

Nigeria’s Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs said Tuesday that “over 1.4 million persons were displaced, about 500 persons have been reported dead… and 1,546 persons were injured”.

“Similarly, 45,249 houses were totally damaged… while 70,566 hectares of farmlands were completely destroyed,” added the statement from the ministry’s Deputy Director Information, Rhoda Ishaku Iliya.

National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Manzo Ezekiel told AFP on Wednesday the latest figures were from last weekend.

While the rainy season usually begins around June, most deaths and displacements started “around August and September” Ezekiel added.

“We are taking all the necessary actions to bring relief to the people affected by the flood,” humanitarian affairs ministry official Nasir Sani-Gwarzo said.

Fuel scarcity caused long queues at petrol stations in the capital Abuja this week after tankers were blocked by floods in neighbouring states.

In southern Anambra state, 76 people died when a boat capsized  last Friday during flooding of the Niger River.

More abundant rains are expected in the coming weeks and months — the rainy season typically ends in November in northern states and in  December in the south. 

Until Thursday, “heavy rainfall is anticipated over parts of Taraba, Ebonyi, Benue and Cross Rivers State,” the  Meteorological Agency said on Facebook, adding that “flash flooding is likely”.

Floods were also caused by the release of water from several damns, a process that was meant to prevent excessive flooding.

The high level of damage caused is also because “people violate regional planning (rules), constructing (houses and buildings) near waterways,” said Ezekiel.

In 2012, 363 people died and more than 2.1 million were displaced from flooding. 

Sub-Saharan Africa is disproportionately affected by climate change and many of its economies are already struggling from ripple effects of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Rice producers have warned that the devastating floods could impact prices in the country of some 200 million people where rice imports are banned to stimulate local production.

The World Food Programme and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said last month that Nigeria was among six countries facing a high risk of catastrophic levels of hunger.

The brain of a rat in which a fluorescent protein has been used to highlight transplanted human brain cells

Scientists have successfully implanted and integrated human brain cells into newborn rats, creating a new way to study complex psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, and perhaps eventually test treatments.

Studying how these conditions develop is incredibly difficult — animals do not experience them like people, and humans cannot simply be opened up for research.

Scientists can assemble small sections of human brain tissue derived from stem cells in petri dishes, and have already done so with more than a dozen brain regions.

But in dishes, “neurons don’t grow to the size which a human neuron in an actual human brain would grow”, said Sergiu Pasca, the study’s lead author and professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University.

And isolated from a body, they cannot tell us what symptoms a defect will cause.

To overcome those limitations, researchers implanted the groupings of human brain cells, called organoids, into the brains of young rats.

The rats’ age was important: human neurons have been implanted into adult rats before, but an animal’s brain stops developing at a certain age, limiting how well implanted cells can integrate.

“By transplanting them at these early stages, we found that these organoids can grow relatively large, they become vascularised (receive nutrients) by the rat, and they can cover about a third of a rat’s (brain) hemisphere,” Pasca said.

– Ethical dilemmas –

To test how well the human neurons integrated with the rat brains and bodies, air was puffed across the animals’ whiskers, which prompted electrical activity in the human neurons.

That showed an input connection — external stimulation of the rat’s body was processed by the human tissue in the brain.

The scientists then tested the reverse: could the human neurons send signals back to the rat’s body?

They implanted human brain cells altered to respond to blue light, and then trained the rats to expect a “reward” of water from a spout when blue light shone on the neurons via a cable in the animals’ skulls.

After two weeks, pulsing the blue light sent the rats scrambling to the spout, according to the research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The team has now used the technique to show that organoids developed from patients with Timothy syndrome grow more slowly and display less electrical activity than those from healthy people.

The technique could eventually be used to test new drugs, according to J. Gray Camp of the Roche Institute for Translational Bioengineering, and Barbara Treutlein of ETH Zurich.

It “takes our ability to study human brain development, evolution and disease into uncharted territory”, the pair, who were not involved in the study, wrote in a review commissioned by Nature.

The method raises potentially uncomfortable questions — how much human brain tissue can be implanted into a rat before the animal’s nature is changed? Would the method be ethical in primates?

Pasca argued that limitations on how deeply human neurons integrate with the rat brain provide “natural barriers”.

Rat brains develop much faster than human ones, “so there’s only so much that the rat cortex can integrate”.

But in species closer to humans, those barriers might no longer exist, and Pasca said he would not support using the technique in primates for now.

He argued though that there is a “moral imperative” to find ways to better study and treat psychiatric disorders.

“Certainly the more human these models are becoming, the more uncomfortable we feel,” he said.

But “human psychiatric disorders are to a large extent uniquely human. So we’re going to have to think very carefully… how far we want to go with some of these models moving forward.”

Britain this year saw record temperatures of above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time

Britain’s approach to changing public travel, heating and food habits is “inadequate” to meet its net zero and environment targets, a parliamentary committee warned Wednesday.

The chair of the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee Kate Parminter said after a summer of record temperatures, fires and drought, “an immediate and sustained response” was needed.

“People power is critical to  reach our environmental goals, but unless we are encouraged and enabled to change behaviours in how we travel, what we eat and buy and how we heat our homes, we won’t meet those targets,” she added.

“ Polling shows the public is ready for leadership from the government. People want to know how to play their part in tackling climate change and environmental damage.” 

The committee from the unelected upper chamber of parliament urged the government to use the lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic to help communicate the need for behaviour changes.

They included areas such as “how we travel, what we eat, what we buy and how we use energy at home”, the committee said.

Parminter urged new Prime Minister Liz Truss to urgently “set out her vision of a country where low carbon choices and behaviours can flourish”.

The panel’s findings follow a warning from another key committee that the government is failing to make adequate progress to meet its targets.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), an independent body established under 2008 climate change legislation to advise the government, said in June that its latest annual progress report found “scant evidence of delivery against… headline goals so far”.

Only a year earlier it had praised the government of then premier Boris Johnson for its new net-zero strategy to be carbon neutral by 2050, and a series of targets to be met along the way.

– Confusion –

The average land temperature in Britain had risen by around 1.2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels and sea levels had risen by 16 centimetres since 1900, the body said in 2021.

In 2015, the Paris climate pact saw countries pledge to limit global temperature rises to less than 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to go down to 1.5 degrees.

Experts believe this can be achieved only by the world hitting the 2050 net zero target.

After she became prime minister in early September, Truss said she was “completely committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050”.

But she also told parliament she had decided to “re-examine” this objective to ensure it was achieved in a way favourable to the economy and growth.

Her early decisions as leader, including a pledge to lift the ban on fracking and to offer new North Sea oil and gas licences, have confused even her own camp.

A cross-party group of pro-environment parliamentarians also wrote to her in early September asking her to give a firm re-commitment to the goal of reaching carbon neutrality.

In response, the government said it remained “fully committed to the legally binding target of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050”.

A spokesman claimed Britain had led the world on climate change by “driving down emissions by 44 percent since 1990… which is more than any other G7 country”.

The government’s “Net Zero Review” would “ensure the UK’s fight against climate change maximises economic growth, energy security and affordability for consumers and businesses,” he added. 

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The solid-fuel Epsilon rocket has been in service since 2013, and has been successfully launched five times

The launch of a Japanese rocket taking satellites into orbit to demonstrate new technologies failed after blast-off on Wednesday because of a positioning problem, the country’s space agency said.

It was Japan’s first failed launch in nearly two decades, and the only one for an Epsilon rocket, a solid-fuel model that has flown five successful missions since its 2013 debut.

The unmanned craft took off from Uchinoura Space Center in the southern Kagoshima region, with its lift-off livestreamed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

But a self-destruct signal was sent to the rocket less than 10 minutes later because of “positioning abnormalities”, said Yasuhiro Funo of JAXA, who led the project.

The livestream was halted and presenters wearing hard-hats told viewers there had been a problem with the launch.

Funo explained at a press conference that a technical issue was detected before the third — and final — stage of the launch, just as the last powerful booster was about to be ignited.

“We ordered the rocket’s destruction because if we cannot send it into the orbit that we planned, we don’t know where it will go,” he said, leading to safety concerns about where the machinery could fall.

After the mission was aborted, the rocket’s parts were assumed to have landed in the sea east of the Philippines, he added.

Japan’s last failed space launch was of a pair of spy satellites to monitor North Korea in 2003, and the only other time JAXA has sent a destroy order to a rocket was in 1999.

– ‘Pulsed-plasma thruster’ –

The 26-metre (85-foot) Epsilon-6 rocket had been carrying a box-shaped satellite due to orbit Earth for at least a year to carry out experiments, as well as eight micro-satellites.

Researchers and private companies had engineered new technologies to be tried out in space as part of the agency’s third Innovative Satellite Technology Demonstration programme.

Their gadgetry ranged from a “pulsed-plasma thruster” to an experiment in “harvesting energy with (a) lightweight integrated origami structure”, according to a JAXA fact sheet.

JAXA describes Epsilon as “a solid-fuel rocket designed to lower the threshold to space… and usher in an age in which everyone can make active use of space”.

It is smaller than the country’s previous liquid-fuelled model, and a successor to the solid-fuel M-5 rocket that was retired in 2006 due to its high cost.

JAXA president Hiroshi Yamakawa apologised for Wednesday’s failure, saying the agency was “terribly sorry that we couldn’t meet the Japanese people’s expectations”.

“We will pour efforts into finding out the cause and will take counter-measures” to prevent a recurrence, Yamakawa said.

Japan’s space programme is one of the world’s largest, and last week JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata flew to the International Space Station as part of the Crew-5 mission.

JAXA has also been in the spotlight after its mission to the asteroid Ryugu by a space probe named Hayabusa-2, which collected pristine material from the celestial body that is now being analysed for clues to the origins of life.

Australia's resources minister says the mining sector has a "major problem" attracting and retaining talent

Australia’s world-beating mining firms are flush with cash and desperate for staff but green-minded workers are shunning the high-paying sector, causing serious staff shortages, the government warned Wednesday.

Australia’s Resources Minister Madeleine King — who oversees the more than US$200 billion-a-year industry — said the mining sector was “stretched” and badly needs to reform and shake its sooty image.

“There is a major problem in attracting and retaining skilled workers,” she told business people in mineral-rich Western Australia.

“A big barrier to attracting these workers is the attitude many young Australians hold towards the resources industry.”

Despite miners paying far more than comparable sectors, King said enrolments in relevant degrees were “dwindling”.

She urged the likes of Rio Tinto and BHP to “get more creative” in attracting young people, suggesting the industry turn “Minecraft-crazed kids” into the real-life miners of tomorrow.

A failure to attract new talent could risk an industry that, she said, “underpins our enviable standard of living”.

Heaving iron ore, coal and other mineral goodies out of the Earth’s lithosphere has been the mainstay of Australia’s economy for decades, helping to avoid numerous crises and recessions.

The country is the world’s largest exporter of iron ore — the main component in steel — and ships out vast amounts of coal, gas, lithium, gold, zinc, diamonds and other resources.

But this year the Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association warned the sector needed an extra 24,000 new workers over the next five years.

It recently described the lack of plant engineers, geologists, drillers, earthmover operators and other staff as “crippling”.

But critics say the industry needs more than an image makeover.

Mining firms have been at the centre of a string of scandals over vast amounts of Earth-warming emissions, allegations of rampant sexual harassment and the recent blowing up of a series of 46,000-year-old Aboriginal rock shelters.

King said sceptics should be reminded that mining was essential for developing green technologies.

“Without the resources sector, there is no net zero,” she said.