This is a study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) — a 47-story building that suffered a total collapse at 5:20 PM on September 11, 2001, following the horrible events of that morning. The objective of the study was threefold: (1) Examine the structural response of WTC 7 to fire loads that may have occurred on September 11, 2001; (2) Rule out scenarios that could not have caused the observed collapse; and (3) Identify types of failures and their locations that may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed.
The UAF research team utilized three approaches for examining the structural response of WTC 7 to the conditions that may have occurred on September 11, 2001. First, we simulated the local structural response to fire loading that may have occurred below Floor 13, where most of the fires in WTC 7 are reported to have occurred. Second, we supplemented our own simulation by examining the collapse initiation hypothesis developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Third, we simulated a number of scenarios within the overall structural system in order to determine what types of local failures and their locations may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed.
The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
All input data, results data, and simulations that were used or generated during this study can be downloaded as a ZIP file:
Download UAF WTC 7 Files (zip | 256 GB) Please be advised that the size of this ZIP file is 256 GB and that, after unzipping the file, the size of the folder containing all of the files is 632 GB. Therefore, downloading the ZIP file and unzipping it will require approximately 900 GB of storage space.
A white scholar pretended to be black and Latina for years. This is modern minstrelsy
Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Yarimar Bonilla
Jessica Krug maintained her masquerade by appealing to the worst Hollywood stereotypes about people of color
Wed 9 Sep 2020 16.16 BST
Last week the historian Jessica Krug confessed that she had spent years engaged in a racial masquerade, taking on a North African, Black American, and later a Black Caribbean identity when she was in fact a white Jewish woman from Kansas City.
Krug’s confession was likely a pre-emptive move because she was about to be exposed. The week before she published her admission, we, as part of a small group of Black Latina scholars, had begun working to uncover her lies and started asking questions to her close friends and editors. Apparently tipped off, Krug tried to control the narrative and “cancel” herself, seemingly trying to set the terms for her own reckoning.
Over the course of her life Krug built an identity based on the worst stereotypes, beliefs and supposed dysfunctions of Black and Latinx people. It is bad enough that she pretended to be Black or Latina; worse, she portrayed herself as the daughter of addicts battling overdoses and suicide attempts on the “streets” of the Barrio. She claimed to be the only person in her family to go to college, took on caricaturesque anti-racist stances, and engaged in racist cosplay under the nonsensical name of “Jess La Bombalera.” If anyone questioned her white appearance, she would retort that her mother was a drug-addicted sex worker who her white father had raped.
In her world, Black Latinx people were typecast and held static in a tangled pathology of trauma, violence and poverty. She openly bullied, mocked, gaslit and antagonized Black and Latina women she encountered in academic and activist circles as a way to further authenticate and validate her imaginary struggle and holier-than-thou politics. She made a mockery of radical politics and activist organizing by tearing down those she deemed less “woke” than herself. Perhaps one of the most disgusting things she publicly did was to attempt to justify the brutal murder of 15-year-old Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, who died in a machete attack at the hands of gang members in a case of mistaken identity, by claiming that had he lived he would have ended up being a cop.
Much like the Blackface minstrel performers of the 19th century, Krug calculatingly used the most exaggerated, hackneyed and simply racist stereotypes of Latinx and Black people and made a mockery of their political stances. These exaggerated traits made it so that whites would not doubt her, since she exhibited all the characteristics associated with Latinos in film and television. And while her performance made her Black and Latinx colleagues uncomfortable, many avoided questioning her because she was prone to level accusations that we were “assimilated” if we did not exhibit the “authentic” culture of our communities or failed to live up to her hyperbolic radical politics.
This was her clever mechanism of deception: against whites she deployed trite Hollywood stereotypes all too familiar to the white imagination, and against minorities she leveled accusations of respectability politics. She terrorized Black and Latina women, panned their work and politics, and made many of her colleagues take on additional labor under the pretense of having to deal with her imaginary family saga. Krug was particularly cruel to US-born Puerto Rican scholars, who she often accused of lacking the insider knowledge and cultural fluency that she reveled in.
The cruel irony is that Latinx scholars, who constitute less than 5% of the professoriate, have fought their whole lives to create a safe space for those who speak with an accent, who are first-generation scholars, or who have not mastered the unspoken codes of the Ivory Tower. Because Krug is light-skinned, her outlandish behavior was deemed passable and presentable because anti-Black logics mean that white people are often more comfortable with minorities who are white and mestizo.
By taking on a fake and exaggerated Afro-Puerto Rican identity, Krug not only engaged in a form of violent minstrelsy but elbowed her way into the very few spaces afforded to underrepresented scholars and activists. By usurping access to Black and Latinx spaces, she silenced and extracted from those whose very existence and identities she was parodying. Along the way she racked up rare scholarships, fellowships and resources earmarked for Black and Latinx scholars, such as the prestigious McNair Scholars Program.
Krug is a well-respected historian whose work would have stood in its own right. She didn’t need to cloak herself in fake Black Latinidad in order for her work to be accepted. She could have been a white ally and worked alongside the communities she allegedly cared for. But she chose to colonize our identities and even steal our names, at one point going by the alias of Jess Cruz. What is more, she specifically stole the lived experiences, culture and struggles of Puerto Ricans: colonial subjects who continually fight against their lack of sovereignty and non-consensual second-class citizenship.
Now, with her egotistically self-flagellating “confession essay”, she has once again attempted to steal the narrative before those affected by her deceit have even had the chance to voice their feelings. By performatively punishing herself, she has attempted to set the terms of her own retribution – thereby stealing from us once again.
It is unclear what the future holds for Krug. Her self-cancellation did not, apparently, include a letter of resignation. Her university colleagues have called for her tenure to be revoked. Many wonder if she will continue to profit from her minstrelsy by writing a tell-all book, as did Rachel Dolezal.
We hold no illusions that Krug actually subscribes to the social justice traditions that she made a mockery of. If she does, however, she would cease her performances and colonialist theft, stop waxing on the impossibility of forgiveness or punishment, and focus on the question of reparations instead.
Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez is an associate professor in the department of English and African American & African Studies at Michigan State University
Yarimar Bonillais a professor in the department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College and the PhD Program in anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Everyone is counting on a coronavirus vaccine. Photograph: John Nacion/SOPA Images/Rex/Shutterstock
A
pril marked the most dramatic and, some would say, dangerous phase of the Covid-19 crisis in the US. Deaths were increasing, bodies were piling up in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals in New York City and ventilators and personal protective equipment were in desperately short supply. The economy was falling off the proverbial cliff, with unemployment soaring to 14.7%.
Since then, supplies of medical and protective equipment have improved. Doctors are figuring out when to put patients on ventilators and when to take them off. We have recognised the importance of protecting vulnerable populations, including the elderly. The infected are now younger on average, further reducing fatalities. With help from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (Cares) Act, economic activity has stabilised, albeit at lower levels.
Or so we are being told.
In fact, the more dangerous phase of the crisis in the US may actually be now, not last spring. While death rates among the infected are declining with improved treatment and a more favourable age profile, fatalities are still running at roughly a 1,000 a day. This matches levels at the beginning of April, reflecting the fact that the number of new infections is half again as high.
Mortality, in any case, is only one aspect of the virus’s toll. Many surviving Covid-19 patients continue to suffer chronic cardiovascular problems and impaired mental function. If 40,000 cases a day is the new normal, then the implications for morbidity – and for human health and economic welfare – are truly dire.
And, like it or not, there is every indication that many Americans, or at least their current leaders, are willing to accept 40,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths a day. They have grown inured to the numbers. They are impatient with lockdowns. They have politicised masks.
This is also a more perilous phase for the economy. In March and April, policymakers pulled out all the stops to staunch the economic bleeding. But there will be less policy support now if the economy again goes south. Although the Federal Reserve can always devise another asset-purchase programme, it has already lowered interest rates to zero and hoovered up many of the relevant assets. This is why Fed officials have been pressing the Congress and the White House to act.
Unfortunately, Congress seems incapable of replicating the bipartisanship that enabled passage of the Cares Act at the end of March. The $600 (£462) weekly supplement to unemployment benefits has been allowed to expire. Divisive rhetoric from Donald Trump and other Republican leaders about “Democrat-led” cities implies that help for state and local governments is not in the cards.
Consequently, if the economy falters a second time, whether because of inadequate fiscal stimulus or flu season and a second Covid-19 wave, it will not receive the additional monetary and fiscal support that protected it in the spring.
The magic bullet on which everyone is counting, of course, is a vaccine. This, in fact, is the gravest danger of all.
There is a high likelihood that a vaccine will be rolled out in late October, at Donald Trump’s behest, whether or not phase 3 clinical trials confirm its safety and effectiveness. This spectre conjures memories of Gerald Ford’s rushed swine flu vaccine, also prompted by a looming presidential election, which resulted in cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome and multiple deaths. This episode, together with a fraudulent scientific paper linking vaccination to autism, did much to help foster the modern anti-vax movement.
The danger, then, is not merely side-effects from a flawed vaccine but also widespread public resistance even to a vaccine that passes its phase 3 clinical trial and has the support of the scientific community. This is especially worrisome insofar as scepticism about the merits of vaccination tends to rise anyway in the aftermath of a pandemic that the public-health authorities, supposedly competent in such matters, failed to avert.
Studies have shown that living through a pandemic negatively affects confidence that vaccines are safe and disinclines the affected to vaccinate their children. This is specifically the case for individuals who are in their “impressionable years” (ages 18-25) at the time of exposure because it is at this age that attitudes about public policy, including health policy, are durably formed. This heightened skepticism about vaccination, observed in a variety of times and places, persists for the balance of the individual’s lifetime.
The difference now is that Trump and his appointees, by making reckless and unreliable claims, risk aggravating the problem. Thus, if steps are not taken to reassure the public of the independence and integrity of the scientific process, we will be left only with the alternative of “herd immunity”, which, given Covid-19’s many known and suspected comorbidities, is no alternative at all.
All this serves as a warning that the most hazardous phase of the crisis in the US will most likely start next month. And that is before taking into account that October is also the beginning of flu season.
• Barry Eichengreen is professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former senior policy adviser at the IMF.
• This article was amended on 10 September 2020 to reinstate the writer’s original description of Wakefield’s study being “fraudulent”.
'I don't want to create panic': Trump defends coronavirus remarks he made to Bob Woodward – video
Donald Trump knew the extent of the deadly coronavirus threat in February but intentionally misled the public by deciding to “play it down”, according to interviews recorded by one of America’s most venerated investigative journalists.
The US president gave Bob Woodward 18 interviews between December 2019 and July 2020. They form the basis of his revelatory new book, Rage, obtained on Wednesday by the Washington Post and CNN, in which Trump is condemned by his own words.
Just two months before he seeks re-election, Trump is quoted describing former president George W Bush as “a stupid moron” and mocking the Black Lives Matter movement for racial equality and an end to police brutality.
The book also reports that the US may have come close to nuclear war with North Korea in 2017.
Rage displays the chasm between Trump’s public and private statements on the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 190,000 Americans and caused the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
As early as 28 January 2020, Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, gave him a “jarring” warning, informing the president that Covid-19 would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. Trump’s head “popped up”, the book says.
Three days later, Trump announced restrictions on travel from China, although the virus was already in the United States.
On 7 February he told Woodward in a phone call: “It goes through the air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
He added: “This is deadly stuff.”
But February, in the view of Woodward and many other analysts, was a wasted month. On 27 February, Trump said publicly: “It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” In a tweet on 9 March, he explicitly compared it to the common flu, noting that “Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on” in flu season. “Think about that!”
By 19 March, Trump had declared a national emergency but told Woodward: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
At the White House on Wednesday, Trump dismissed the book as “just another political hit job” and sought to defend his handling of the pandemic.
He added: “And certainly I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy. We wanna show confidence, we wanna show strength as a nation, and that’s what I’ve done. And we’ve done very well from any standard. You look at our numbers compared to other countries, other parts of the world, it’s an amazing job that we’ve done.”
America has the highest caseload (6.35m infections) and highest death toll (190,815) in the world, according to Johns Hopkins university figures. It also has one of the highest fatality rates per 100,000 population, at 57.97.
Later, Trump told Fox News: “I said don’t panic. I’m a cheerleader for this country and I don’t want to see panic.”
Speaking at an election campaign event in Warren, Michigan, on Wednesday afternoon, the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, reacted to the reports by saying: “He knew how deadly it was. It was much more deadly than the flu. He knew and purposely played it down. Worse, he lied to the American people. He knowingly and willingly lied about the threat it posed to the country for months.”
Biden added: “He had the information. He knew how dangerous it was and, while this deadly disease ripped through our nation, he failed to do his job on purpose. It was a life and death betrayal of the American people. Experts say that if he’d acted just one week sooner, 36,000 people would have been saved.”
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, told the MSNBC network: “I think what he said connotes two things. One, his weakness: he didn’t know how to cope with the challenge to our country.
“Secondly, his disdain and denial for science, which has the answers, we could have contained this early on. But bigger than all of that was his total disregard for the impact on individual families in our country.”
At a White House coronavirus taskforce briefing on 3 April, Trump was still minimising the virus.
“I said it’s going away and it is going away, ” he said. But just two days later, he told Woodward: “It’s a horrible thing. It’s unbelievable.” On 13 April, he acknowledged: “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”
Dr Anthony Fauci, Mike Pence, Dr Deborah Birx and Adm Brett Giroir listen as Donald Trump speaks during a coronavirus taskforce briefing on 17 April. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
In May, Woodward asked Trump if he remembered O’Brien’s dire warning on 28 January. He replied: “No, I don’t, I’m sure if he said it – you know, I’m sure he said it. Nice guy.”
And in their final interview in July, Trump sought to duck responsibility, telling Woodward: “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault. It’s … China let the damn virus out.”
Rage also contains damning views of Trump’s failures to lead on the virus response, for example his unwillingness to order economic lockdowns, and prevarications and resistance for months over mask wearing.
Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, is quoted describing Trump’s leadership as “rudderless” and saying his “attention span is like a minus number”.
Fauci is reported to have said: “His sole purpose is to get re-elected.”
Woodward, 77, is a two-time Pulitzer prize winner and has written about nine American presidents. His reporting with Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein on the Watergate break-in and cover-up helped bring about Richard Nixon’s resignation. Trump has expressed admiration for Nixon and is currently echoing his “law and order” election strategy.
But Trump said Woodward made Bush “look like a stupid moron, which he was”, according to the book, and said of Barack Obama: “I don’t think Obama’s smart … I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.”
He also told Woodward that the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, thought Obama was an “asshole”.
In June, at the height of protests against racial injustice after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, Woodward suggested to Trump that white and privileged men like them need to appreciate the plight of African Americans.
Trump replied, “No,” in a mocking voice. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”
Meanwhile Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is quoted as saying that four texts are key to understanding Trump, including Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Kushner paraphrased the Cheshire Cat from the book: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.”
Woodward also writes that Trump’s national security team warned that the US may have come close to nuclear war with North Korea in 2017. James Mattis, then the defence secretary, slept in his clothes to be ready in the event of a North Korean missile launch and prayed at the Washington national cathedral. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, is quoted as saying: “We never knew whether it was real, or whether it was a bluff.”
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'I don't want to create panic': Trump defends coronavirus remarks he made to Bob Woodward – video
Mysteriously, Trump bragged to Woodward about a new secret weapons system: “I have built a nuclear – a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before.” Woodward writes that other sources corroborated the claim but were surprised that Trump revealed it.
Woodward obtained the 27 “love letters” Trump exchanged with Kim. Kim flatters Trump by repeatedly calling him “Your Excellency”, and writes that the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force”. Kim says in another that meeting again would be “reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film”.
