A quarter of a century after 9/11 –the worst terrorist attack the United States has ever experienced– there are still five people awaiting trial for being the intellectual instigators of attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people. Although it has been forgotten due to the fact that the 19 perpetrators of the attacks died on the spot, the country still faces one of the most complicated trials in its history to be able to close the chapter on that fateful day.

The story of Tania Head struck North American society in the early 2000s, when Americans were just recovering after the September 11, 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon. For years, Head posed as a survivor of the attack, appeared publicly on numerous occasions explaining the false story of her trauma, led guided tours of New York's ground zero, and even became president of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network, the association of attack survivors. In 2007, an investigative report by The New York Times revealed that everything Head had explained was a lie: she neither worked in the Twin Towers, nor had a husband who had died in the attack, nor had she been rescued by a man with a red scarf. After that revelation, Tania Head disappeared.

With the pandemic already in retreat (but still present and threatening), with political prisoners on the street (but exiles still abroad and judicial repression still active) and at the gates of the beginning of a political dialogue with the State (but with few specifics and low expectations), this year's Catalonia Day comes in a context at a time of waiting. The course is uncertain. Despite having the leverage of the Catalan Government, the pro-independence movement remains divided and disoriented, without a common roadmap, still digesting the consequences of everything that the independence referendum and the forward flight of a symbolic declaration of independence four years ago entailed. The same can be said of the Catalan opposition: it is neither mobilised nor united. The impotence stalemate is lengthening amidst a panorama of social and economic urgency due to the harsh shock of the pandemic.