I am fortunate to live in the suburbs, where nature is all around us. Our garden looks enchanting now that it’s summer. It has mature fruit trees – hazelnut, fig, walnut, apple and medlar – and in the flowerbed my mum has planted magnificent dahlias. Halfway down the garden, my dad’s precious greenhouse has loads of amazing vegetables of the season and flower seedlings. The allotment is behind our back gate and then there is an enormous field where there are sheep, cows and deer.

One evening on the way to our allotment, Dad opened the gate, peered out and turned around to put a finger on his lips. Quietly but quickly, I stepped towards the gate, and the first thing I saw were some incredibly cute fox cubs! They were lolloping in the soft, wet grass without a care in the world.

Dad told me to stay really still, so I played musical statues with my new fuzzy friends, and one of them came right to my feet! I see fox cubs every year but this was the closest I have ever come to one.

Another night, my dad heard commotion in the garden, he turned on the patio light and there was an adult fox walking confidently along our fence, with another one howling on the patio, I reckon it must have been the daddy fox who went to the pub for too long!
Mason, nine

Read today’s other YCD piece, by Elizabeth, 11: ‘Total eclipse of the duck’

My husband’s death smelled of cardamom. Death smells of many things, but my first memory of it was of cardamom and soft butter buns. It was Sunday morning. I was baking a gingerbread man for our son’s second birthday. We were celebrating two days in advance – Sunday was better than Tuesday, and the birthday boy was too young to know the difference anyway. My husband was out running a half marathon a bit outside Aarhus, on Denmark’s east coast, where we lived. He was late as usual, but I was determined not to let it bother me.

Everything was ready. Bunting hung from the living room ceiling, balloons stuck up everywhere. Elmer’s new balance bike was leaning against the wall. The birthday boy was taking a nap before the guests arrived. Soon the apartment would be filled with people, and I enjoyed the quiet moment before the storm.

Then the phone rang.

I picked up and a stranger’s voice asked whether I was Lasse’s wife. I felt an instinctive, nameless fear grip me as I said yes. The stranger was a doctor. Something had happened to my husband. I’m afraid it is serious, said the voice on the end of the phone. What was he talking about? Lasse had had a heart attack and was in a coma. I interrupted him. No, I said, tentative at first, then shouting. Over and over I shouted, screamed at him. What was he telling me?

The doctor kept his voice calm. He told me that I had to come to the cardiac unit immediately.

I screamed again.

Then I heard Elmer crying from his cot.

A switch inside me flipped. I felt the blood drain from my pounding head, the sweat on my hands turning to ice. Suddenly I was calm. A sharply focused but remote kind of calm. I cleared my throat and said I was ready now; I’d pulled myself together. I asked what I needed to do.

He told me that I should find someone to watch my son, and then take a taxi to the hospital. We agreed to meet at the entrance to the ward. Before I hung up, I said: “Just so you know, I’m six months pregnant. Please try to remember that, in case I’m not able to.”

My husband never woke up. I waited all night, as his family and mine arrived, their faces ashen. The following day he was pronounced dead.

When it was all over, they let me in to see the body. I got on to the bed and lay on my side, facing him, and someone tucked a sheet over us. It billowed around my hip and came to rest motionless over the contours of his body. He didn’t look right in that position – he never lay on his back. He had been arranged like that by another stranger, ready for me, for this.

I closed my eyes and whispered: It’s OK, we can just pretend we’re at home in bed. Soon Elmer will wake up in his cot, and hey, listen, the gulls are squawking outside again – remember last summer when a man came out on to his balcony one morning and shouted at them to fuck off? And we lay laughing in our bed, our eyes still shut?

Our unborn baby was awake again, rolling around inside me, playfully pushing and kicking at his dad’s body. I caressed the little triangle of Lasse’s chest hair like I always did, but it didn’t feel the same.

What happened? The doctors couldn’t tell me. No one understood why a healthy 27-year-old man would have a heart attack. I was in a state of numb shock, but I couldn’t fall apart. I had to go home and tell Elmer that his father had died.

How do you say that to a two-year-old? The hospital’s grief counsellor told me that death is too abstract for a small child to understand. What he can understand is that Dad isn’t coming home again – and then he needs to know where Dad has gone.

So I chose a star.

At home I sat on the bedroom floor with my son. I reminded him that Dad had gone out running and that he had a very long way to go. Yes, he replied, expectantly.

“Well, you know Dad had to run really, really far, and he kept going so long that he ran up into the sky, so high up that he couldn’t get down again. Now he is sitting on a star, watching over us. That is where he lives now. He doesn’t live with us any more. He will never come back home again.”

As I spoke, I started crying. I thought I might faint. My son looked at me with his big, serious eyes. In my hand I held a photo of my husband. We waved at him together.

Bye-bye, Dad.

The week after Lasse’s death was a blur with shiny glass splinters in it. My apartment was constantly filled with friends and family wanting to give me their condolences. All of them brought flowers. That was when I started resenting flowers, and resenting other people. The thick, sweet smell of lilies made me sick. I jumped every time the doorbell rang; I felt dizzy when I glanced at the pile of shoes in the entrance. I couldn’t stand their tears, or the way they looked at Elmer, wanting him to be a source of hope, a ray of light for them in their grief. As if he could carry all that. I wanted them to go away so I could be alone with my child, but as soon as they left I wanted them to come back. Every night I woke up from horrible nightmares to reality hitting me like a hammer: I was a single mother, a 26-year-old widow. In three months I must give birth to a dead man’s child.

A few days before the funeral, I noticed a pain in my abdomen. The closer we drew to the funeral, the more intense the pain became. It felt like a sharp metal hand wrapped around my womb, pulling down hard. I’d read somewhere that during pregnancy the mother’s and child’s emotions are entwined symbiotically, just like the blood that flows from one to the other. When a mother feels joy, so does her baby – which meant my grief was a poison I was pumping into my son unrelentingly. Could this be acting like an alarm inside my body, triggering the birth? I started panicking. Inside me wasn’t a safe place to be right now, but the alternative was not an option: it was far too early for labour. He wasn’t ready, and neither was I. I rang the maternity ward.

My mum drove me to the ultrasound clinic for an emergency scan. She held my hand while the doctor pressed the gun to my stomach. Right away, the baby materialised on the screen, yawning his funny little alien mouth and wiping his nose like he’d just woken up from a nap. He tried to stretch his arms and legs, and I felt it: kicks not of grief but of little feet. I burst into tears. Then I laughed. He was alive. So was I. And there was so much to live for.

Lasse and I had met in high school. I was 18 years old, he was 19. We fell deeply, madly in love. He was quirky. I liked that – I was quirky, too. He loved to draw and paint, dreaming of becoming an architect, while I loved reading and writing. After school we went to the same university, moving in together as students. It was only a small studio but we were happy there – the shelves increasingly packed with my books and the architectural models Lasse brought home from school. And when he ran out of shelf space he hung models on the walls, turning them into strange lamps (which was probably very dangerous since they were all extremely flammable, but we didn’t worry about that at the time). Years went by and I finished my bachelor’s degree and started a master’s in journalism. When Lasse proposed, I didn’t hesitate. It all felt so romantic. A few weeks before the wedding, I found out I was pregnant, and we were shocked but excited, too. I was 24 years old when Elmer was born – and the honeymoon was over.

I loved the father my husband became, but that process was no walk in the park for either of us. Elmer had colic, screaming for hours on end for the first three months of his life. Neither of us knew what to do and we took it out on each other. I was on maternity leave while Lasse continued his master’s degree. He often stayed late at school. After he graduated, he got a job at an architectural firm while my own career was swallowed up by motherhood before it had really started. I still dreamed of becoming a journalist, but I wasn’t able to separate myself from our child in the way my husband could.

Over time we learned the melody of family life. Elmer grew bigger, he learned to walk and to sleep and to talk. Dad. That was his first word. As he got older, the two of them would play with building blocks for hours, or make colourful drawings together. They connected in a different way than our son did with me – they were interested in the same things. I have a photo of them from our last holiday in Prague. They are looking at the trams, holding hands. For so long they were standing there. What is so fascinating about trams? I could never say.

The same week my husband died, I began writing. The first notes I made were broken, confused. How can I name our baby alone? Do we have insurance? How will I take care of two kids on my own? What colour should I choose for the coffin? Will life ever be good again?

I never imagined these notes would be used for anything – I was just writing as a desperate act of survival. All the things I couldn’t say to other people, I would write in the journal. I wrote about my longing for sex. I wrote about the nightmares where Lasse was chasing me, trying to rape me. About the anger I felt towards my mother-in-law. About those evenings when I was too exhausted to say goodnight to the stars with Elmer and instead yelled at him to go to sleep.

And I wrote about Lasse. I missed his kisses, I missed his touch. The smell of his aftershave, the crunchy sound of his espresso boiling in the morning. The way he couldn’t pass me when I was cooking without giving my butt a little spank. The way he looked at me while I read to Elmer – he always said I was the best storybook narrator. Glancing out of the window to see him walk past with Elmer on his shoulders, on the way to daycare. His arms around me as we fell asleep.

The happy memories were agony. But there were also good things in the present and I wrote those down, too: the small glimmers of joy when Elmer said something funny or sweet. The warmth from his little body as I held him, the smell of his hair. The evening I put on some music and danced again for the first time. The baby’s kicks; all those firsts still to come. The day Emma, my 19-year-old little sister – my angel, my hero – told me that she would move in to help me with the children.

A few weeks after Emma arrived, I went into labour. Giving birth to my second child was the most beautiful and painful experience in my life. Kaj was born into a circle of women: Emma, two of my best friends and my wonderful midwife. I had asked them not to mention my husband during labour; I couldn’t let my grief into that space. I wouldn’t be able to stand the pain of the contractions if the grief was also there. But as soon as Kaj was in my arms, we all cried together. He was so perfect. I let my head fall back towards the sky and sobbed. I asked my husband if he could see him – could he see how beautiful his son was? And, surrounded by people who loved me, in that moment I felt so alone. This little boy was mine alone.

When I got home from the hospital, everything became very busy. Kaj screamed day and night, and when he finally fell asleep, Elmer woke up – a constant loop of feedings and tantrums and dirty nappies. Emma tried her best to help, but the boys just cried for me until I came. At the same time, the apartment felt more and more like a museum, a monument to life as it should have been, grief sticking to the walls like dust. My longing for Lasse grew into anger. I started cursing at the night sky: Fuck you, Lasse! How dare you abandon me! Fuck you and your fucking star!

But slowly, very slowly, things got better. The children grew. The nights got quieter and the days got brighter. When Emma eventually moved out, I decided that it was time for me to look for a new place, too. I found a sweet little house for me and the boys in a village-like corner of Aarhus.

We landed in a simple everyday, a little life. Full of routines and meaning, the number of good days on the rise.

The boys played in the bathtub in the evenings and I sat with them, reading a book with rolled-up trousers and my feet submerged in the warm water. We watched TV, we lit candles on overcast mornings, we argued, they fought, I did the laundry and finished my master’s degree, Kaj learned to walk and chase spiders, I laid out clothes for the next day in three little piles, Elmer started drawing, I wrote a poem about getting on a bus and falling in love, we turned the music up and danced after dinner again. I baked buns at weekends. Sometimes we waved goodnight to Dad on the star, but most of the time we didn’t.

Lasse faded.

I could no longer recall his face every time I shut my eyes. I had to conjure up a particular detail first – his Adam’s apple, his wonky front tooth – in order to put the rest of the puzzle pieces together and make him whole again. And yet he still managed to find a way to appear, in all his clarity, just when I hadn’t called for him.

When Elmer pursed his lips in concentration, there he was.

When I warmed Kaj’s feet in my hands, it was like holding tiny versions of Lasse’s, with their funny high arches and toes scrunched up like they were cracking a nut.

But the Lasse who lived inside me was finally coming to rest.

It seemed like we made it through the storm.

I kept it together for six years. Then I collapsed. Suddenly I was unable to do anything. I cried at the complexity of setting a breakfast table. I yelled at the kids over nothing. I started having nightmares about dead bodies. Sometimes I dreamed that Lasse was chasing me and the kids around a house where none of the windows or doors opened. I quit my job and started therapy, but it didn’t really help.

That’s when I decided I had to go back to the grief, to remember the truth of those brutal, lonely days, to write the story properly. I had to take myself to the bottom of my own sea. The first time I opened up the dusty box of notebooks, I was very scared – what if the sorrow and darkness took over completely? What if I went down there and I couldn’t get back up to the surface?

As I read back through the muddled, grief-stricken notes, I noticed how hard I was on myself. I felt guilty for crying in front of Elmer. I felt guilty for not grieving hard enough. I felt guilty for being happy (unless it was because of the children).

A few weeks before giving birth I wrote this note: “I haven’t had my picture taken since Lasse died. I don’t feel like this is a moment in my life that should be captured. How should I look at the camera? Should I smile? That’s a bit misleading, isn’t it? Should I cry, then? Portraying myself as a fucking victim, self-absorbed, dwelling in sorrow? But what about the baby? I owe it to him to have a picture of “his” belly. In the future he should be able to look at it and see how tremendously happy I was to have him. That I feel so lucky to be gifted with all this love!”

But as I read I also started to notice how my notes dwelt on moments of grace – how I had used them to capture all the beauty that still remained in the world. In the midst of my loss, I had been writing about death only to write about life: which is so persistent and so beautiful.

Once I got started, the writing was incredibly liberating. I was in charge of the story this time, not the other way around. I closed my eyes and I went back to the hospital. I saw the dead body again. This time I stayed until Lasse didn’t scare me any more. I went back and told Elmer about the stars. I held Kaj in my arms for the first time again. And I told myself how great I did. How wonderful the boys turned out to be. That it was all worth it.

Peter on Linda

Gareth Southgate has suggested his England team lack the physical levels to execute his gameplan at Euro 2024 while Declan Rice has opened up on the pressure the players are feeling.

The mood in the England camp was heavy on introspection and soul-searching as they came to terms with Thursday’s 1-1 draw against Denmark. It was not so much the result, which has kept them in the driving seat to qualify for the last 16 as Group C winners. Rather the collective performance, which was defined by errors on the ball and an absence of aggression without it. The press did not work, the absence of high-intensity sprints glaring, and it was worrying to see how Denmark were able to find spaces.

Southgate has made no secret about his fears over the fitness of a clutch of starting players, who have not completed many full games in recent weeks and months. The captain, Harry Kane, is among them. He injured his back towards the end of the domestic season with Bayern Munich and has come through 90 minutes only once since 4 May – in England’s 1-0 win over Serbia in the opening round of group games here.

Kane did not press or run in behind against Denmark and Southgate took him off in the 70th minute for Ollie Watkins, feeling that he needed fresh energy up front. Bukayo Saka and Phil Foden were substituted at the same time. Saka missed Arsenal’s final Premier League game with an injury and played only 25 minutes of England’s warm-up matches.

“We are not pressing well enough, with enough ­intensity,” Southgate said. “We have limitations in how we can do that with the physical condition. We can’t press as high up the pitch as we might have done in the ­qualifiers, for example. And we are not keeping the ball well enough. We have to keep the ball better and build with more control.”

Rice was asked for his opinion on Southgate’s comments. Was the physical condition of the players an issue? “It’s hard to say, really,” Rice said. “You only know yourself. Lads are never going to admit if they’re tired or not. As someone watching a game, you can tell if a player is tired or not. A player’s never going to admit that.”

The pressure on the players is intense, the scrutiny unforgiving and it has been possible to wonder whether it has affected them. Southgate admitted after the Denmark game that “if anything they’re showing they care too much”.

Rice said: “We are all so desperate to do the country proud. We are all so desperate to win, to be leaders, to go out there and give people memories for lifetimes.

“Sometimes I maybe feel like we put too much pressure on ourselves where we could just go out there and let it just take care of ourselves. But, look – two games, one win, one draw. And now we go into that last game [against Slovenia on Tuesday]. Our objective is always to qualify and I’m sure we can still do that.”

Southgate said: “I am seeing every day that they are loving working together. I don’t think it is a lack of spark. At the moment, they ironically care too much and they need firm leadership. We have to guide them through the difficult period that is coming but really stay on track and focused on this challenge ahead.

“We are trying to do something that has never been done before [win the Euros]. So that is going to be a bit of a rollercoaster. It’s not going to go smoothly when you are trying to achieve extraordinary things. They are bloody difficult. We have to accept the level of expectations, we have to accept the arena we are in. And we have to find a better way of playing to how we have so far.”

The mysterious monolith that appeared in the Nevada desert has been removed, years after similar mystifying, gleaming objects first appeared in the deserts of Utah during the Covid-19 pandemic and captured the world’s imagination.

Las Vegas police announced the discovery of the monolith – an art installation – at Gass Peak, roughly 40 miles (64.4km) north of the city, on Monday.

“MYSTERIOUS MONOLITH!” a police department post on X said. “We see a lot of weird things when people go hiking like not being prepared for the weather, not bringing enough water… but check this out! Over the weekend, [police] spotted this mysterious monolith near Gass Peak north of the valley.”

The monolith was taken down Thursday afternoon, the police said in an update on Friday, citing “public safety and environmental concerns”. They said it would be stored at an undisclosed location while authorities determine how to dispose of or store the reflective 10ft-tall (3 meters) metal prism.

“It remains unknown how the item got to its location or who might be responsible,” police said. “At this time, there is no [police] investigation into the object or the circumstances surrounding its existence.”

Similar versions of the monolith spotted in Utah, California, Wales and Romania in 2020 sparked conspiracy theories involving aliens – or that the appearance of the structures was an elaborate, highly coordinated prank.

The structures bear a resemblance to the one that is featured in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The first monolith was discovered by accident in 2020 when wildlife officials were counting bighorn sheep from a helicopter in a desert near Moab, Utah. The object soon attracted hundreds of curious onlookers to its location as its fame spread around the globe. Shortly after it was found, that monolith mysteriously disappeared.

Within a short time, a spate of monoliths appeared around the world and quickly vanished – one near an archaeological site outside the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt, another that appeared atop a mountain in central California, and one in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Earlier this year, a monolith was spotted by walkers at the summit of Hay Bluff hill in Powys, Wales. “I was a bit taken aback as it looked like some sort of a UFO,” Craig Muir told PA media at the time.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

This was an opportunity for France to show they can dismiss high-level opponents without Kylian Mbappé but instead question marks will linger. They should have won a game that, although the first goalless draw of the tournament, was lively enough and brought a string of presentable chances. Most of them fell the favourites’ way but, as the list of misses stacked up, the absence of their talisman glared more brightly.

Had the night’s outcome been of huge consequence, Mbappé would surely have been wheeled into action for a side that simply could not score. Didier Deschamps suggested as much afterwards but this was always going to be a phoney war, the group stage offering little jeopardy to genuine hopefuls, and it was telling that Mbappé did not sport one of the golden bibs worn by France’s other substitutes while sitting on the bench. His broken nose was not worth risking and it remains to be seen whether he is given a chance to get his eye in when they look to top Group D against Poland, who have been eliminated, on Tuesday.

“I wasn’t bluffing at all,” said Deschamps, who had left open the possibility Mbappé might play after being fitted with a face mask for his injury. “He’s getting better and if it had been a decisive game this evening then maybe I’d have thought twice about him playing or not. He took a nasty blow, he’s got a bruise and will have to wear a mask. With every day that passes we’re getting to a point where we want to be. I thought the wiser decision was to keep him on the bench.”

Mbappé had uncharacteristically missed a sitter against Austria before taking that grievous knock for his troubles, but he must have been straining at the leash for a go at one of the openings France spurned in either half. Antoine Griezmann was particularly culpable and they were almost punished as proceedings entered their final 20 minutes.

The flag went up quickly after Xavi Simons, rifling in from 14 yards after Mike Maignan had denied Memphis Depay, briefly wheeled away in celebration. Denzel Dumfries, who was well offside, had been standing directly to Maignan’s left as the ball flashed past him on that side. The assumption was that he had impeded the keeper’s ability to dive and VAR set to work in rubber-stamping the call.

It was upheld after a wait of almost three minutes that culminated in Anthony Taylor calling Griezmann and Virgil van Dijk, the captains, across to run them through the rationale. The decision itself seemed reasonable but the delay, during which Taylor communicated with the VAR officials Stuart Attwell, felt straight out of Stockley Park. The past week has been notable for relatively quick resolutions to video referrals and this one did not meet that bar.

Deschamps raised his eyebrows at the interruption’s length, feeling the case was “a no brainer”. Unsurprisingly Ronald Koeman’s take cast a different hue. “I personally think the goal should have stood,” he said. “I think Dumfries is offside, that’s true. But he isn’t disturbing the goalkeeper, and when that doesn’t happen it’s a legal goal in my opinion. And you need five minutes [sic] to check it because it’s so difficult? I don’t understand it.”

Koeman watered that assessment down by accepting his team were not “up to scratch” for spells and noting France had enjoyed the clearer openings. A draw, he thought, was fair when that was all priced in. Again, it was hard not to think he might have been more strident had this been a knockout tie. No bones about it, this was a good result for the Netherlands even if they will not be given an easy ride next time out against Austria.

Perhaps it would have been even better if the lightning-quick Jeremie Frimpong, through on goal after racing away thrillingly from Théo Hernandez, had beaten Maignan inside the opening minute. A mobile Dutch front line caused particular headaches in the first half, Simons twinkling at the venue where he has shone all season for RB Leipzig and Cody Gakpo making Maignan save superbly, but France were the more consistent threat.

Griezmann drew an acrobatic stop from Bart Verbruggen and then, fed by an unselfish Adrien Rabiot who should surely have shot after clever work from Marcus Thuram, stumbled in front of goal when looking to convert. He also swiped wide from inside the box and then watched as Thuram, slipped into acres of space by a smart ball down the right from Jules Koundé, raced towards goal but blazed off target.

More glimpses followed in the second half. Aurélien Tchouaméni rose high but headed wide before Griezmann fluffed arguably the best chance of all. Teed up by N’Golo Kanté, who was again imperious throughout, he could not beat Verbruggen from six yards and France were left to sweat on video technology moments later.

They will also dwell on whether Mbappé comes back at full tilt. “It changes his vision but also the risks he’ll be taking,” Deschamps said of the situation Mbappé will face when, wearing the mask, he returns to contact training. France may just have to take the gamble.

Above a lush and rugged valley in Tenerife’s Rural De Teno national park, a police officer from Spain’s civil guard surveys the landscape with binoculars.

A few hundred yards below, members of the Canary’s civil defence force in orange hi-vis jackets are searching further into the valley close to where the British tourist Jay Slater disappeared five days ago.

The 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire was last heard from between 8am and 9am on Monday morning, when he had left the holiday cottage of some men he had gone back with after a music festival in the south of the island.

Slater’s last known location, according to his mobile phone, was around half a mile uphill from the cottage, on the outskirts of the village of Masca – in the opposite direction to the coastal resort where he was staying with friends.

Ofelia Medina Hernandez, the owner of the Airbnb where Slater went after the festival, said she was “very worried” about him, and added: “It’s not our fault.”

She said: “It’s dangerous walking around here, it’s easy to lose yourself. Here, people don’t get lost, there are routes everywhere. And he walked along the road when I saw him for the last time, up there … He was there alone.

“He was walking normally, though fast, a little fast.”

Hernandez said she had given all the information she had to the police, adding that Slater had asked about the bus, and she had told him that the bus leaves at 10am.

The Airbnb owner said the two men she hosted were friendly and had stayed one more night, spending the time in the house. She thought they had met Slater at the festival, but was not sure.

Friends of Slater also said he had met the men, believed to be from the south-east of England, at the festival. Some suggested police hadn’t questioned the men before they left the island, but other witnesses in Masca said officers had spoken to the men before they returned to the UK.

Police at the La Cruz de Hilda viewpoint, where the search has been concentrated, said on Friday that there were no updates.

In a statement, the Guardia Civil also said: “There is a search ongoing and the police operation is focused on the area of Masca (Tenerife). By now we cannot confirm any more information.”

Yesterday, a large group of Slater’s friends flew out to the island to help with the search. Members of his family including his mother, Debbie Duncan, have been in Tenerife since Tuesday.

“It’s just traumatic and it doesn’t feel real. It’s just awful, it’s horrendous,” she said. “He’s just a great person who everyone wanted to be with. He’s good looking, he’s a popular boy.”

Slater’s last known contact with friends was on Monday morning, when he texted his friend Lucy, who had been at the festival with him but had left before him.

He had told her he was lost, had been cut by a cactus, needed water, and that his phone battery was on 1%.

Lucy has been among those who have called for police reinforcements to be sent out from the UK to help with the search.

Friends of Slater have said more resources need to be dedicated to finding the missing teenager. “I just think they need to get as much help as they can out here,” Lucy told the Guardian.

“There are no helicopters here 1719005163. He’s been missing for that long now, what are they actually doing?”

Another friend said they had spent 12 hours driving “all down the coastal area”, had searched through dense undergrowth, and said “we were shouting, screaming”.

“We’ve been here since Tuesday and I’ve seen the helicopter once, we’ve seen the drones once, and I’ve seen one dog.”

Slater’s last Snapchat post was a photograph of him smoking a cigarette, believed to have been taken inside the Airbnb. Friends have been collecting cigarette butts they have found while searching in the undergrowth, in case they may come in useful as evidence later.

Yesterday the search had extended further across the valley, a considerable distance from where Slater was last seen. Personnel concentrated part of the search on a river named Barranco Madre del Agua at the bottom of a ravine, sifting through fallen dead palm trees with sticks.

On Thursday, one rescuer told the Guardian that search teams had not given up, and they believed it was possible to survive in the elements with current weather conditions.

Rescue workers told the Guardian on Friday that their search was focused on two ravines in the area and the paths around it, an area of about 30 square kilometres.

They said there were about 25 voluntary rescue workers involved, and that rescuers had spent the morning descending into the ravines to reach the bottom.

One added: “We still have hope that he’s alive, up until the last moment when the last hope is lost. The truth is that we feel a bit frustrated because we can’t find him. It’s so big [here] that it’s very difficult to search in such a steep area. But we’re doing everything we can.

“We haven’t found anything, we have combed this entire trail, we’ve been up and down but, until now, nothing.”

They said it was a “very difficult area to search”, with many areas covered in vegetation, as well as gaps and ravines.

A Facebook page dedicated to finding Slater, which had attracted more than 468,000 members, was paused after conspiracy theories about his disappearance began to spread wildly on social media profiles, including TikTok.

“It’s gone too far,” Rach Louise Harg, a friend of Slater and the Facebook page’s administrator, said in a post.

In a previous post, she said: “Struggling to find words at this time but all I can say is we are looking still and everyone is doing all they can.”

“I wish this would end now, this living nightmare,” she added. “Searches are ongoing and we remain positive.”

Separately, a fundraiser set up by Lucy to “get Jay Slater home” has received more than £23,500 in donations.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We are supporting the family of a British man who has been reported missing in Spain and are in contact with the local authorities.”

Nigel Farage has said the EU and Nato “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by expanding eastwards, as the Reform UK leader was challenged over a series of policies and beliefs in a sometimes combative TV interview.

Speaking to BBC’s Panorama on Friday evening, Farage also said Brexit would have benefited the UK economically if he had been running the country, and that many of the Reform candidates criticised for saying offensive things had been “stitched up in the most extraordinary way”.

Challenged on his beliefs over the invasion of Ukraine, and his stated admiration for Vladimir Putin, Farage said he disliked the Russian president personally but “admired him as a political operator” because of the extent of his control over Russia.

On why Putin invaded Ukraine, Farage said: “I stood up in the European parliament in 2014 and I said: ‘There will be a war in Ukraine.’ Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason … to say: ‘They’re coming for us again,’ and to go to war.”

He added: “We provoked this war. Of course it’s his fault, he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.”

The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have long accused Farage of being an apologist for the Russian president.

Earlier this year Rishi Sunak said it was “clearly ridiculous” to blame the west for the war. “Russia conducted an illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” the prime minister said. “I’m proud that the UK has stood strongly with Ukraine from the beginning.”

Elsewhere in the interview, one of a series hosted by Nick Robinson with party leaders, Farage accepted that a claim he made saying the UK had moved from being the “world’s seventh-biggest exporter to the world’s fourth-biggest exporter” after Brexit referred only to services.

Asked why exports in goods had not similarly benefited, Farage blamed net zero policies, saying they had “de-industrialised Britain”. On the economic effects of Brexit, he said: “If you put me in charge it’d be very, very different, but of course they didn’t do that did they?”

Challenged over his support at the time for Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, Farage praised it for having “a lot of things here that were pro-growth and pro-business”, while saying it was undermined by not including matched cuts in spending.

Asking about Reform’s own fiscal plans, set out this week in the party’s manifesto, Robinson seemed unconvinced by Farage’s explanations as to how the party would cut public spending enough to make mass tax cuts.

“Well, number one, we will get people off the unemployment register into work,” Farage said. Robinson replied: “That’s not going to raise you £140bn a year. You were on I’m a Celebrity – you should have been on Fantasy Island.”

Discussing migration, Farage repeatedly said that people arriving in the UK could bring their mothers with them, which is not the case. On net zero, asked if he still believed King Charles was “an eco-loony”, Farage replied: “He wasn’t the king then, and I can’t speak ill of the monarch obviously.”

Robinson also questioned Farage about comments from a series of Reform’s election candidates, including one who said the UK should have been politically neutral towards Nazi Germany.

Reform has since blamed a vetting company it employed for failing to check what candidates had said. But Farage appeared to play down the seriousness of many of the comments, saying: “We’ve also had an awful lot of candidates being stitched up in the most extraordinary way with quotes being taken out of context.”

Robinson replied: “So, you can’t run vetting but you could find £140bn in public spending savings?”

Asked if Reform attracted such people because of his own views, Farage called this “cobblers, absolute cobblers”, quoting Martin Luther King and saying he believed in meritocracy.

Asked why he once praised Enoch Powell and criticised Rishi Sunak by saying he “doesn’t understand our culture”, Farage said this simply referred to the prime minister being “too upper-class”.

A 25-year-old video has come to light of a man identified by the FBI as a Saudi intelligence agent filming locations in the center of Washington three months before Al-Qaida decided to carry out the 9/11 attacks.

The footage, shot in the summer of 1999 and in the possession of the FBI, was unsealed in a court action by families of the victims of 9/11, who claim that Saudi Arabia’s government was complicit in the event, which the country’s rulers deny. It was obtained by CBS and shown on the 60 Minutes program.

The video includes commentary from the man, Omar al-Bayoumi, about various locations in the city, including the Washington monument and the entry points and security arrangements of the US Capitol building, and referring at one point to a “plan”.

The Capitol is believed to have been the target of one of the planes before its hijackers were overwhelmed by passengers, causing it to crash in the Pennsylvania countryside.

Saudi authorities have long and strenuously denied complicity or support for 9/11, as does Bayoumi. Lawyers for the Saudi government have filed for the families’ case to be dismissed, with oral arguments due this summer.

The film was initially found by UK investigators in Bayoumi’s flat in the days after the attack in 2001, when he was a PhD student at Aston University in Birmingham. The flat also contained an address book that lawyers for the families say contains the contact details of officials in the Saudi government at the time. Scotland Yard gave the footage to the FBI.

Saudi Arabia has always denied that Bayoumi was its agent. He has long been a subject of speculation due to his links to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. An FBI report declassified in March 2022 presented evidence of “a 50/50 chance [Bayoumi] had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur” from his relationship with Hazmi and Mihdhar.

Another bureau report declassified the year before says he gave significant help to the pair after their arrival in the US, and communicated with a key logistics facilitator for Osama bin Laden each time he assisted them.

The video was shot over several days and is of somewhat grainy quality. He starts it in Arabic, saying, “O beloved, esteemed brothers, a greeting to you from Omar al-Bayoumi,” then adds: “We greet you, the esteemed brothers, and we welcome you from Washington – Washington the American capital city.”

Pointing out the Washington monument, he talks about going there and “reporting to you in detail what is there” to the people he is addressing in the film. He also notes the proximity of the airport.

Focusing on cars outside an unidentified building, he says: “Their cars, you said that in the plan.”

The FBI claims that when Bayoumi was shooting the video, he was with two Saudi Arabian diplomats who the bureau said had ties to al-Qaida.

The Saudi government declined to comment to 60 Minutes about the contents of the report.

The official 9/11 Commission report, a 585-page document published in 2004 from the findings of an inquiry set up by the US government, concluded that intelligence failures on the part of the CIA and FBI were primarily to blame for the attack. Referring to Bayoumi, the report said: “We have seen no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism, or knowingly aided extremist groups.”

The commission reported that when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, credited as the attack mastermind, was asked under interrogation if he knew Bayoumi, he said he did not.