The Kremlin has admitted that Vadim Krasikov, the assassin freed by Germany in a historic prisoner swap on Thursday, is a serving officer of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), essentially an acknowledgment that his 2019 murder of a Chechen exile in Berlin was a state-ordered hit.

It also hinted that he was linked to Vladimir Putin’s personal guard.

“Krasikov is an FSB employee,” Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters, adding that he had “served with some of the people working in the president’s security detail”.

Krasikov was one of eight Russians released from jails in the west and returned to Moscow on Thursday as part of a complex exchange deal in which 16 people were freed from Russian custody, including the US reporter Evan Gershkovich and several Russian opposition politicians.

Those involved in the negotiations have said that for Putin, Krasikov had always been the most important part of the puzzle, with the Kremlin insisting he would have to be part of any exchange. Putin was described as “maniacal” about returning Krasikov from Germany by one source in Moscow with knowledge of the negotiations – and Friday’s admission goes some way to explaining why.

It is the first time the Kremlin has admitted one of its serving operatives is behind a murder on foreign soil. Previously, Moscow have always denied involvement in cases such as the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, the 2018 attempted murder of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, or numerous hits on Chechen exiles in Istanbul, however implausible.

When Krasikov killed the Chechen exile Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in 2019, the Kremlin denied all responsibility. “I categorically reject any link between this incident, this murder and official Russia,” Peskov said at the time. However, in an interview earlier this year, Putin referred to Krasikov as a “patriot” who had “liquidated a bandit”.

Krasikov and the other seven returnees to Russia – a mix of spies and those serving time on criminal charges – were given a hero’s welcome in Moscow after the exchange in Ankara, with a red carpet, a guard of honour and Putin arriving in person to offer embraces and bouquets of flowers as they stepped off the plane.

Peskov confirmed that Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, who had been posing as an Argentine couple in Slovenia, were in fact Russian “illegals” – deep-cover spies who can spend decades abroad pretending to be foreigners. The couple’s two children, who had been taken into foster care when their parents were arrested in late 2022, travelled to Russia with them.

“The children of the illegals who arrived yesterday only found out they were Russian on the plane from Ankara. They do not speak Russian,” Peskov said. Putin greeted them in Spanish with the words “buenas noches” when they disembarked the plane.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who personally gave Joe Biden the green light for Berlin’s end of the deal, defended the prisoner swap as justified by a “duty to protect lives”, as Germany agonised over the high price of releasing Krasikov.

While during the cold war there were countless secret agent swaps across the Glienicke “Bridge of Spies”, the grand bargain pulled off on Thursday required Germany to open the prison bars for a man a Berlin court found had committed a “state-ordered killing” on German soil.

The prisoners’ liberation was greeted with joy and relief throughout Germany, but also hand-wringing by rights groups and outrage from the murder victim’s family.

Scholz, who broke off his holiday to greet 13 of the former detainees as they emerged from a private plane in Cologne, said he had no choice, given that the lives of at least some of the hostages had been at stake. “No one took this decision lightly to expel a convicted murderer sentenced to life in prison after only a few years in custody,” he said.

After a “moving” meeting with those released, Scholz said speaking with them “now in freedom removed any doubt” over whether it had been the right thing to do.

Michael Roth, an MP in Scholz’s Social Democrats, said sometimes it was necessary “on humanitarian grounds to make a deal with the devil”.

The justice minister, Marco Buschmann, of the libertarian Free Democratic party, said the government had been required to make a “painful concession” in the form of Krasikov’s release order, a first, and one he personally had to sign.

Amnesty International, the human rights organisation, welcomed the exchange but warned of the precedent it could set. “The Russian government could feel emboldened for further political arrests and human rights violations without having to fear consequences,” the deputy general secretary of the group’s German chapter, Christian Mihr, said.

Khangoshvili’s family reacted angrily to the swap, saying they had not been informed in advance. “It was devastating news for us relatives,” the family said in a statement through their lawyer, Inga Schulz.

“On the one hand, we are happy that someone’s life has been saved. At the same time, we are very disappointed that there is apparently no law in the world, not even in the countries in which the law is meant to be the highest authority.”

Roderich Kiesewetter, an MP in the opposition Christian Democrats and a former Bundeswehr officer, said that the “danger of sabotage or terrorism by Russia could now rise” because Putin had shown that his henchmen had no consequences to fear.

The news magazine Der Spiegel said Putin had apparently calculated it would have been much harder to win Krasnikov’s release if Donald Trump won the US election in November, given the former president’s frosty relationship with Berlin. “Putin should have no problem finding helpers to hunt down undesirable people in the west,” it said. “They know: the boss will always get them home.”

Trump asserted that the swap was a “win for Putin” and that he as president would have been able to bring the Americans home without having to agree to an exchange.

“As usual, it was a win for Putin or any other country that deals with us, but we got somebody back, so I’m never going to be challenging that,” he told Fox. “We wouldn’t have had to pay anything. We wouldn’t have had to let some of the great killers of the world go, because that’s what’s happened, as you know.”

He hinted without evidence that the US had provided more than prisoners to Russia in the exchange.

“When you start paying money … when you start doing that, and all of a sudden you have a lot of hostages taken prisoner, so to speak, and you’ll have a lot of a lot of things happening,” Trump said. “It’s very bad. It’s a very bad precedent.”

Talks on a release of western inmates in Russia, as well as the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a swap for Krasikov, had been held as early as 2022, soon after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

But, at the time Berlin resisted, with the hawkish foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, leading opposition against a more amenable Scholz.

Baerbock, in particular, raised concerns that if Navalny were exchanged for Krasikov, Putin’s nemesis would probably soon return to Russia and be arrested again, leaving the west empty handed, Die Zeit reported.

However, Scholz finally agreed to a major prisoner swap in February, telling Biden, “For you, I will do this.”

But by the end of that month Navalny was dead in a Russian penal colony. His fate was widely seen in the west as a warning for the other inmates in Russia, leading German diplomats and intelligence officials to redouble efforts to make a deal.

The mass-market daily Bild noted that, in addition to the cold war spy swaps between Moscow and Washington carried out in Berlin, West Germany had also “bought” the freedom of thousands of imprisoned East German citizens before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

It quoted German former secret service officials as warning the west risked opening “Pandora’s box” with the deal with Putin, who could order arbitrary arrests of foreign citizens at any time.

A former director of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service, August Hanning, said that in the past, leaders had ensured that such swaps took place “among equals” – meaning that “the state does not make itself vulnerable to blackmail”.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris met the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other freed American prisoners just hours after Washington and Moscow completed their largest prisoner exchange since the cold war.

On a muggy evening at Andrews air force base near Washington DC, Gershkovich and the other freed prisoners, the ex-marine Paul Whelan and the journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, touched down on US soil and shortly later disembarked a Bombardier jet from Turkey. They were met by their families and the US president and vice-president.

As he stepped off the jet, Gershkovich embraced Harris and Biden several times, then stepped over to his mother, Ella, and lifted her off the ground in an embrace. He was also met by his father, Mikhail, and sister Danielle.

After a few minutes spent chatting with family, Gershkovich approached the crowd of reporters and began to embrace his friends and colleagues.

Asked how he was feeling he said: “I feel fine.” But he also spoke about his feelings boarding the bus with the other freed detainees on Thursday and said he was happy to see Russians on board as well.

“There’s one thing I would like to say. It was great to get on that bus today and see not just Americans and Germans but Russian political prisoners.

“I spent a month in prison in Yekaterinburg where everyone I sat with was a political prisoner. Nobody knows them publicly, they have various political beliefs, they are not all connected with Navalny supporters, who everyone knows about. I would potentially like to see if we could do something about them as well. I’d like to talk to people about that in the next weeks and months.”

He was also met by senior editors at the Wall Street Journal, including the editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, and Gordon Fairclough. Several times he repeated: “My mother writes very nice things about you.”

There were squeals of joy as Kurmasheva’s young daughters, Miriam and Bibi, ran to hug her, followed by a warm embrace from husband, Pavel Butorin.

Whelan, who was met by his sister Elizabeth, also appeared healthy. He said that he felt fine, that he only believed that he was free as the flight flew further from Turkey over continental Europe and the the UK, and that his plan now was to “eat a steak”.

Speaking on the tarmac later, Biden rejected the idea that prisoner swaps could lead to other Americans being detained. “I don’t buy this idea of … let these people rot in jail because other people may be captured.”

Harris called the deal an “extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy”.

On Friday morning, Jake Sullivan, the US national security advisor, told ABC’s Good Morning America show that the prisoner swap had been “such a human victory. It was also a victory for our country”.

He added: “This was the United States of America at our best, working with our allies to bring home our people.” He also hailed the release of other prisoners who had stood up to the Russian regime as “freedom fighters”.

Sullivan said the deal was clinched because of Joe Biden’s international relationships, with the US president’s ties “unlocking the deal” that the US and European allies struck with Russia.

“It would not have happened without him,” he said.

He denied that such deals encourage hostile regimes to kidnap or imprison more innocent Americans, saying that during the Biden administration about 70 Americans held overseas had been released and there had not been a matching surge in those detained.

Hundreds of journalists came to the base to catch their first glimpse of the freed detainees who, combined, had spent nearly a decade in Russian captivity. They were among 16 American, Russian dissident and German prisoners freed by Russia, in exchange for eight Russians freed by the US, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Poland. Those returning to Russia included a number of undercover spies and a convicted FSB assassin whom Vladimir Putin had obsessively sought to free from German prison for years.

Gershkovich’s family said earlier in a statement: “We have waited 491 days for Evan’s release, and it’s hard to describe what today feels like. We can’t wait to give him the biggest hug and see his sweet and brave smile up close. Most important now is taking care of Evan and being together again. No family should have to go through this, and so we share relief and joy today with Paul and Alsu’s families.”

Whelan was detained in 2018 on espionage charges and served more than five years in pre-trial detention and then a labor colony.

“Paul Whelan is not in a Russian labor colony any longer, but he is not home,” his family wrote in a statement. “While Paul was wrongfully imprisoned in Russia, he lost his home. He lost his job. We are unsure how someone overcomes these losses and rejoins society after being a hostage. We are grateful for everyone’s efforts to help Paul while he was away. We hope you will continue to help him by providing Paul the space and privacy he needs as he rebuilds his life. It is Paul’s story to tell and he will tell it when he is able.”

Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe journalist who was arrested on charges of failing to register herself as a foreign agent and then charged with spreading false information about the Russian military, had been sentenced to more than six years in prison.

The Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin and several other opposition figures were also freed, including the British-Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza and three people who had worked as regional coordinators for the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison earlier this year.

Kira Yarmysh, a spokesperson for Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said on X that Harris had called Navalnaya “to discuss the exchange and express her support”, noting her and her husband’s contributions to the fight for a democratic Russia.

Navalnaya thanked Harris for the US assistance and called on the international community to facilitate the release of other Russian political prisoners, Yarmysh said.

Early on Friday, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, met some of the freed detainees, many of whom he said “feared for their health and even their lives”.

Speaking at Cologne airport, Scholz insisted the swap was “the right decision, and if you had any doubts, you will lose them after talking to those who are now free”.

The complex deal had involved months of negotiations between multiple countries and came together in extreme secrecy, with the location and exact makeup of the exchange not made public until the last moment. Sullivan told reporters that Navalny was meant to be a part of the deal before his death in February. On the day of his death, Sullivan said, he met Gershkovich’s mother and said he still saw a path forward for the deal.

For a few seconds, no one even noticed that Evan Gershkovich had taken his first steps back on US soil as a free man.

All eyes were on Paul Whelan, the ex-marine who had spent more than 2,000 days in a Russian prison, mostly in obscurity as his family implored the White House to bring him home. Now Joe Biden was holding him by the elbow, while the vice-president, Kamala Harris, looked on.

But then Harris turned around and spotted Gershkovich, who threw his arms out as if to say: “Here I am!” She mimicked him in mock surprise. Then they hugged. It was a moment.

Soon, Gershkovich came over to his mother, Ella, who had lobbied presidents, chancellors and senior officials to assemble a complex and precarious prisoner swap that would release him from a Russian jail. He lifted her off the ground in a big bear hug. Another picture-perfect moment.

Finally, he strolled over to the more than 100 waiting journalists, ready to greet colleagues and field questions despite the fact he’d been released just that morning. Asked how it was to be free, he barely thought and said: “Not bad.”

He also spoke about his feelings boarding the bus with the other freed detainees on Thursday and said he was happy to see Russians on board as well.

“There’s one thing I would like to say. It was great to get on that bus today and see not just Americans and Germans but Russian political prisoners.

“I spent a month in prison in Yekaterinburg where everyone I sat with was a political prisoner. Nobody knows them publicly, they have various political beliefs, they are not all connected with Navalny supporters, who everyone knows about. I would potentially like to see if we could do something about them as well. I’d like to talk to people about that in the next weeks and months.”

Hundreds of journalists – some of them friends – came to the base to catch their first glimpse of the freed detainees who, combined, had spent nearly a decade in Russian captivity. They were among 16 American, Russian dissident and German prisoners freed by Russia, in exchange for eight Russians freed by the US, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Poland. Those returning to Russia included a number of undercover spies and a convicted Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) assassin whom Vladimir Putin had obsessively sought to free from German prison for years.

For the friends and colleagues watching, there was something heartening in how naturally Gershkovich behaved, how casual the whole performance was. There was a playfulness to it, a humour and nonchalance that was distinctly familiar to a time before he was arrested and became a household name in the US and around the world.

But there was also something deeply earnest in his response to the 491 days he had spent in Russian prison for espionage, a sense of purpose and gravity of the moment that befits the largest prisoner swap since the cold war.

He hugged like it mattered. He looked you in the eye as you spoke. And, when he discussed the plight of the political prisoners who remained behind in Russia, his eyes became misty. This was a issue that he seemed to have taken to heart.

In a mere hour in public at the airbase on Thursday, he hit all the right notes to put those around him at ease. It was vaguely political at moments, the quick back-and-forth with the press corps feeling almost like a brief campaign stop before getting back on the jet. But, as he adjusts to a celebrity thrust upon him, Gershkovich seemed oddly at ease, and at home.

• This article was amended on 2 August 2024 to correct the positions of Evan Gerschkovich and Paul Whelan in a photograph.

Much has been made of the public diplomacy behind the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the US since the cold war, with officials from at least seven countries spending years making calls and holding secret meetings in far-flung capitals.

But since Evan Gershkovich, the formerly imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter, and others stepped off the plane in Maryland on Thursday, new details have emerged about the role of a crucial player in that effort: his mother.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ella Milman spent the 16 months since March 2023 – when her son was arrested on espionage charges in Russia – heavily involved in public and private diplomacy, from meetings to talkshows to rushing up to Joe Biden at a dinner.

The prisoner swap that occurred on Thursday between Russia and the US freed 16 people from Russian custody, and, in exchange, eight Russian adults and two minors who had been detained abroad were returned to Russia, including the assassin Vadim Krasikov, who had been held in a German prison since 2019 for the murder of a Chechen exile in Berlin.

Gershkovich, the Journal and the White House have all dismissed the charges against the reporter as nonsense from the beginning.

While they worked to secure his freedom, Milman was a constant and, it turns out, impactful presence, according to the Journal. She set up meetings with world leaders, built a contact network of sympathetic sources in the US government and in other foreign governments, regularly strategized with the Wall Street Journal’s legal and executive team, and read and studied the cases of other US nationals who had been detained in Russia.

Milman was raised in the same Leningrad as Putin, by a Jewish mother who had treated Holocaust survivors as a wartime nurse in Poland. Her father, a Soviet army medic, had reached Berlin in 1945.

While her son was detained in Russia, she wrote him weekly letters, the Journal reported – recounting the history of a family that had survived the Russian civil war, the second world war and Soviet antisemitism.

“And now this is our turn,” she wrote.

She also researched possible prisoner exchanges, in particular the name of Vadim Krasikov, a convicted Russian assassin detained in Berlin for murder. Over those 16 months Milman studied Krasikov’s case, the Journal said, convinced that he could be the key to securing her son’s freedom.

Krasikov had been held in a German prison since 2019 for the murder of a Chechen exile in Berlin. In prison letters, Milman and Gershkovich used a coded nickname for Krasikov: “the German”.

All the while, Milman continued to appear on news shows, drawing attention to her son’s case and pressuring the White House and officials from around the world. In April of last year, while attending the White House correspondents’ dinner, Milman approached Biden face to face. “You are the only one who can bring my boy home,” she implored him, according to the newspaper.

Several months later, Milman and her husband traveled to Moscow to attend Gershkovich’s appeal hearing, ignoring the advice of the FBI that they might also be arrested, the Journal reported. While there, she agreed to be interrogated, and spent hours answering questions from Russian authorities about her son.

In September, the Journal obtained access for Milman to a gala dinner in New York. There, she reportedly approached the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and pleaded for help in freeing her son. The chancellor told her: “We are helping. We are doing something.”

In January, as US government officials continued to work with foreign governments including German and Russian authorities to secure a deal, Milman flew to the World Economic Forum, where she met with Scholz’s chief of staff to ask for assistance.

He pledged to help, and later that day spoke with Biden by phone about a meeting to discuss the matter, the Journal said.

After Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, hinted in a television interview in February that the release of Gershkovich could be secured in a prison swap involving Krasikov, Scholz flew to the US to meet with Biden, the Journal said. There, they formally agreed that they would explore Krasikov as the centerpiece of a deal that would free numerous prisoners.

In May, Milman attended the White House correspondents’ dinner again, and told Biden to call the German leader to move the deal forward. Two days later, the president did exactly that – sending a formal request to Scholz that gave the chancellor the mechanism he needed to formalize a deal.

This week, Milman received an invitation to an urgent meeting at the White House for 10.30am on Thursday. She was told to bring her husband and daughter. Hours later, her son was home.

Crowds gathered in Doha to bury the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, assassinated in Tehran this week, as the US president, Joe Biden, said the killing had “not helped” efforts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and warned he was concerned about escalating regional conflict.

Iran has vowed revenge for the humiliating attack in the heart of its capital, which came just hours after Israel killed the top military commander of Hezbollah in an airstrike on Beirut.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said the killings had pushed its conflict with Israel into “a new phase”, at the funeral on Thursday of Fuad Shukr, who had been second-in-command of the group. The response would be a “real, studied” strike, not a symbolic attack, he added.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the country was “in a state of very high readiness for any scenario”. The government had given ministers satellite phones in case Iran’s retaliation takes down communications, Israeli media reported.

Air India on Friday joined a growing list of carriers – from Lufthansa to Delta – that have cancelled flights to Israel, and France urged its citizens to leave Iran.

Cyprus said it had expanded plans to support a large-scale evacuation from the region if the war expands. The island nation helped tens of thousands of people leave during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Haniyeh’s funeral in Qatar came the day after a prayer ceremony in Tehran for the Hamas leader, who was the group’s chief negotiator in efforts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza. His assassination prompted many in the region to question if Israel had any real interest in seeking a truce.

Biden, who has pushed hard for a ceasefire in recent months, said the killing was “not helpful”, in comments to journalists on a US airbase, late on Thursday.

Biden added that he had a “very direct” conversation with Netanyahu about the need to reach a deal. “We have the basis for a ceasefire. He should move on it and they should move on it now.”

Without an end to fighting in Gaza there is little hope of easing spiralling regional tensions. Iranian allies and proxies including Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen say they are fighting in solidarity with Palestinians under attack in Gaza.

Haniyeh’s death has not been officially claimed by Israel but it has been widely celebrated inside the country as an Israeli operation, including by top politicians and former security chiefs.

There have been conflicting reports about whether the explosion that killed Haniyeh was caused by a missile or a concealed bomb. But regardless of details, the operation in the heart of Tehran, at a time of heightened security, was an extraordinary tactical feat, even if its longer-term strategic implications for Israel are not yet clear.

The dual assassinations, and Israel’s announcement that it had killed the military chief inside Gaza, Mohammed Deif, could give Netanyahu political cover to agree a halt to fighting, on the grounds he had taken out much of Hamas’ leadership and struck a major blow against Hezbollah.

He is yet to show much interest in pushing for a deal, though. Announcing Shukr’s assassination, Netanyahu said it was possible only because he had spent months resisting heavy pressure to agree a ceasefire. Israel would continue fighting until it reached its goals, including eliminating Hamas capabilities, he added.

On Friday, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, met his British counterpart, John Healey, who is visiting allies in the region. Gallant briefed Healey and thanked him for Britain’s support in helping to defend Israel from an Iranian attack in April, the Israeli government said in a statement.

That unprecedented attack, with more than 300 drones and missiles, came after another targeted assassination outside Israel’s border, when it killed a senior Iranian commander at an embassy complex in the Syrian capital Damascus.

The UK was part of an international coalition that played a critical role in intercepting the Iranian arms. The US has already said it will defend Israel if it is attacked again.

Haniyeh’s funeral and burial, in a mosque north of the Qatari capital, was attended by a hundreds-strong crowd, including Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

Also attending were Hamas officials tipped as potential successors, the former Hamas chief and close aide Khaled Meshaal and the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Khalil al-Hayya. “We are sure that his blood will bring out victory, dignity and liberation,” Hayya told Haniyeh’s family.

His coffin, draped with the Palestinian flag, stood beside that of a bodyguard killed with him. They will be buried in the city of Lusail later on Friday.

Hamas called for a “day of rage” to mark the burial, and joined calls for retaliation, although after nearly 10 months of fighting in Gaza its military options are limited.

Haniyeh was also mourned at mosques across the region. Israel’s interior minister said he planned to revoke the residence permit of a preacher at al-Aqsa mosque, who he said had led a prayer for the Hamas leader.

Moshe Arbel sent a letter to the attorney general saying Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri had committed a security felony and breach of trust. A residence permit can be revoked for breaches of trust in Israel, even without a legal conviction.

The champion American gymnast Simone Biles found time overnight between counting her record haul of Olympic medals to ding Donald Trump on social media after his offensive and untrue remarks at a gathering of Black journalists earlier in the week.

She posted on X early on Friday: “I love my black job” with a black heart emoji alongside, responding to another post of her beaming with her latest Olympic gold medal.

“Simone Biles being the GOAT, winning Gold medals and dominating gymnastics is her black job,” posted the singer Ricky Davila.

The messages were an unmistakable takedown of the former president, who is once again the Republican party’s nominee for president.

Trump said in an interview with three top political journalists at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on Wednesday that migrants were “taking Black jobs” in the US.

When asked to define a “Black job”, he said it was “anybody that has a job”.

His interview, in which he delivered numerous gaffes and insults, dismayed and outraged those gathered at the convention in Chicago and millions watching live on TV. He questioned the US vice-president and Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s identity as a Black woman and elicited gasps and derisive laughter from the audience.

Later that day, Harris called the remarks divisive and said: “America deserves better.”

It is not the first time Trump has made such remarks: in the presidential debate with Biden, he said migrants were “taking Black jobs now … they’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs”.

Joe Biden responded later, telling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in a reference to Harris: “I know what a Black job is: it’s the vice-president of the United States.”

Public prosecutors have opened a formal investigation into death threats and cyber-harassment of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Olympic Games opening ceremony, French media have reported.

The probe is the second to be launched into online abuse of people involved in the ceremony after prosecutors this week opened an inquiry into threats of death, torture and rape received by the DJ and LGBTQ+ campaigner Barbara Butch.

Jolly filed a complaint with authorities on Tuesday saying “he had been the target on social media of messages containing threats and insults and critical of his sexual orientation and wrongly presumed Israeli roots”, the prosecutor’s office said.

Charges that could arise from the investigation, to be handled by officers from the French judiciary’s online hate division, included defamation, public abuse and death threats on grounds of origin and sexual orientation, it added.

French media reported than much of the online abuse was in English and a sizeable proportion appeared to come from the US. Jolly is gay but is not Jewish and has no immediate connection with Israel.

The Paris 2024 organising committee told Agence-France Presse it “firmly condemned the threats and harassment of which the authors and artists of the opening ceremony, including Thomas Jolly, have been victims”.

The committee – which on Sunday apologised for any offence caused by parts of the ceremony – said it offered its “full support to Thomas Jolly and to the ceremony’s authors and artists in the face of the attacks directed against them”.

One of the ceremony’s tableaux, titled Festivity, featured Butch, a cast of drag queens and, playing Dionysus, a semi-naked singer sitting in a bowl of fruit. Some Christian and conservative critics interpreted the scene as a parody of the Last Supper.

Jolly has repeatedly said Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece portraying the final meal Jesus is said to have shared with his Apostles was not the inspiration for the scene, which instead represented a pagan feast of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus.

French bishops have said they regretted the “excesses and provocation” of the tableau, which they said amounted to “a mockery of Christianity”. Criticism from far-right French politicians and the religious right in the US has been more vituperative.

Art historians have said the scene appears to be based on the Feast of the Gods, by the 17th-century Dutch artist Jan van Bijlert, with which it bears striking similarities. That work is itself, however, seen as a “mythological reimagining” of the Last Supper.

The man is very slight of build, his hair shorn but his beard full. He is naked except for the handcuffs shackling his wrists in a clinically bright room.

This photo is the first published image of a “war on terror” detainee in a CIA black site. The man staring at the camera is Ammar al-Baluchi, one of five men at Guantánamo Bay accused by the US government of plotting the 9/11 attacks. (On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that three of the five men, but not Baluchi, had agreed to plead guilty to all charges and would avoid possible death sentences.) Baluchi was first arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, in April 2003 and then secretly shuffled between five black sites from May 2003 to September 2006. Since then, he has been held at Guantánamo, though he has not been convicted of a crime.

This photograph, shared with the Guardian by Baluchi’s lawyers, is believed to be from early 2004, when he was 26 years old, and was probably taken at the CIA’s black site in Bucharest, Romania, known in US government communications both as Location No 7 and by the color-coded name of Detention Site Black. In the picture, Baluchi, whose story formed the basis for a character in the film Zero Dark Thirty, is probably being readied for transit to another black site. The black bar visible across his midsection has been added by his attorneys to preserve Baluchi’s dignity.

Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 Muslim men were hidden, housed, and interrogated at these secret CIA prisons around the world, with 39 of them subjected to what the Bush administration euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques”. In 2014, the US government admitted these practices constituted torture, when Barack Obama stated: “We tortured some folks.” No one at the CIA has ever been held accountable for the torture.

The CIA took some 14,000 photographs of their black sites and the detainees in their custody. The very existence of those photographs was hidden from the public until 2015, and the photos mostly remain classified. But defense attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees have been litigating the military court’s draconian classification system for years, which has gradually resulted in the release of more formerly classified material, including this photograph.

Although forced nudity was frequently used by the CIA as an “enhanced interrogation technique” at the black sites, Baluchi is naked in this photograph probably because of CIA transportation protocols. According to a previously declassified CIA inspector general’s report, Baluchi had already been subjected to “standard rendition procedures” when he was transported to Romania from his first black site, the Salt Pit, a secret prison in Afghanistan that was also known as Detention Site Cobalt. Transportation procedures between the black sites included “a body cavity check” and a medical officer examining Baluchi. CIA headquarters indicated to field officers that they needed to “take pictures of him to document his physical condition at the time of transfer”.

It was at the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, several months before this photo was taken, where Baluchi encountered his most brutal treatment at the hands of the CIA, including having the back of his head repeatedly bounced off a wall, a technique labeled “walling” by the government. Student interrogators seeking “official” job certification lined up to practice “walling” him as if he were a training prop. He was kept naked during the process, for sessions lasting two hours. (Medical experts for the defense have since reported to the military commissions that the walling might have resulted in permanent traumatic brain injury.)

At various times, Baluchi was also deprived of sleep for up to 82 hours at a time, forced into a standing position by having his wrists shackled to a bar in the ceiling, repeatedly doused with ice-cold water, forcibly shaved of his hair and beard, subjected to beatings, placed in stress positions, and deprived of food. When the US seized custody of him in mid-2003, Baluchi weighed 141lbs. By late 2003, his weight had sunk to 119lbs.

In late 2003, he was moved from the Salt Pit to Romania. The Romanian site has since been identified as having been in the basement of the National Registry Office for Classified Information, a sizable government building close to downtown Bucharest. Six prefabricated cells, painted white and tiled with impact-resistant glass, were installed on rubber feet to keep detainees disoriented. Romania, which was seeking entry into Nato at the time, agreed to cooperate with the CIA by hosting the site and was provided with millions of dollars in return.

At the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, detainees “were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste”, according to the Senate subcommittee on intelligence. The chief of interrogations at the site described the Salt Pit as “a dungeon”.

The Romanian black site, by contrast, was flooded with light 24 hours a day, which may explain the brightness of this photo. (In court filings, Baluchi has described his time there “as if I was living in a refrigerator. Here I finally had clothes, short pants and a blanket, which was not enough to ward off the cold of this place.”) At this site, detainees were subject to solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and being physically manhandled with “attention grasps” and “facial holds”. They were allowed to shower once a week, a novelty compared with the black sites established before this one. But they were still held extrajudicially and incommunicado, disappeared from the world and never able to speak with anyone except their jailers.

The CIA report quotes a debriefer who called the Romanian black site “probably the ‘nicest facility’ she had visited”, stating that it was “clean, ‘sterile’, efficient and modern” with “an almost ‘surreal’ feel to it”. Another debriefer, who knew Baluchi from the Salt Pit, mentioned that since his time in the Romanian site, he now had “more meat on his bones”. As is clear from the photograph, his beard, which had been forcibly shaved when he entered his first black site, has grown back.

Not long after this picture was taken, photos from Abu Ghraib prison shocked the world. In many ways, those images are the opposite of this one. In the Abu Ghraib photos, we see naked Iraqi bodies piled into a human pyramid; people dragged around on leashes; a hooded man standing on a box, arms extended with wires attached to his fingers. The American servicemen and women in the photos are seen smiling with a thumbs up sign next to corpses or engaging in other sadistic kinds of pleasures at the abuse they’re inflicting. Those photos, taken mostly as macabre mementoes by soldiers on duty, soon became visual evidence of the misbegotten character of the American invasion of Iraq.

Photos documenting the extreme brutality that took place at the CIA black sites may also exist, though if they do they remain classified and out of view. But this photo serves a specific bureaucratic aim rather than existing as a keepsake. The purpose of this photograph appears twofold: to diminish its subject, al-Baluchi, into nothing but a naked body and then to demonstrate that this body remains whole, despite everything that has been done to it.

The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were predicated on the fact that they would leave no lasting physical evidence on the body of the accused, as the Bush administration’s now notorious “torture memos” make clear. The memos defined torture as “permanent and serious physical damage” that “must rise to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function”.

As such, this photograph functions as visual proof of this now discredited argument while illustrating the humiliating and submissive posture Baluchi is forced into in front of the camera. Dr Vincent Iacopino, a physician who specializes in the medial consequences of torture, previously told the Guardian that such compulsory naked photography is both a form of sexual humiliation and sexual assault.

The deaths of two young women, miscarriages and birth defects in Brazil have been linked to Oropouche virus, a little-known disease spread by midges and mosquitoes.

A surge in cases has been recorded in the country this year – 7,284, up from 832 in 2023. Many have been recorded in areas that have not previously seen the virus.

A total of 8,078 cases had been confirmed in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Cuba by the end of July, with doctors in the region urged to be vigilant.

The climate emergency is likely to be driving the insects that spread the virus to new areas, experts warned, while genetic changes in Oropouche itself may play a role.

The first known deaths anywhere in the world, of two women aged 21 and 24 in Bahia state, were announced by Brazil’s health ministry on 25 July. They each developed sudden symptoms – which can include fever, body aches and headaches – that led to fatal bleeding. A potential third linked death, of a 57-year-old man, is under investigation.

One of the women who died had twice sought help from health facilities but had been discharged. Márcia São Pedro, epidemiological surveillance director for Bahia, said: “This is related, I believe, to the fact that people assume everything is dengue. And because dengue is well known, they hydrate and send the patient home. We need to understand that this is not the case. We are in a different situation now.”

In June officials reported a pregnant woman lost her baby at 30 weeks’ gestation, with Oropouche virus subsequently detected in samples from the umbilical cord and organs. A miscarriage at eight weeks’ gestation was also linked to the virus.

Tests in four newborn babies with microcephaly, a condition in which the baby’s head is smaller than expected, also indicated the presence of antibodies to Oropouche virus – although those tests do not prove definitively that the virus caused the birth abnormalities.

Deaths and miscarriages are “really standout things that we don’t really associate with this virus”, said Alain Kohl, professor of virology at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), and an expert in bunyaviruses such as Oropouche. He stressed these were “early days” in assessing the outbreak, with many unanswered questions.

Felipe Naveca, from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a health research institution linked to Brazil’s Ministry of Health, and the co-author of research that found genetic changes in the form of Oropouche, said: “It has caused outbreaks before, but nothing on the scale of what is happening now.”

However, severe outcomes such as death and miscarriage did not necessarily mean a difference in the virus’s strength, Naveca said, and could simply reflect that “when you have a very high number of cases, some severe cases will inevitably emerge”.

Some of the increase in numbers could be down to better surveillance and more widespread testing, he said, while changes in climate and deforestation were making contact between the insects carrying the virus and humans more likely.

The virus is typically found in primates and sloths, and can be transmitted to humans through the bites of certain midges and mosquitoes. A review published in The Lancet in January described Oropouche as a “prototypical neglected disease” and warned of significant gaps in medical and scientific understanding of the virus which “has the potential to emerge as a substantial threat”.

Oropouche, first detected in Trinidad and Tobago in 1955, tends to cause flu-like symptoms lasting about a week. In some cases the virus can cause severe complications such as meningitis.

Prof Jonathan Ball, deputy director of LSTM, said that while the link to miscarriage and microcephaly was not confirmed, the spread of the virus to new areas could be.

“Frequent exposure to the virus in endemic areas is likely to generate immunity before females reach child-bearing age, and this immunity would likely protect pregnant women and their unborn baby. However, when the virus is newly introduced this protection isn’t there,” he said.

There is no specific vaccine or treatment for Oropouche, and the Pan American Health Organization said people should focus on prevention. This includes covering up arms and legs, using insect repellants containing Deet, IR3535 or icaridin, and using fine-mesh mosquito nets on doors, windows and beds. Midges are much smaller than mosquitoes and so traditional mosquito nets will not protect against their bites.

Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, of the University of Oxford, said the outbreak should be “a wake-up call”, and added: “If climate continues to change, we should expect spread of the insects which can transmit diseases to humans to increase.”

The deaths of two young women, miscarriages and birth defects in Brazil have been linked to Oropouche virus, a little-known disease spread by midges and mosquitoes.

A surge in cases has been recorded in the country this year – 7,284, up from 832 in 2023. Many have been recorded in areas that have not previously seen the virus.

A total of 8,078 cases had been confirmed in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Cuba by the end of July, with doctors in the region urged to be vigilant.

The climate emergency is likely to be driving the insects that spread the virus to new areas, experts warned, while genetic changes in Oropouche itself may play a role.

The first known deaths anywhere in the world, of two women aged 21 and 24 in Bahia state, were announced by Brazil’s health ministry on 25 July. They each developed sudden symptoms – which can include fever, body aches and headaches – that led to fatal bleeding. A potential third linked death, of a 57-year-old man, is under investigation.

One of the women who died had twice sought help from health facilities but had been discharged. Márcia São Pedro, epidemiological surveillance director for Bahia, said: “This is related, I believe, to the fact that people assume everything is dengue. And because dengue is well known, they hydrate and send the patient home. We need to understand that this is not the case. We are in a different situation now.”

In June officials reported a pregnant woman lost her baby at 30 weeks’ gestation, with Oropouche virus subsequently detected in samples from the umbilical cord and organs. A miscarriage at eight weeks’ gestation was also linked to the virus.

Tests in four newborn babies with microcephaly, a condition in which the baby’s head is smaller than expected, also indicated the presence of antibodies to Oropouche virus – although those tests do not prove definitively that the virus caused the birth abnormalities.

Deaths and miscarriages are “really standout things that we don’t really associate with this virus”, said Alain Kohl, professor of virology at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), and an expert in bunyaviruses such as Oropouche. He stressed these were “early days” in assessing the outbreak, with many unanswered questions.

Felipe Naveca, from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a health research institution linked to Brazil’s Ministry of Health, and the co-author of research that found genetic changes in the form of Oropouche, said: “It has caused outbreaks before, but nothing on the scale of what is happening now.”

However, severe outcomes such as death and miscarriage did not necessarily mean a difference in the virus’s strength, Naveca said, and could simply reflect that “when you have a very high number of cases, some severe cases will inevitably emerge”.

Some of the increase in numbers could be down to better surveillance and more widespread testing, he said, while changes in climate and deforestation were making contact between the insects carrying the virus and humans more likely.

The virus is typically found in primates and sloths, and can be transmitted to humans through the bites of certain midges and mosquitoes. A review published in The Lancet in January described Oropouche as a “prototypical neglected disease” and warned of significant gaps in medical and scientific understanding of the virus which “has the potential to emerge as a substantial threat”.

Oropouche, first detected in Trinidad and Tobago in 1955, tends to cause flu-like symptoms lasting about a week. In some cases the virus can cause severe complications such as meningitis.

Prof Jonathan Ball, deputy director of LSTM, said that while the link to miscarriage and microcephaly was not confirmed, the spread of the virus to new areas could be.

“Frequent exposure to the virus in endemic areas is likely to generate immunity before females reach child-bearing age, and this immunity would likely protect pregnant women and their unborn baby. However, when the virus is newly introduced this protection isn’t there,” he said.

There is no specific vaccine or treatment for Oropouche, and the Pan American Health Organization said people should focus on prevention. This includes covering up arms and legs, using insect repellants containing Deet, IR3535 or icaridin, and using fine-mesh mosquito nets on doors, windows and beds. Midges are much smaller than mosquitoes and so traditional mosquito nets will not protect against their bites.

Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, of the University of Oxford, said the outbreak should be “a wake-up call”, and added: “If climate continues to change, we should expect spread of the insects which can transmit diseases to humans to increase.”

Stock markets in Europe, Asia and New York tumbled on Friday as fears of a US economic slump grew and technology shares were hit by underwhelming earnings.

Concerns that the US could be sliding towards a recession spurred a global sell-off, which accelerated after a poor employment report on Friday showed that the US jobs market was cooling fast, pushing up the unemployment rate.

Economists fear the US economy could be weaker than central bankers at the Federal Reserve had realised, and could force the Fed into a sharp cut in borrowing costs in September – or even an emergency rate cut before that – to stimulate demand.

“The sharp slowdown in payrolls in July and sharper rise in the unemployment rate makes a September interest rate cut inevitable and will increase speculation that the Fed will kick off its loosening cycle with a 50bp cut or even an intra-meeting move,” said Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist at Capital Economics.

The weak jobs report added to anxiety after data this week showed weakness in the US manufacturing sector, and disappointing results from semiconductor maker Intel, which hammered its shares.

The tech-focused Nasdaq index fell almost 3% in early trading and was on course for a correction – 10% off its record high – after the latest US non-farm payroll report showed that only 114,000 jobs were created last month, compared with the 175,000 analysts expected. In another blow, the US unemployment rate rose from 4.1% to 4.3%.

Japanese equities suffered their worst day since the Covid-19 pandemic rocked markets in 2020; the Nikkei 225 share index tumbled by 5.8% to its lowest closing level since January. The broader Japanese Topix fell 6.1%, Australia’s ASX fell 2.5% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 2.1%.

Europe’s main stock indices also declined on Friday, with European technology stocks falling to their lowest level in more than six months. France’s CAC 40 hit its lowest level since last November, down over 1%, while Germany’s Dax lost 2%.

The Dutch chipmaking equipment manufacturer ASML’s shares fell 9.6%, while the rival ASM International dropped 13.7%.

“The past 24 hours have seen an increasingly precarious backdrop for risk markets, with a risk-off mood on the back of another batch of weak US data yesterday followed by mostly downbeat tech earnings overnight,” said Jim Reid, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, on Friday morning.

In London, the FTSE 100 blue-chip share index lost more than 120 points at one stage, down 1.5%.

Friday’s sell-off followed a rough day’s trading on Wall Street on Thursday, where the Dow Jones industrial average fell 1.2%, or almost 500 points. This was triggered by data showing US manufacturing activity dropped to an eight-month low in July amid a slump in new orders, and a jump in the number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits to an 11-month high.

New orders for US-manufactured goods fell by 3.3% in June, data on Friday showed, adding to anxiety that economic demand was tailing off. The Fed left US interest rates on hold on Wednesday, but hinted that a rate cut was close.

Financial markets are now pricing in a 100% chance that the Fed will cut rates in September, with a large, half-point cut seen as a 60% chance after the weak jobs report.

“The Fed remain wary about inflation, but this week’s employment cost index and unit labour cost data should really have boosted their confidence that inflation is on the path to 2%. Their focus needs to be the state of the jobs market,” said James Knightley, ING’s chief international economist.

The US dollar weakened, lifting the pound by 0.5% to $1.28, and the euro by 1.2% to $1.092.

Intel’s shares plunged over 28% after it announced plans to cut more than 15,000 jobs globally as it tries to “resize and refocus” its business. Amazon shares were down 10% after it missed sales forecasts and disappointed analysts with its latest outlook.

Shares in the chipmaker Nvidia fell 2.7% after a report that the US Department of Justice had launched an investigation into complaints from competitors that it may have abused its market dominance in selling chips that power artificial intelligence.

Russ Mould, an investment director at AJ Bell, said rising economic pessimism meant August had got off to a bad start for global stock markets.

“An economy going through a bad patch is one catalyst for a central bank to cut rates and hopefully stimulate activity,” he said. “This thought process is likely to be at the top of the agenda for the Fed this week after shocking US economic data that featured bigger than expected jobless claims and contraction in manufacturing. The narrative has changed from rate cuts equating to good news to rate cuts meaning measures to avoid recession.”

While shares slid, gold hit a fresh record on Friday as investors flocked to safe-haven assets. Gold futures at one point on Friday were up $25.70 (£20.17), or 1%, to $2,506.40 an ounce.

A former soldier who appeared on recruitment posters for the British army has received a settlement and an apology after taking it to an employment tribunal over the racist and sexist abuse she was subjected to during her career.

While still in training, Kerry-Ann Knight was pictured on a recruitment poster above the words “Your army needs you and your self-belief”, confidently looking over her shoulder.

Knight, 33, thought the army would offer stability, a type of family and the chance of a fantastic career. She had a “bright hope” she could pave the way for other young, Black women.

Now, after 12 years of service, her hopes are in tatters. After enduring more than a decade of racist and sexist abuse, she was forced out of the role she loved.

Knight joined 26 Regiment Royal Artillery (26 RA) after enlisting at the age of 20 following training, and was posted to Germany.

“I had to serve alongside people that claimed to support the KKK, Britain First and/or the English Defence League,” she said in her witness statement provided to the tribunal. She said male soldiers would call her a “black bitch” but say: “I’d still shag you though.”

“One evening I returned to my room to see someone had drawn images of huge black penises all over the wardrobes in my room,” the statement said.

When Knight appeared on the recruitment poster she thought she had been asked because of her achievements in training. “I didn’t know it was because I was going to be the only Black woman in that regiment,” she told the Guardian. “I didn’t know what I was in for.”

When she signed up for the campaign, Knight said, she had “this bright hope that I’m helping to change things”. In promotional materials, she looks happy and excited – “but when I turned up to the unit, that wasn’t my lived experience”, she said.

“There was a lot of sexism,. However, when you put race into play, as well, for me, it just felt like it was multiplied by 10.”

After she accepted a post as an instructor at the Army Foundation College in Harrogate in 2021, Knight hoped things would be different. Her role was to train new recruits, who enlist at 16 and 17.

But from the outset, she said, she did not feel welcome. In her witness statement she detailed how colleagues “took it in turns to shout out ‘watermelooooon!’ anytime I walked into the room. Every time they did this the others would laugh,” she said, adding that she “felt humiliated and mocked”.

She heard colleagues talking about her “getting lynched” and being “tarred and feathered”. One said he would put her in a “hot box” – a reference to a scene in the film Django Unchained in which a black female slave is tortured by being locked inside a wooden coffin-type box.

In her statement, Knight said the Tarantino film “was regularly played by my colleagues – seemingly on repeat”.

Over several years, Knight tried to raise complaints about the racism and misogyny, informally at first and then formally, through Service Complaints, the grievance scheme for members of the armed forces. She backed up her complaints with evidence, including WhatsApp screenshots and audio recordings.

However, after submitting a service complaint about her treatment at AFC Harrogate she was removed from her role training junior soldiers, on the basis that her “mental or emotional state [was] sufficiently at risk of deterioration that she should not be in a [junior soldier-]facing role at this time”.

“I think when it got to that stage, that’s when I just realised that the army is institutionally racist,” Knight said. “And they would go above and beyond in order to discredit me as an individual, in order to protect the army image, to portray that racism doesn’t exist, even though it was there in black and white.”

In December 2022, Knight sought legal advice. Her case, brought by the Centre for Military Justice, was supported by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

Her solicitor, Emma Norton, from the Centre for Military Justice, said: “For the army, it was not the racists that needed to be dealt with it, it was Kerry-Ann, because she’d had the audacity to complain about racism and misogyny. It is all dreadfully familiar and shows again that, in the British army, it’s worse to accuse someone of racism than it is to be racist.”

Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the EHRC, said: “As one of the UK’s largest employers, and a public authority under the Equality Act, the British army should be a standard bearer when it comes to protecting their employees from discrimination.

“Many of the most recent recruits in the army today will have joined after seeing Ms Knight’s face in a recruitment campaign. Like everyone else in the country, they have the legal right to be treated fairly regardless of who they are or what they look like.”

It is in part her face on recruitment posters that motivated Knight to bring her case. “I wanted my story to help change the lived experience of others in the army,” Knight said. “Me being their campaign girl I’d say falsely helped to recruit individuals, under false pretence, to say the army’s all-inclusive.

“I really wanted to try and make an effective change. So this is why I wanted the army to acknowledge that there was wrong, and try and change the policies in some way.”

An MoD spokesperson said: “We do not tolerate abuse, bullying or discrimination of any kind and encourage any personnel who believe they have experienced or witnessed unacceptable behaviour to report it. All allegations of unacceptable behaviour are taken extremely seriously and are thoroughly investigated. If proven, swift action will be taken.

“The MoD settled this claim with Kerry-Ann Knight in June, with no admission of liability.”

It wasn’t just a misplaced apostrophe, it was a misplaced Yorkshire apostrophe that caused the furore. “Gerrit in’t bin,” said the new municipal anti-litter posters. “Tha what?” came the chorus of complaints.

But a misplaced apostrophe row involving North Yorkshire council has raised a bigger question: do we even need apostrophes?

“I say put the apostrophe where you like,” said the unmistakably Yorkshire poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan. “People get so cross about apostrophes and I say: ‘Don’t worry about it. They’re going to die.’”

North Yorkshire council this week conceded they had erred. Posters that said “Gerrit in’t bin” should have said “Gerrit in t’bin”. The council said it had corrected the sentence in its downloadable signs.

But Rod Dimbleby, chair of the Yorkshire Dialect Society – established in 1897 and said to be the oldest dialect society in the world – would have liked the council to have gone further.

“A humble apology would be nice,” he said. “We’re doing our best to keep our dialect alive, but you see what we’re up against when authorities like that get it wrong.”

McMillan, who last year translated all of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville into Yorkshire for an opera production, is relaxed about the mistake.

He told the Guardian that in his eyes the apostrophe is “a movable feast. It is kind of there as a guide to the unwary.

“If I was writing it I would miss the apostrophes out altogether. I would even write it as one word: gerritintbin.

“The apostrophe can become something which hangs in the air. It confuses people and they get a bit nervous of it. It’s there to represent that thing that we all do that isn’t actually a word or a letter, it’s really just a kind of intake of breath and people get a bit worried about it.

“If it was me, I’d miss the apostrophe out.”

To anyone who is aghast at that: “I’d like to remind people they are not rules, they’re conventions.”

McMillan, sometimes known as the Bard of Barnsley, said he loved it when he saw the commonly mangled greengrocers’ signs for “tomato’s”. “I say put it where you like,” he said.

He’s relaxed about the apostrophe but enthusiastic about the council’s use of dialect. “I’m a litter picker myself, so I would say “gerrit in t’bin”. But perhaps they should bin the apostrophe too. Gerritintbin, along with the apostrophe.

“The more we talk about dialect the better, and it will help with the cultural and linguistic levelling up that in the end will happen. As I always say, the royal family will speak like us … that’s my plan.”

McMillan’s relaxed approach is a stark contrast to that of Bob McCalden, chair of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

“Apostrophes matter,” he said. “It is important they are used correctly because it makes the written use of English that much clearer.”

Apostrophes had been about for hundreds of years, he said, and for good reason. “It is really a matter of whether you want to use the English language correctly or incorrectly.

“I’m no expert on Yorkshire dialect, but English grammar suggests the council got it wrong.”

Misplaced apostrophes rightly annoyed people, McCalden said. “There’s a small chain of restaurants down here in Surrey that is driving me mad at the moment. They have special Tuesdays and they put the apostrophe in Tuesdays. I don’t think they do it to just irritate me.”

He said the protection society was thriving, with 4,000 members. “I’m delighted that it does arouse passion in other people as well, not just me. If I was the only person ranting about it I might give up.”

The new row is not the first time North Yorkshire council has got into trouble over apostrophes. Earlier this year it emerged that the council would ditch them in new street signs to avoid problems with computers, meaning, for example, St Mary’s Walk becoming St Marys Walk.

It made headlines around the world, resulting in a climbdown.

Keane Duncan, executive member for highways, admitted punctuation was causing “a bit of a headache” at the council.

“We have got punctuation on these litter signs – but unfortunately it’s in the wrong place. So we’re taking a few steps forward, a few steps back. We’re learning and hopefully one day we will get punctuation exactly right here in North Yorkshire”.

The row comes as grammarians prepare for International Apostrophe Day on 15 August, an event created by the former Guardian journalist David Marsh. “No active plans for it,” said McCalden, “but I hope it gets a few people to think about the subject.”