The Trump administration has publicly and privately signaled that it does not believe Russia represents a cyber threat against US national security or critical infrastructure, marking a radical departure from longstanding intelligence assessments.

The shift in policy could make the US vulnerable to hacking attacks by Russia, experts warned, and appeared to reflect the warming of relations between Donald Trump and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

Two recent incidents indicate the US is no longer characterizing Russia as a cyber security threat.

Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the state department, said in a speech last week before a United Nations working group on cyber security that the US was concerned by threats perpetrated by some states but only named China and Iran, with no mention of Russia in her remarks. Franz also did not mention the Russia-based LockBit ransomware group, which the US has previously said is the most prolific ransomware group in the world and has been called out in UN forums in the past. The treasury last year said LockBit operates on a ransomeware-as-service model, in which the group licenses its ransomware software to criminals in exchange for a portion of the paid ransoms.

In contrast to Franz’s statement, representatives for US allies in the European Union and the UK focused their remarks on the threat posed by Moscow, with the UK pointing out that Russia was using offensive and malicious cyber attacks against Ukraine alongside its illegal invasion.

“It’s incomprehensible to give a speech about threats in cyberspace and not mention Russia and it’s delusional to think this will turn Russia and the FSB (the Russian security agency) into our friends,” said James Lewis, a veteran cyber expert formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “They hate the US and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The US policy change has also been established behind closed doors.

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.

The person said work that was being done on something “Russia-related” was in effect “nixed”.

“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries. With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cyber security personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this,” the person said.

The person added: “People are saying Russia is winning. Putin is on the inside now.”

The New York Times has separately reported that the Trump administration has also reassigned officials at Cisa who were focused on safeguarding elections from cyberattacks and other attempts to disrupt voting.

Another person who previously worked on US Joint Task Forces operating at elevated classification levels to track and combat Russian cyber threats said the development was “truly shocking”.

“There are thousands of US government employees and military working daily on the massive threat Russia poses as possibly the most significant nation state threat actor. Not to diminish the significance of China, Iran, or North Korea, but Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat,” the person said.

The person added:“There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure, and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.”

Cisa and the State Department did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

The change is not entirely surprising, given that the Trump administration has made it clear that it is seeking to make amends with Moscow. Earlier this week at the United Nations, the US voted with Russia against an EU-Ukrainian resolution that condemned Russia on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The US has long assessed Russia, China and Iran as leaders in cyberthreats. To see a US representative in an international setting erase Russia’s role altogether comes as a bit of a shock – though consistent with the sudden US alignment with Russia and its satellites on the global stage,” said Scott Horton, an American lawyer who previously worked in Moscow and advised Russian human rights advocates.

The US has long warned that Russia posed a cyber threat to US infrastructure, including in the annual threat assessment published by US intelligence agencies last year. The report stated that Russia posed an “enduring global cyber threat” even as it has prioritized cyber operations against Ukraine. Moscow, the report concluded, “views cyber disruptions as a foreign policy lever to shape other countries’ decisions and continuously refines and employs its espionage, influence and attack capabilities against a variety of targets”. Russia was able to target critical infrastructure, industrial control systems, in the US and in allied and partner countries.

Few lawmakers have previously been as outspoken on the issue as Marco Rubio when he was still a Florida senator. In 2020, as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Rubio – who now serves as Trump’s secretary of state – said the US would retaliate for a massive and ongoing cyberattack that had compromised companies and federal agencies, including the energy department’s National Nuclear Security Administration. At the time he said the attacks were “consistent with Russian cyber operations”.

But there was no sign of that kind of rebuke from Franz, who now reports to Rubio at the state department. The change in language at the recent UN speech was not only remarkable for omitting Russia and LockBit, said Valentin Weber, senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, but also for leaving out any mention of allies and partners.

“For a quarter century Putin’s Russia pushed an autocratic agenda in the UN cybersecurity negotiations, while engaging in nonstop cyberattacks and information operations around the world, and the US and other democracies pushed back,” said William Drake, director of international studies at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information in Columbia Business School. “But now the Trump administration has abandoned the liberal international order… [and] the US is no longer a global power trying to maintain an open and rules-based international system, it’s just a great power with narrower self-interests that happen to be impacted by China’s cyberattacks.”

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The Israeli military has presented the UN and aid organisations with a plan for running Gaza that involves Israel having tighter control than it did before the war, according to humanitarian officials, casting doubt on whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has any intention of carrying out a military withdrawal.

At meetings with UN representatives on Wednesday and with officials from other agencies on Thursday, Cogat, the army unit given the task of delivering aid to the occupied territories, outlined a scheme of distributing supplies through tightly managed logistics hubs to vetted Palestinian recipients.

The blueprint appears to be a version of a scheme tried more than a year ago in Gaza, known as “humanitarian bubbles”, involving aid distributions from small, highly controlled areas that would expand over time. But the experiment was abandoned after a few trials in northern Gaza.

It has been revived by Cogat at a time when Israel is negotiating the potential start of a second phase of the January ceasefire agreement, which is supposed to include the full withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from the Gaza Strip. The Cogat plan instead involves a tightening of Israel’s grip on day-to-day life in the Palestinian territory.

According to aid sources briefed on the plan, the “humanitarian hubs” themselves could be secured by private security contractors, but they would be located in areas “under full IDF control”.

The only entrance to Gaza through which aid would be allowed under the plan would be the Kerem Shalom crossing, controlled by Israel. The Rafah crossing, between Egypt and Gaza, would be permanently closed.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) allowed to operate in Gaza would have to be registered in Israel, and all staff working for them or for UN agencies would have to be vetted.

As aid would only be allowed through an Israeli crossing and not through Rafah, it would make operating in Gaza all but impossible for the UN relief agency for Palestinian Refugees (Unrwa) – by far the biggest aid organisation in Gaza – which has been banned by Israel.

Aid officials familiar with the Cogat briefing said the plan was presented as an established fact, with Israeli officials claiming it already had full US support and would therefore be hard for the UN to resist.

The scheme envisages a Gaza in which basic necessities are distributed to approved Palestinians at limited distribution points under tight Israeli control. It makes no mention of Donald Trump’s plan for the US to take ownership of the Gaza Strip and for the territory to be emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.

Cogat did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Its presentation of the scheme comes as Arab governments discuss their own plan for Gaza’s future. A meeting in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, of representatives from Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states on 21 February endorsed an Egyptian-designed $53bn reconstruction plan lasting three to five years, starting with the establishment of safe zones of tents and mobile homes for people to live in during reconstruction.

The proposal is due to be presented to an emergency summit of the Arab League on Tuesday in Cairo.

“The Cogat plan is meant to be a spoiler, an alternative to the Arab plan,” an aid worker in Jerusalem said.

In January 2024, the IDF carried out trials of “humanitarian bubbles” in three areas of northern Gaza. Selected Palestinians such as community elders were to administer the distribution of food and other basic supplies, but the plan never got off the ground. It was hard to find local volunteers prepared to work with the Israelis and Hamas killed some of the local people who were co-opted into the experiment.

“The bubble approach, which was rejected from the beginning of the war, has all kinds of serious implications since the Israelis will control each single supply coming in,” Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, said.

Shawa said it would be an extension of the restrictive aid regime currently overseen by the IDF. Under the ceasefire, the flow of humanitarian assistance entering Gaza has reverted to its prewar level of 400 to 600 trucks a day, but Shawa says Israel has not delivered the number of tents promised, when children have been freezing to death.

Unrwa reported that six infants died from exposure to cold on Monday and Tuesday this week in the Gaza Strip.

Shawa said the IDF was also preventing water tankers from entering, as well as notebooks and crayons intended for the improvised school classes being taught under canvas, on the grounds that such materials were “dual use”.

“They want to control the ABC of the lives of Palestinians,” he said.

Pope Francis has suffered an “isolated breathing crisis” which caused him to vomit, provoking a “sudden worsening” of his respiratory condition, the Vatican said.

The episode happened on Friday afternoon after the pontiff, 88, spent the morning alternating “respiratory training” with prayer in the chapel at Rome’s Gemelli hospital, where he has been battling pneumonia for two weeks.

The Vatican said in its evening update that the pope inhaled the vomit, leading to the “sudden worsening” of his respiratory condition.

He was then administered “non-invasive mechanical ventilation” to help him to breathe, which had “a good response”, the Vatican added.

Francis remained “alert and well-oriented” and is continuing his treatments. His doctors’ prognosis remains guarded.

A Vatican official said the breathing crisis on Friday did not last for long and that his doctors were expected to need 24-48 hours to assess how the event would affect his clinical condition.

The episode came after three days in which the pontiff’s health had shown “slight” improvements, meaning his situation was no longer considered to be critical.

On Wednesday, a CT scan of the pontiff’s chest “showed a normal evolution” of the inflammation in his lungs, while the “mild kidney insufficiency”, which was diagnosed on Sunday, had resolved.

It is unclear how long he will remain in hospital. The Vatican said earlier on Friday that Francis would not be leading the church service on 5 March to mark the beginning of Lent.

Francis was admitted to hospital on 14 February and was subsequently diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection and pneumonia in both lungs.

He is prone to lung infections because he developed pleurisy as a young adult and had part of one lung removed while he was training to be a priest in his native Argentina.

Nightly prayer vigils for the pope’s health are continuing to take place at St Peter’s Basilica as well as in towns and cities across Italy and abroad.

Vigils have also been held outside the Gemelli, which has long been the preferred hospital for pontiffs.

The pope has suffered from ill health in recent years. He was admitted to hospital in March 2023 for what was eventually diagnosed as pneumonia. He also underwent a colon operation in June 2021. The pontiff has often been seen using a wheelchair or a walking stick as a result of sciatic nerve pain and a knee problem.

Before his hospital admission, the pope maintained an intense schedule, especially with events related to the Catholic jubilee year.

Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, has quit her post over Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the international aid budget by almost half to pay for an increase in defence spending, warning it could enable Russia and China to further their global influence.

The senior Labour MP, who attended cabinet, predicted that the UK pulling back from development would bolster Moscow, which has already been aggressively increasing its presence worldwide, as well as encourage Beijing’s attempts to rewrite global rules.

Her departure, just hours after Starmer returned from a widely lauded trip to Washington for crucial talks with Donald Trump on Ukraine, came as a blow to the prime minister as concerns grew that the aid cut could damage the UK’s national security interests.

In a further setback to Starmer’s commitment to maintain development spending in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, Dodds predicted the government would find it impossible with the diminished budget, which will fall by about £6bn by 2027.

She said she firmly believed, however, that Starmer was right to increase defence spending, because the postwar consensus had “come crashing down” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

She recognised there were “not easy paths” to boosting defence spending, saying she had been prepared for some cuts to the aid budget to help pay for the plan to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 – and an ambition to hit 3% in the next parliament.

But the former shadow chancellor said she believed Starmer’s 3% ambition “may only be the start”, given the tumultuous global picture, and urged the government to look at ways of raising the money other than through cutting departmental budgets, including looking again at borrowing rules and taxation.

There is understood to be a growing sense in the cabinet that the government should not let adherence to the fiscal rules scupper its wider agenda, with further painful departmental cuts on the cards in June as Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, attempts to balance the books.

Starmer replied with his own letter several hours after Dodds announced her resignation, in which he praised the departing minister but defended his decision to cut the aid budget.

Jenny Chapman has been appointed the new minister for international development, Downing Street said.

Cabinet ministers are among those who voiced concern over plans to cut aid spending by 46%, from 0.56% of gross national income to 0.3%, after Trump’s own drastic cuts to the US aid budget. In a cabinet meeting, several spoke of the risk of unintended consequences.

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, said earlier this month that the US’s plan to cut aid funding could be a “big strategic mistake” that would allow China to step into the gap and extend its global influence. Starmer has been accused of pandering to the US president.

Dodds, the MP for Oxford East, said she was told about the decision by Starmer only on Monday, but delayed resigning so as not to overshadow the prime minister’s trip to Washington to make the case to Trump for security guarantees for Ukraine.

Starmer made his surprise announcement in the Commons, telling MPs that Britain would “fight for peace in Europe” with a generational increase in defence spending.

The announcement, two days before the prime minister was due to meet Trump, raised immediate concerns that he was following the US’s lead and prompted fury from aid groups, who said it could cost lives in countries that relied on UK support.

Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army, said the decision to cut foreign aid was a “strategic mistake” that would ultimately add to the burden on Britain’s armed forces, and risked making the UK “weaker not stronger”.

Dodds, in her letter to the prime minister, wrote: “Undoubtedly the postwar global order has come crashing down. I believe that we must increase spending on defence as a result; and know that there are no easy paths to doing so.

“I stood ready to work with you to deliver that increased spending, knowing some might well have had to come from overseas development assistance [ODA]. I also expected we would collectively discuss our fiscal rules and approach to taxation, as other nations are doing.

“Even 3% may only be the start, and it will be impossible to raise the substantial resources needed just through tactical cuts to public spending. These are unprecedented times, when strategic decisions for the sake of our country’s security cannot be ducked.”

Dodds, who was also a minister for women, was sceptical about Starmer’s promise to maintain aid funding for Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, as well as for vaccination, climate and rules-based systems.

Officials have said that the portion of the development budget going on asylum-seeker accommodation – which stands at almost a third – would eventually be freed up for aid.

But Dodds wrote: “It will be impossible to maintain these priorities given the depth of the cut; the effect will be far greater than presented, even if assumptions made about reducing asylum costs hold true.”

She cautioned about the effect on Britain’s national security and global influence as hostile countries moved into the breach.

“The cut will also likely lead to a UK pullout from numerous African, Caribbean and western Balkan nations at a time when Russia has been aggressively increasing its global presence,” she said. “All this while China is seeking to rewrite global rules, and when the climate crisis is the biggest security threat of them all.

“Ultimately, these cuts will remove food and healthcare from desperate people – deeply harming the UK’s reputation. I know you have been clear that you are not ideologically opposed to international development. But the reality is that this decision is already being portrayed as following in President Trump’s slipstream of cuts to USAid.”

In reply, Starmer wrote: “Overseas development is vitally important, and I am proud of what we have done. The UK will still be providing significant humanitarian and development support, and we will continue to protect vital programmes – including in the world’s worst conflict zones of Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan.

“The decision I have taken on ODA was a difficult and painful decision and not one I take lightly. We will do everything we can to return to a world where that is not the case and to rebuild a capability on development.

“However, protecting our national security must always be the first duty of any government and I will always act in the best interests of the British people.”

Sarah Champion, the Labour chair of the Commons international development committee, posted on X: “What else could she do? She knows these cuts are unworkable. Honourable as always, she’s done right by her department and right by the PM by not resigning before DC visit. Deep shame for development where she was respected.”

The Conservative former aid secretary Andrew Mitchell said Dodds had “done the right thing” by resigning, adding: “Labour’s disgraceful and cynical actions demean the Labour party’s reputation as they balance the books on the backs of the poorest people in the world. Shame on them and kudos to a politician of decency and principle.”

Romilly Greenhill, the chief executive of Bond, the umbrella organisation for aid charities, said: “This will be a huge loss. It is clear from the devastating UK aid cuts announced this week, which must be reversed, that the government is trying to step back from its development ambitions.”

Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, has quit her post over Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the international aid budget by almost half to pay for an increase in defence spending, warning it could enable Russia and China to further their global influence.

The senior Labour MP, who attended cabinet, predicted that the UK pulling back from development would bolster Moscow, which has already been aggressively increasing its presence worldwide, as well as encourage Beijing’s attempts to rewrite global rules.

Her departure, just hours after Starmer returned from a widely lauded trip to Washington for crucial talks with Donald Trump on Ukraine, came as a blow to the prime minister as concerns grew that the aid cut could damage the UK’s national security interests.

In a further setback to Starmer’s commitment to maintain development spending in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, Dodds predicted the government would find it impossible with the diminished budget, which will fall by about £6bn by 2027.

She said she firmly believed, however, that Starmer was right to increase defence spending, because the postwar consensus had “come crashing down” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

She recognised there were “not easy paths” to boosting defence spending, saying she had been prepared for some cuts to the aid budget to help pay for the plan to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 – and an ambition to hit 3% in the next parliament.

But the former shadow chancellor said she believed Starmer’s 3% ambition “may only be the start”, given the tumultuous global picture, and urged the government to look at ways of raising the money other than through cutting departmental budgets, including looking again at borrowing rules and taxation.

There is understood to be a growing sense in the cabinet that the government should not let adherence to the fiscal rules scupper its wider agenda, with further painful departmental cuts on the cards in June as Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, attempts to balance the books.

Starmer replied with his own letter several hours after Dodds announced her resignation, in which he praised the departing minister but defended his decision to cut the aid budget.

Jenny Chapman has been appointed the new minister for international development, Downing Street said.

Cabinet ministers are among those who voiced concern over plans to cut aid spending by 46%, from 0.56% of gross national income to 0.3%, after Trump’s own drastic cuts to the US aid budget. In a cabinet meeting, several spoke of the risk of unintended consequences.

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, said earlier this month that the US’s plan to cut aid funding could be a “big strategic mistake” that would allow China to step into the gap and extend its global influence. Starmer has been accused of pandering to the US president.

Dodds, the MP for Oxford East, said she was told about the decision by Starmer only on Monday, but delayed resigning so as not to overshadow the prime minister’s trip to Washington to make the case to Trump for security guarantees for Ukraine.

Starmer made his surprise announcement in the Commons, telling MPs that Britain would “fight for peace in Europe” with a generational increase in defence spending.

The announcement, two days before the prime minister was due to meet Trump, raised immediate concerns that he was following the US’s lead and prompted fury from aid groups, who said it could cost lives in countries that relied on UK support.

Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army, said the decision to cut foreign aid was a “strategic mistake” that would ultimately add to the burden on Britain’s armed forces, and risked making the UK “weaker not stronger”.

Dodds, in her letter to the prime minister, wrote: “Undoubtedly the postwar global order has come crashing down. I believe that we must increase spending on defence as a result; and know that there are no easy paths to doing so.

“I stood ready to work with you to deliver that increased spending, knowing some might well have had to come from overseas development assistance [ODA]. I also expected we would collectively discuss our fiscal rules and approach to taxation, as other nations are doing.

“Even 3% may only be the start, and it will be impossible to raise the substantial resources needed just through tactical cuts to public spending. These are unprecedented times, when strategic decisions for the sake of our country’s security cannot be ducked.”

Dodds, who was also a minister for women, was sceptical about Starmer’s promise to maintain aid funding for Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, as well as for vaccination, climate and rules-based systems.

Officials have said that the portion of the development budget going on asylum-seeker accommodation – which stands at almost a third – would eventually be freed up for aid.

But Dodds wrote: “It will be impossible to maintain these priorities given the depth of the cut; the effect will be far greater than presented, even if assumptions made about reducing asylum costs hold true.”

She cautioned about the effect on Britain’s national security and global influence as hostile countries moved into the breach.

“The cut will also likely lead to a UK pullout from numerous African, Caribbean and western Balkan nations at a time when Russia has been aggressively increasing its global presence,” she said. “All this while China is seeking to rewrite global rules, and when the climate crisis is the biggest security threat of them all.

“Ultimately, these cuts will remove food and healthcare from desperate people – deeply harming the UK’s reputation. I know you have been clear that you are not ideologically opposed to international development. But the reality is that this decision is already being portrayed as following in President Trump’s slipstream of cuts to USAid.”

In reply, Starmer wrote: “Overseas development is vitally important, and I am proud of what we have done. The UK will still be providing significant humanitarian and development support, and we will continue to protect vital programmes – including in the world’s worst conflict zones of Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan.

“The decision I have taken on ODA was a difficult and painful decision and not one I take lightly. We will do everything we can to return to a world where that is not the case and to rebuild a capability on development.

“However, protecting our national security must always be the first duty of any government and I will always act in the best interests of the British people.”

Sarah Champion, the Labour chair of the Commons international development committee, posted on X: “What else could she do? She knows these cuts are unworkable. Honourable as always, she’s done right by her department and right by the PM by not resigning before DC visit. Deep shame for development where she was respected.”

The Conservative former aid secretary Andrew Mitchell said Dodds had “done the right thing” by resigning, adding: “Labour’s disgraceful and cynical actions demean the Labour party’s reputation as they balance the books on the backs of the poorest people in the world. Shame on them and kudos to a politician of decency and principle.”

Romilly Greenhill, the chief executive of Bond, the umbrella organisation for aid charities, said: “This will be a huge loss. It is clear from the devastating UK aid cuts announced this week, which must be reversed, that the government is trying to step back from its development ambitions.”

After years as one of US authorities’ most wanted men, the Mexican drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero was brought into a New York courtroom on Friday to answer charges that include orchestrating the 1985 killing of a US federal agent.

Caro Quintero pleaded not guilty to running a continuing criminal enterprise. Separately, so did Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of another cartel. Carrillo is accused of arranging kidnappings and killings in Mexico but not accused of involvement in the death of the DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.

Caro Quintero, Carrillo Fuentes and 27 other Mexican prisoners were sent on Thursday to eight US cities, a move that came as Mexico sought to stave off the Donald Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports next week.

For Camarena’s family, the arraignments marked a long-awaited moment.

“For 14,631 days, we held on to hope – hope that this moment would come. Hope that we would live to see accountability. And now, that hope has finally turned into reality,” the family said in a statement thanking Trump and everyone who has worked on the case over the years.

The White House, in a statement Friday ahead of the arraignments, called Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world”.

In exchange for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, illegal immigration and fentanyl production.

But members of Mexico’s security cabinet on Friday framed the transfer of the 29 prisoners as a national security decision.

“It is not a commitment to the United States. It is a commitment to ourselves,” said Mexican attorney general Alejandro Gertz Manero. “The problem of drug trafficking and organized crime has been a true tragedy for our country.”

Mexican security secretary Omar García Harfuch said the people sent into US custody were “generators of violence” in Mexico and represented a security threat to both countries.

Caro Quintero had long been one of America’s top Mexican targets for extradition.

He was one of the founders of a Guadalajara-based cartel and one of the primary suppliers of heroin, cocaine and marijuana to the US in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Caro Quintero had Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1985 because he blamed the agent for a raid on a huge marijuana plantation the year prior, authorities said. Camarena’s killing marked a low point in US-Mexico relations and was dramatized in the popular Netflix series Narcos: Mexico.

Caro Quintero had been 28 years into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court overturned his verdict in 2013.

After his release, he returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora until he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022, authorities said.

Caro Quintero told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2018 that he “never went back to drugs”.

“Whoever’s saying it is a liar!” he said, according to the newspaper. “I’m not working any more, let’s be clear about that! I was a drug trafficker 23 years ago, and now I’m not, and I won’t ever be again.”

The US, which had added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 2018 with a $20m reward, sought his extradition immediately after his 2022 arrest. It happened days after the Mexican and US presidents at the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden respectively, met at the White House.

But the request remained in limbo as López Obrador severely curtailed his country’s cooperation with the US to protest undercover American law enforcement operations targeting Mexican political and military officials.

Then, in January, a non-profit group representing the Camarena family sent a letter to the new Trump administration urging it to renew the extradition request.

Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of the drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies”, who died in a botched plastic surgery in 1997. Carrillo Fuentes, who was known as “The Viceroy”, continued his brother’s business of smuggling drugs over the border until his arrest in 2014.

He was sentenced in 2021 to 28 years in prison for organized crime, money laundering and weapons violations.

Among the others extradited are leading members of Mexican organized crime groups recently designated by the Republican administration as “foreign terrorist organizations”.

They include cartel leaders, security chiefs from both factions of the Sinaloa cartel, cartel finance operatives and a man wanted in connection with the killing of a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy in 2022.

The US Department of Education sent an email to employees department-wide on Friday offering up to $25,000 to voluntarily resign or retire, or take severance, whichever is less.

The email, obtained by the Guardian, states “this is a one-time offer in advance of a very significant Reduction In Force for the US Department of Education” and gives employees until the end of day Monday to accept.

According to a Department of Education employee, the email was sent, retracted, then sent back out to employees.

“This is beyond manipulative and misleading,” claimed the worker, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “Also, if you leave voluntarily, you are not eligible for unemployment.”

They noted their severance and unused leave compensation that they would receive through a reduction in force order would be several times more than the buyout offer. But with the buyout offer, they would only receive the lesser amount. They provided the Guardian a copy of their benefits, which notes their current severance amount and eligibility.

Another Department of Education employee confirmed this claim, adding “if you take it thinking you’ll get $25,000 but your severance is $15,000, you’ll get the $15,000”.

The agreement also includes a stipulation that the employee would have to pay back the buyout if they are employed or contracted with the federal government in the next five years, according to a copy of the voluntary separation incentive payment.

“Under a reduction in force, you have more rights to re-employment and unemployment,” the second employee noted.

The application also affirms “My decision is entirely voluntary. I have not been coerced.”

The Department of Education and White House were contacted for comment.

Reports surfaced earlier this month that the White House had been preparing an executive order to abolish the US Department of Education.

Dozens of employees at the Department of Education were placed on administrative leave in response to Donald Trump’s anti-DEI orders earlier this month. At least 39 probationary employees were also fired and $900m in research funding at the department was cancelled by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”.

Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, said she “wholeheartedly” agreed with Trump’s plan to dismantle the department, with her final Senate confirmation vote scheduled for Monday.

Skype will ring for the last time on 5 May as owner Microsoft retires the two-decade-old internet calling service that redefined how people connect across borders.

Shutting down Skype will help Microsoft focus on its homegrown Teams service by simplifying its communication offerings, the office software giant said on Friday.

Founded in 2003, Skype quickly disrupted the landline industry in the early 2000s with its audio and video calls, making the company a household name boasting hundreds of millions of users at its peak. But the platform has struggled to keep up with easier-to-use and more reliable rivals such as Zoom and Salesforce’s Slack in recent years, in part because Skype’s underlying technology grew less suited for the smartphone era.

When the pandemic and work from home fueled the need for online business calls, Microsoft batted for Teams by aggressively integrating it with other Office apps to tap corporate users, once a major base for Skype.

Online video communication was once the near exclusive purview of Skype before the likes of FaceTime, Zoom and Google Hangouts took over. Skype was an early example of a tech product that was so ubiquitous it was used as a verb. Users would “Skype” someone in much the same way they would Google something.

When Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5bn after outbidding Google and Facebook, its largest deal at the time, the service had about 150 million monthly users; by 2020, that number had fallen to roughly 23 million, despite a brief resurgence during the pandemic.

Over the years, Microsoft struggled to integrate Skype into its suite of tools and could not meet the moment when the company began seeing competition from Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s various communications app attempts. And when Microsoft launched its collaboration product Teams in 2017 that quickly took priority.

“We are honored to have been part of the journey,” Microsoft said on Friday. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications.”

To ease the transition from the platform, its users will be able to log into Teams for free on any supported device using their existing credentials, with chats and contacts migrating automatically.

For some, it may come as a surprise that Skype was still in operation given the company’s own years-long deprioritization of the platform. Launching successful communication tools has been a challenge for many of the big tech firms including Google. Now Skype will be laid to rest in the graveyard of communication tools alongside Duo and AOL Instant Messenger.

Microsoft declined to share the latest user figures for Skype and said there would be no job cuts due to the move. It added that Teams had about 320 million monthly active users.

Two Australian men have been charged during a global operation into a criminal group distributing artificial intelligence-generated child abuse images.

A 38-year-old NSW man and 31-year-old Queensland man have been arrested alongside a total of 25 linked to the investigation into child sexual exploitation.

A Danish national was arrested in November for allegedly producing AI-generated child abuse material and charging users to view it through an online subscription service.

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The Australian federal police launched an investigation into allegations two Australian men were subscribers of the site.

Police raids allegedly uncovered child abuse material on mobile phones and other electronic devices at each man’s home.

“Operation Cumberland” was one of the first cases involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material and was led by Danish police alongside Europol and law enforcement agencies from 19 countries.

Authorities are dealing with more AI-generated material and AFP Det Acting Supt Kurt Wesche said it was getting harder for police to work out if child abuse images were real or not.

“Although the children depicted in this material are not real, these criminal networks are still involved in the sexual exploitation of children,” he said.

“In Australia, it is a criminal offence to create, possess or share content that depicts the abuse of someone aged under 18; it is child abuse material irrespective of whether it is ‘real’ or not.”

A total of 273 suspects were identified via the worldwide probe and more arrests were expected.

New research has identified four types of romantic lover, including one that has sex up to 20 times a week.

The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, categorised lovers as mild romantic, moderate romantic, intense romantic, and libidinous romantic.

Lead author, Australian National University PhD candidate in biological anthropology Adam Bode, defined romantic love as “a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual” – and one “that arose some time during the recent evolutionary history of humans”.

“It occurs across the lifespan and is associated with distinctive cognitive, emotional, behavioural, social, genetic, neural, and endocrine activity in both sexes. Throughout much of the life course, it serves mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding functions.”

Bode said that definition was “not perfect” but was “the scientifically most useful and most precise”. He plans to update it to include the age of the onset of romantic love, to note that it “doesn’t have all its features until puberty”, and that it is associated with the early stages of a romantic relationship.

According to the study, the romantic love stage can be measured through changes in hormones and blood neurotransmitter levels and is thought to last up to two years, after which it transitions to “companionate love”.

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In some cases it persists longer.

Bode said this was “the first paper to empirically show that we don’t all love the same”.

“That seems pretty obvious, but science just hasn’t shown it before,” he said.

The researchers, including experts from the University of Canberra and the University of South Australia as well as ANU, used the Romantic Love Survey 2022 of 1,556 people, the world’s largest dataset of people in love.

This longitudinal study across 33 countries selected 809 people aged 18 to 25, who self-reported being in love. And among them, Bode’s team identified four major “clusters”.

• Mild: About one in five – 20.02% – fell into this cluster, characterised by “the lowest intensity, lowest obsessive thinking, lowest commitment, and lowest frequency of sex”. This group also had the lowest proportion of people who thought their partner was “definitely” in love with them – just 25.31% – and the lowest proportion having sex, at 82.72%.

• Moderate: About four in 10 – 40.91% – landed in this category, which Bode described as “fairly stock-standard” – or in the words of the journal article, “entirely unremarkable”. Those in this category were more likely to be male, and less likely to have children. This group had “relatively low intensity, relatively low obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and relatively moderate frequency of sex”.

• Intense: This category described about one in three – 29.42% – of survey respondents, who Bode described as “crazy in-love” types. They were characterised by “the highest intensity, highest obsessive thinking, highest commitment, and relatively high frequency of sex”. About six in 10 people in this group were female.

• Libidinous: About one in 10 – 9.64% – were libidinous romantic lovers, who had sex an average of 10 times a week and up to 20 times. They were characterised as “relatively high intensity, relatively high obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and exceptionally high frequency of sex”. This group were slightly more likely to be male, and had the highest proportion of people in a committed relationship but not living together.

The team’s research measured people’s romantic intensity, obsessive thinking, commitment and sexual frequency to come up with the categories. Bode noted other interesting associations, including that libidinous lovers were also more likely to want to smoke cigarettes, travel and spend more money.

The study measured the intensity of romantic love by the Passionate Love Scale (or PLS), a “robust measure of the cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics of romantic love” used cross-culturally, developed in 1986.

The research noted that obsessive thinking about a loved one has been recognised in theories about the understanding and mechanisms of romantic love. It cited previous research positing that obsessive thinking helps with bonding and faithfulness, that commitment plays a role in forming bonds, and that sex is a function of romantic love (the 2022 survey participants were told to define sex by “whatever they thought it meant”).

The authors of the new study suggested it might “be fruitful” to further explore variables of sex, gender and sexual orientation, as well as the impact on mood of romantic love, and its effect on relationships over time. They also recommended future research focus on cultural or ethnic variations in the expression of romantic love, as well as the role of gender inequality.

The study noted that the survey at its heart was limited to young, English speaking adults, many of them from Weird (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) countries.

“Romantic love is under-researched given its importance in family and romantic relationship formation, its influence on culture, and its proposed universality and we want to help world researchers understand it,” Bode said.

“These findings have implications for the evolution of romantic love.

“Humans may still be evolving in terms of how they express [it].”