What happened
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy. He was accused of accepting illegal funds from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 election victory. The 70-year-old, who denies all wrongdoing, was also fined €100,000 (£87,450) and barred from standing for office for five years.

Who said what
This is the first time a former French president will be put behind bars, marking a “seismic shift in France’s political and judicial landscape”, said France 24. The verdict is the “biggest stain to date” on Sarkozy, a figure still “revered by much of the French centre-right”, said The Times. “The verdict is likely to nourish a growing sentiment among French voters that the country’s democratic process is corrupt and untrustworthy.”

What next?
Sarkozy intends to launch an appeal, but presiding judge Nathalie Gavarino made an unusual ruling that he must face time in prison regardless of an appeal as the offences were of “exceptional gravity” and “likely to undermine citizens’ trust”.

What happened
Microsoft has revoked the Israeli military’s use of its cloud services after discovering that Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence wing, had stored vast volumes of intercepted Palestinian phone calls on its Azure platform. The move follows a Guardian investigation that revealed the agency’s mass surveillance project, capable of collecting and analysing millions of calls a day. The surveillance trove, reportedly held in a Dutch Microsoft datacentre, was quickly shifted out of the EU after the exposé.

Who said what
Microsoft president Brad Smith told staff that the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defense”.

The “extraordinary decision” by Microsoft to end the spy agency’s access to one of its technologies was made “amid pressure from employees and investors over its work for Israel’s military”, said Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham in The Guardian. Concerns have been mounting over “the role its technology has played in the almost two-year offensive in Gaza”.

What next?
Microsoft faces ongoing scrutiny from employees and campaigners demanding that it end all ties with the Israeli military.

Iraq is pushing for the dismantling of a notorious detention camp just across the border in north-eastern Syria where thousands of people – many with links to Isis – are struggling in brutal conditions.

Originally set up for Iraqi refugees fleeing war, the al-Hol camp is now a “reliquary of the defeat of Islamic State”, said New Lines magazine. Family members of Isis fighters are contained here, and Baghdad views it as a threat to national security.

Authorities are facing an “uphill struggle” to secure camps and prisons in this region of Syria, said the BBC, and Donald Trump’s aid cuts have made matters worse because the camp management teams rely “heavily” on non-governmental organisations to provide funding for food and guards.

The al-Hol camp is ostensibly run by the Kurdish authorities that control north-eastern Syria, but both Baghdad and Washington believe that much of the site is actually run by Islamic State, and used for indoctrination and recruitment.

Repatriation efforts have been made, but the hold of Isis ideology in the camp means that many of its inhabitants are afraid to leave and return home. Even when, in January, Kurdish authorities offered to allow all of the camp’s 16,000 Syrian nationals to go home, some chose to stay.

Iraq has had the “most aggressive repatriation strategy”, said Al Jazeera, with hundreds of Iraqis returned in “more than a dozen campaigns”. And, since the suspension of aid to the camp, Baghdad has “stepped up repatriations”.

The Kurdish authorities have “done their best to keep the camp functioning”, but the “sheer number of detainees” means that it’s “constantly overcrowded and lacking services”.