A French court on Monday sentenced far-right leader Marine Le Pen to a five-year ban on running for office with immediate effect, throwing into doubt her bid to stand for president in 2027.

The judge also gave her a four-year prison term, which is to be served with an electronic tag, drawing immediate criticism from her party and other far-right leaders.

Including 56-year-old Le Pen, nine figures from her National Rally (RN) party were convicted over a scheme where they took advantage of European Parliament expenses to employ assistants who were actually working for the party.

Twelve assistants were also convicted of concealing a crime, with the court estimating the scheme was worth 2.9 million euros.

All the RN officials including Le Pen were banned from running for office, with the judge specifying that the sanction should come into force with immediate effect even if an appeal is lodged.

“The court took into consideration, in addition to the risk of reoffending, the major disturbance of public order if a person already convicted… was a candidate in the presidential election,” said presiding judge Benedicte de Perthuis.

Three-time presidential candidate Le Pen, who scents her best-ever chance of winning the French presidency in 2027, has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

She left the courtroom after her conviction and this sanction were announced, but before the judge announced rulings on a potential prison sentence and fine, an AFP correspondent said.

Le Pen said in a piece for the La Tribune Dimanche newspaper published on Sunday that the verdict gives the “judges the right of life or death over our movement”.

Young pretender

With her RN emerging as the single largest party in parliament after the 2024 legislative elections, Le Pen believed she has the momentum to finally take the Elysee in 2027 on the back of public concern over immigration and the cost of living.

Polls currently predict that she would easily top the first round of voting and make the second round two-candidate run-off.

The reaction from Moscow to the verdict was swift. “More and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine”), wrote Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of her main allies in the EU, on X in support.

Waiting in the wings is her protege and RN party leader Jordan Bardella, just 29, who is not under investigation in the case.

Bardella, reacting to the verdict, said French democracy was “executed” with the “unjust” verdict.

In a documentary broadcast by BFMTV late on Sunday, Le Pen for the first time explicitly gave her blessing to Bardella becoming president. “Of course he has the capacity to become president of the republic,” she said.

But there are doubts even within the party over the so-called “Plan B” and whether he has the experience for a presidential campaign.

‘Very upset’

Le Pen took over as head of the then-National Front (FN) in 2011 but rapidly took steps towards making the party an electoral force and shaking off the controversial legacy of its co-founder and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died earlier this year and who was often accused of making racist and anti-Semitic comments.

She renamed it the National Rally and embarked on a policy known as “dediabolisation” (de-demonisation) with the stated aim of making it acceptable to a wider range of voters.

Prosecutors accused the party of easing pressure on its own finances by using all of the 21,000-euro monthly allowance to which MEPs were entitled to pay “fictitious” parliamentary assistants, who actually worked for the party in France.

And prosecutors argue that its “organised” nature was “strengthened” when Marine Le Pen took over as party leader in 2011.

Given her current popularity, even some opponents have expressed discomfort over the prospect of Le Pen not making it to the starting line of an election.

“There are a very significant number of our fellow French citizens who identify with Marine Le Pen’s words and her struggle, and personally I would be very upset, to put it mildly, if she were unable to run to represent them,” France’s former EU commissioner Thierry Breton told French television at the weekend.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• President Trump is set to announce new tariffs on April 2, potentially escalating trade tensions with key allies and further impacting market volatility. Broad-based sanctions on “all countries” are now on the table. Analysts predict sector-wide tariffs averaging 15% across major U.S. trading partners, with potential recessionary and inflationary consequences.

‘Liberation Day’ is upon us. On Wednesday, April 2, the Trump administration is expected to make a raft of new tariff announcements, potentially escalating growing trade tensions with some of America’s closest allies.

Already, President Trump has caused market volatility by imposing tariffs on neighboring nations Canada and Mexico and two 10% tariffs on China. Hikes have also been placed on all autos and steel and aluminum products.

But he’s not done yet: This week, the Oval Office warned that further sanctions will begin on “all countries” rather than a specific list.

Markets are, perhaps unsurprisingly, volatile ahead of the announcement, which could escalate a trade war. At the time of writing the S&P500 is down 2.4% over the past five days, while the Dow Jones is also down 1.4% over the same period.

Much of this selloff happened over the weekend, when President Trump made his threat on “all” nations as well as stoking geopolitical tensions with criticism of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Ahead of this week’s announcement, here’s a roundup of President Trump’s policy threats and Wall Street reaction.

The EU

While President Trump has previously said he likes the “nice little European countries” that make up the EU, he has also erroneously claimed the trade bloc was set up with the purpose of destroying the U.S.

In October, President Trump highlighted America’s trade deficit with the EU regarding autos—an issue already addressed by his vehicle tax—and the “farm products” that he said the EU doesn’t accept from the States.

They will have to pay a “big price,” Trump said at the time.

This threat has been heightened even within the last week, with President Trump saying that if the EU and Canada began working on an undisclosed deal to benefit themselves while hurting American interests, they will face sanctions “far larger than currently planned.”

As such, the EU—America’s second-largest import partner—could represent the largest shift in trade policy announced on April 2.

Previously, a Deutsche Bank survey of 400 analysts found that the medium-term expectation for EU tariffs would settle at around 18%, though this could be after a period of negotiation with hikes that initially started higher.

“We expect the administration to use a broader set of metrics to come up with country-specific tariff numbers, including the magnitude of trade imbalances, tariff differentials, VAT, digital service taxes and non-tariff barriers,” UBS economist Arend Kapteyn wrote in a note seen by Fortune this morning.

“Given that the time needed to analyze all this properly is not consistent with the April 1 deadline, this week is likely just the starting point of negotiations,” Kapteyn continued.

UBS’s base case is a 15% tariff on America’s 15 largest trade partners.

China

Despite a 60% tariff on China being the major talking point of President Trump’s campaign, so far, Bejing has only faced two hikes of 10% apiece.

Of course, this has been framed as a sanction against the flow of deadly drugs—such as fentanyl—coming into the U.S. from China. However, President Trump’s bid to rebalance trade with China could result in further sanctions this week.

“We had penciled in 60% tariffs for China because that was what Trump campaigned on, but there is clearly scope for tariffs to be lower,” Kapteyn added.

Having announced its own reciprocal tariffs, China has fared remarkably well despite the growing tensions with the U.S.

Bank of America economists Helen Qiao and Anna Zhou identified a number of factors for the boost in market sentiment. In a note seen by Fortune, the pair wrote: “China still managed to post a 2.3% yoy increase in exports in Jan-Feb … But even before the boost from macro data strength … investor sentiment had already recovered.

“A confluence of factors are at play, including: 1) a technology breakthrough (i.e. the introduction of DeepSeek-R1 and the rise of humanoid robots); 2) the unprecedented success of Chinese animation movie Ne Zha 2; and 3) the symposium between President Xi and tech leaders on February 17 that provided a measure of reassurance around incentive improvement.”

Russia

President Trump has also threatened further economic sanctions against Russia if the U.S.-brokered ceasefire talks between Putin’s nation and Ukraine do not go ahead.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” President Trump told NBC News on Sunday.

He doubled down: “That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”

A universal tariff?

Thus far, Trump has targeted specific countries with their own tariff levels rather than announcing a blanket hike for all imports into the U.S.

A so-called universal tariff has been highlighted as potentially recessionary and inflationary by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, but it is looking increasingly likely with Trump’s talk of an “all countries” policy.

Over the weekend, Goldman Sachs upped its tariff assumptions, per a note from economists Ronnie Walker, Alec Phillips, and David Mericle.

“We expect President Trump to announce reciprocal tariffs that average 15% across all U.S. trading partners on April 2, although we expect product and country exclusions to ultimately whittle the addition to the average U.S. tariff rate down to 9pp,” the note seen by Fortune reads.

The trio also increased their core PCE inflation forecast by 0.5pp to 3.5% year over year and shifted their recession expectation from 20% to 35%.

In late January, Thierry Wizman, global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie, suggested that sector-level universal tariffs are likelier than threats against allied nations because “permanent sector-level universal tariffs are more consistent with WTO rules than country-specific tariffs, and so are likelier to withstand legal challenge.”

He added in the note seen by Fortune: “To Trump, universal tariffs also serve the public-policy imperative of raising revenue for the U.S. government, thus perhaps justifying corporate tax rates to be cut, an important agenda item for the administration.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Providing ubiquitous desktop software for decades, Microsoft has come in for jibes, mockery and even loathing even as it has helped millions of people get things done.

Every design decision is felt around the world for better or worse — often staying with people for years as a fond memory or a meme.

Here are a few of the ways Microsoft has marked computing culture:

Blue Screen of Death

A fixture since the very first versions of Windows — if mercifully much rarer these days — the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD, is displayed when Microsoft’s operating system encounters a fatal error in a programme, or the application becomes unresponsive.

It has most commonly been a full blue screen with white text — originally composed by Steve Ballmer, who later went on to head the company — warning of the problem.

Some versions of the screen include error codes to help power users figure out what has gone wrong.

More recent editions of Windows have added a sad-face smiley in an apparent bid to sympathise.

While it has often offered the option to continue working by closing the programme or restarting the computer, many users have found the only way to escape it is by manually turning the machine off and on again.

Blissful background

In a breath of fresh air from previous versions of Windows, users booting up the 2001 “XP” edition were presented with a vision of lush, sun-dappled hills under a vivid blue sky.

For many who grew up using computers in the 1990s and 2000s, the idyllic desktop background now recalls a simpler time of after-school gaming or using still-novel online chat programmes to talk with friends.

Wine industry photographer Chuck O’Rear took what has been called “the world’s most-viewed picture” in 1996, after driving by a spot in California’s Sonoma County where vines had been torn up to fight the phylloxera pest.

Dubbed “Bliss”, the background can still be spotted in the wild today on systems that have not been updated in a while, and has spawned endless memes, parodies and now AI imaginings of what the rest of the scene might look like.

Inviting melodies

2001 was far from the beginning of Microsoft’s attempts to craft a soothing environment for PC users.

The 1995 edition of the operating system played ethereal startup chimes as the machine laboured into life.

Windows 95’s enchanting startup sound was crafted by electronic music legend Brian Eno, who told news site SFGate in 1996 that the piece was like “a tiny little jewel”.

Commissioned to make it “inspiring, universal, blah-bah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” Eno composed 84 clips before selecting the best — which was twice as long as the original three-and-a-quarter-second brief.

‘Helpful’ Clippy

Long before ChatGPT was helping to write essays or generate emails, Microsoft tried to back up users of its Office productivity suite with smart software.

From the late 1990s, an “Office Assistant” interactive animated character would pop up to offer help with the task it believed was at hand.

The best-remembered is chirpy paperclip “Clippy”, whose often mistaken assumption that Word users needed help writing letters spawned a million memes.

Assistant emerged from research suggesting that users experienced interactions with a computer like working with human colleagues.

It was a “truly tragic misunderstanding” of the study, interaction designer Alan Cooper later said.

“If people are going to react to computers as though they’re humans, the one thing you don’t have to do is anthropomorphise them,” he told broadcaster G4TV.

Nevertheless, nostalgics can find Clippy as the face of a ChatGPT-powered assistant for Windows 11 built by developers FireCube.

Secret flight simulator

Microsoft produces a highly detailed and well-loved series of games simply called “Flight Simulator” with recreations of real locations and aircraft.

Office workers without a joystick or high-end graphics card, though, could escape into a bizarre neon-tinged hilly landscape that they could fly around using only the mouse via a series of hidden inputs in Excel 97.

The scene, which also included the credits for the spreadsheet programme, is just one of dozens of hidden “Easter eggs” scattered through the company’s software over the decades.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com