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Elon Musk has pledged to appeal against a court order in Australia to scrub footage of a violent attack in Sydney from his X social media platform, accusing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government of censorship. 

The billionaire Tesla chief executive has been embroiled in a war of words with Australian politicians over their demands to remove videos of an attack last week on an Assyrian church in Sydney from the X platform.

At least four people, including the church’s bishop, were injured in the attack, which police have called a “terrorist incident” of “religious motivated extremism”.

An Australian federal court late on Monday granted an interim injunction sought by the country’s eSafety commissioner ordering X to hide all videos of the incident within 24 hours.

The court will reconvene on Wednesday, when X will argue against what it called an “unlawful and dangerous approach” to online content.

“Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?,” Musk wrote on X after the injunction was granted, noting that the videos had already been removed for users in Australia. 

Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, accused Musk of acting as if he was “above the Australian law” and “common decency”.

“This billionaire is prepared to go to court fighting for the right to sow division and to show violent videos which are very distressing,” Albanese told Sky News. “I won’t cop it and Australians won’t cop it either.”

“Under the law today there are legal prohibitions which limit free speech,” Stephen Jones, assistant treasurer who is involved in tech regulation, told Australian broadcaster ABC. “Yes, we want free speech, but it comes with responsibilities.”

The dispute is the latest between large technology companies and the Australian government, which has been pursuing stronger regulation of online platforms, digital payments and social media. Canberra has threatened action against Facebook and Instagram owner Meta after it pulled out of a deal to pay local publishers for news.

The eSafety commissioner also lodged a removal notice with Meta over the Sydney stabbing attack and said it was “satisfied with” the company’s compliance after it “quickly removed the material”.

Australia established the eSafety commissioner in 2015 as the world’s first dedicated government agency to keep citizens safe online. The body, led by Julie Inman Grant who previously worked at Twitter and Microsoft, has enforcement powers to stop the spread of harmful content online, including the right to levy heavy fines on companies failing to comply with its orders.

The commissioner imposed a A$610,500 (US$394,000) fine against X last year for failing to disclose efforts to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse content, a penalty the company failed to pay.

The commissioner can levy fines of up to A$782,500 per contravention of a removal notice.

The case against X follows two unrelated violent attacks in Sydney this month, one of which resulted in six deaths as well as that of the assailant.

Gruesome footage of the attacks and misinformation about the identity and potential motives of the attacker in one incident were widely circulated online, leading to the wrong person being identified as the culprit.

X has also been the subject of an acrimonious public battle in Brazil, where the country’s attorney-general has called for social media sites to be regulated after Musk posted that a Supreme Court judge should “resign or be impeached” over an order to block certain accounts.

NEW YORK (AP) — A longtime tabloid publisher was expected Tuesday to tell jurors about his efforts to help Donald Trump stifle unflattering stories during the 2016 campaign as testimony resumes in the historic hush money trial of the former president.

David Pecker, the former National Enquirer publisher who prosecutors say worked with Trump and Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, on a so-called “catch-and-kill” strategy to buy up and then spike negative stories during the campaign, testified briefly Monday and will be back on the stand Tuesday in the Manhattan trial.

Also Tuesday, prosecutors are expected to tell a judge that Trump should be held in contempt over a series of posts on his Truth Social platform that they say violated an earlier gag order barring him from attacking witnesses in the case. Trump’s lawyers deny that he broke the order.

Pecker’s testimony followed opening statements in which prosecutors alleged that Trump had sought to illegally influence the 2016 race by preventing damaging stories about his personal life from becoming public, including by approving hush money payments to a porn actor who alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied that.

“This was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

A defense lawyer countered by attacking the integrity of the onetime Trump confidant who’s now the government’s star witness.

“President Trump is innocent. President Trump did not commit any crimes. The Manhattan district attorney’s office should not have brought this case,” attorney Todd Blanche said.

The opening statements offered the 12-person jury — and the voting public — radically divergent roadmaps for a case that will unfold against the backdrop of a closely contested White House race in which Trump is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but also a criminal defendant facing the prospect of a felony conviction and prison.

The case is the first criminal trial of a former American president and the first of four prosecutions of Trump to reach a jury. Befitting that history, prosecutors sought from the outset to elevate the gravity of the case, which they said was chiefly about election interference as reflected by the hush money payments to a porn actor who said she had a sexual encounter with Trump.

“The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again,” Colangelo said.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — a charge punishable by up to four years in prison — though it’s not clear if the judge would seek to put him behind bars. A conviction would not preclude Trump from becoming president again, but because it is a state case, he would not be able to pardon himself if found guilty. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

The case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg revisits a years-old chapter from Trump’s biography when his celebrity past collided with his political ambitions and, prosecutors say, he scrambled to stifle stories that he feared could torpedo his campaign.

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The opening statements served as an introduction to the colorful cast of characters that feature prominently in that tawdry saga, including Stormy Daniels, the porn actor who says she received the hush money; Cohen, the lawyer who prosecutors say paid her; and Pecker, who prosecutors say agreed to function as the campaign’s “eyes and ears.”

In his opening statement, Colangelo outlined a comprehensive effort by Trump and allies to prevent three separate stories — two from women alleging prior sexual encounters — from surfacing during the 2016 presidential campaign. That undertaking was especially urgent following the emergence late in the race of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump could be heard boasting about grabbing women sexually without their permission.

“The impact of that tape on the campaign was immediate and explosive,” Colangelo said.

Within days of the “Access Hollywood” tape becoming public, Colangelo told jurors that The National Enquirer alerted Cohen that Daniels was agitating to go public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.

“At Trump’s direction, Cohen negotiated a deal to buy Ms. Daniels’ story to prevent American voters from hearing that story before Election Day,” Colangelo told jurors.

But, the prosecutor noted, “Neither Trump nor the Trump Organization could just write a check to Cohen with a memo line that said ‘reimbursement for porn star payoff.’” So, he added, “they agreed to cook the books and make it look like the payment was actually income, payment for services rendered.”

Those alleged falsified records form the backbone of the 34-count indictment against Trump. Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels.

Blanche, the defense lawyer, sought to preemptively undermine the credibility of Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his role in the hush money scheme, as someone with an “obsession” with Trump who cannot be trusted. He said Trump had done nothing illegal when his company recorded the checks to Cohen as legal expenses and said it was not against the law for a candidate to try to influence an election.

Blanche challenged the notion that Trump agreed to the Daniels payout to safeguard his campaign, characterizing the transaction instead as an attempt to squelch a “sinister” effort to embarrass Trump and his loved ones.

“President Trump fought back, like he always does, and like he’s entitled to do, to protect his family, his reputation and his brand, and that is not a crime,” Blanche told jurors.

The efforts to suppress the stories are what’s known in the tabloid industry as “catch-and-kill” — catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else.

Besides the payment to Daniels, Colangelo also described arrangements to pay a former Playboy model $150,000 to suppress claims of a nearly yearlong affair with the married Trump. Colangelo said Trump “desperately did not want this information about Karen McDougal to become public because he was worried about its effect on the election.”

He said jurors would hear a recording Cohen made in September 2016 of himself briefing Trump on the plan to buy McDougal’s story. The recording was made public in July 2018. Colangelo told jurors they will hear Trump in his own voice saying: “What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?”

Pecker is relevant to the case because prosecutors say he met with Trump and Cohen at Trump Tower in August 2015 and agreed to help Trump’s campaign identify negative stories about him.

He described the tabloid’s use of “checkbook journalism,” a practice that entails paying a source for a story.

“I gave a number to the editors that they could not spend more than $10,000” on a story without getting his approval, he said.

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Tucker reported from Washington.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of former President Donald Trump at https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump.

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Joe Biden has told Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Washington will rapidly escalate military aid to Ukraine as soon as Congress gives final approval to a $95bn security funding package this week.

The US president made the pledge to Zelenskyy during a call on Monday, according to the White House, two days after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives led by Speaker Mike Johnson voted to approve the assistance after months of delay.

The bill includes $60bn in aid for Ukraine, as well as funding for Israel and the Indo-Pacific, and is expected to pass the Senate on Tuesday or Wednesday and enacted into law by Biden later in the week.

“President Biden shared that his administration will quickly provide significant new security assistance packages to meet Ukraine’s urgent battlefield and air defence needs as soon as the Senate passes the national security supplemental and he signs it into law,” said the White House account of the call with Zelenskyy.

The new security aid is expected to include long-range ATACMS missiles, as well as ammunition and other weapons systems, though White House and Pentagon officials have not offered precise details of what will be in the next package. Zelenskyy cheered the looming arrival of new military aid in his own account of the call with Biden.

Zelenskyy said: “The president has assured me that the package will be approved quickly and that it will be powerful, strengthening our air defence as well as long-range and artillery capabilities.”

Ukraine’s president also added: “Everything has been decided in the ATACMS negotiations for Ukraine. I am grateful to President Biden, Congress, and the entire United States.”

Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s comments highlight how Washington and Kyiv are trying to make up for lost time in the effort to boost Ukrainian military capabilities, after the delays in US funding caused setbacks on the battlefield against Russian forces.

Analysts at the Eurasia Group said the breakthrough on Capitol Hill would “substantially improve Ukrainian military prospects for stabilising the situation” in the eastern region of the country where they have suffered most.

“Low stocks of artillery and air defence ammunition have hurt the Ukrainian military’s ability to defend against Russian advances in Donetsk and drone and missile attacks against cities and power infrastructure nationwide,” they said.

Biden had been pleading for Congress to approve new funding for Ukraine since August of last year, including during an Oval Office address in October. He also opened his State of the Union address in March by speaking about the urgency of helping Kyiv defeat the Russian invasion.