Briefly

UNITED STATES

Musk threatens lawsuit against Twitter rival

Twitter threatened to sue Meta just hours after the Instagram parent company launched Threads, an app it hopes will beat out the struggling site owned by Elon Musk. Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro on Thursday accused the company of "unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property". The letter accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information". In a post referencing Twitter's potential legal action against Meta, Musk noted that "competition is fine, cheating is not".

Trump ally removed from Freedom caucus

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch ally of former president Donald Trump, has been voted out of the House Freedom Caucus group after clashing with a fellow lawmaker, a caucus member said. The move to expel the firebrand Greene from the roughly three-dozen-strong hard-line group came weeks after she engaged in a heated clash on the House of Representatives floor with fellow Representative Lauren Boebert over the latter's plan to try to force a vote to impeach Democratic President Joe Biden.

IRAN

Tanker with 'smuggled fuel' seized in Gulf

Iran's Revolutionary Guards have seized a tanker holding 900 metric tons of "smuggled fuel" and 12 crew members based on a court order, a report by the semiofficial Fars News Agency said on Friday. No further detail about the ship has been given. British maritime security company Ambrey said on Thursday it was aware of an attempted seizure by Iranian forces of a small Tanzanian-flagged tanker, northeast of the Saudi Arabian port city of Dammam.

Agencies Via Xinhua