--:-- Mark Garrison: Good morning. It's Monday, August 22nd. I'm Mark Garrison in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney may have lost her GOP primary in Wyoming last week. But she tells ABC News she's not done fighting Donald Trump and people who support his lies about the election he lost.
--:-- Liz Cheney: I'm going to be very focused on working to ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers. And I'm going to work against those people. I'm going to work to support their opponents. I think it matters that much.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Cheney is perhaps the most prominent Republican critic of Trump. She's the vice chairwoman of the January 6th committee and one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him. She told ABC she has no regrets and that parts of the GOP are, quote, very sick.
--:-- Liz Cheney: I feel sad about where my party is. I feel sad about the way that too many of my colleagues have responded to what I think is a great moral test and challenge of our time, a great moment to determine whether or not people are going to stand up on behalf of the democracy and on behalf of our country.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The Wall Street Journal reports that hours after Cheney lost her primary, she filed to transfer her campaign cash to a new political action committee. She had more than seven million dollars at the end of July so she might have a lot of money to go after Trump supporters.
--:-- Mark Garrison: ABC asked Cheney if she's considering running for president herself. She didn't say yes but she didn't say no either.
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--:-- Mark Garrison: This week, new rules cracking down on ghost guns take effect. These are firearms that are homemade and don't have serial numbers, which makes them hard for law enforcement to trace. Some are relatively cheap. All that is making them more and more popular with criminals.
--:-- Alon Stevens: They've just exploded among criminals who are trying to get firearms outside the purview of the government. Between 2016 and 2021, there's been a thousand percent increase in recoveries of ghost guns. That's about estimated about 45,000 ghost guns across the nation have been recovered at crime scenes. And about 700 of those have been linked to homicides and attempted homicides.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The new national regulations include background checks for buyers and serial numbers for ghost gun parts. But there's a lot they won't cover. The law, though, has no retroactive effect to potentially millions of unserialized ghost gun kits that have already been sold out there.
--:-- Alon Stevens: Ahead of the Wednesday deadline, there's been a selling frenzy. Some ghost gun dealers put countdown clocks on their websites, urging people to buy before the rules kick in. A lot of the websites have already sold out of products. They're really saying, however, that this is not the end, that there's a legal battle and they want to challenge this.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Federal agents tell The Trace that the new ghost gun rules should give them an edge in fighting shootings and trafficking. But considering how many of these untraceable weapons are already on the streets, gun safety advocates are watching to see how much these new rules can actually do.
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--:-- Mark Garrison: We're going to talk now about a sporting event where things are not quite what they seem. At first glance, you'd think it's a regular swim meet. Watch for the streamlined position. Good dolphin kick. All the usual stuff is there. Swim caps, lanes, starting blocks.
--:-- Mark Garrison: But there's something weird in the pool. Listen to the announcer. You hear that? The announcer said the swimmer let the mannequin slip behind him. He's referring to this big orange dummy. It simulates hauling a drowning person to safety. This isn't competitive swimming. It's competitive life-saving.
--:-- Emma Batchelary: The most interesting thing to me was that, I had all these ideas of emotionally and like mentally, what does it mean to prepare to do something that's competitive lifesaving? You're thinking about this very deep life and death thing of saving lives. Like, what does that look like as a competition?
--:-- Mark Garrison: Competitive lifesavers need strong swimming skills and expertise to save someone who's drowning. That element of danger and urgency makes it a pretty unusual sport.
--:-- Emma Batchelary: It just was very strange to come in and think of like, OK, saving lives, maybe people who have done serious work as lifeguards who have perhaps saved a life. And so that was just you know it was I not sure what I was expecting but it was really strange to see up close.
--:-- Mark Garrison: These athletes have a sense of mission that's very different from what you might imagine Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps thinking about when they suit up. Competitive lifesavers don't just want to win a race. They think of every competition as a step toward making the water more safe, even if it does look like a super weird swim meet.
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--:-- Mark Garrison: Fans waited a long time to watch House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel last night. But some had to wait a bit longer. Bloomberg reports on thousands of HBO Max outages happening around 9 p.m. Eastern when the first episode rolled out.
--:-- Mark Garrison: HBO said the outages were limited, but of course that didn't stop lots of fans from posting angry messages on social media. The stakes are high for HBO and its parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Recode has an article on what it could all mean for the future of streaming. One key point it makes, the limitless budgets that streaming services have thrown at some shows, now they have limits.
--:-- Mark Garrison: It's not to say companies won't keep making some big bets. According to Variety, House of the Dragon costs HBO nearly $20 million an episode. Back in season one, Game of Thrones episodes cost about $6 million each.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Turns out, even dragons aren't immune to inflation.
--:-- Mark Garrison: You can read all the stories we talked about today in the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to your narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
