Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the new OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
DW
Leftist Alexis Tsipras has officially become the new leader of Greece. Despite his promises to end the "humiliation" of austerity, creditors say Greece has no choice but to settle its debts.
After his leftist Syriza party emerged as the clear winner with 36.3 percent of the vote, Alexis Tsipras was sworn in as Greece's new prime minister on Monday. With little pomp and no tie, the 40-year-old opted for a secular oath instead of a religious one, swearing to "always serve the interests of the Greek people."
Tsipras' victory marks the first time in four decades that neither party from the previous ruling coalition, New Democracy and the socialist PASOK, will be in power.
The election gave Syriza 149 seats of the 300 in parliament, just two shy of an absolute majority. In order to have a majority and form a government, the leftists made the interesting choice of creating a coalition with the Independent Greeks (ANEL), a small right-wing party that received 4 percent of the vote and 13 parliamentary seats.
Al Jazeera America
Greece’s leftist Syriza party has swept to power in a historic vote, promising to end years of painful austerity policies and putting the country on a collision course with the EU and international creditors.
In a result that exceeded analysts' expectations, Syriza and its 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras won 149 seats in the 300-seat Greek parliament, just two short of an absolute majority, with most of the votes counted on Sunday.
The party subsequently announced that it had struck a deal with the right-wing party Greek Independents to form an anti-austerity coalition. Despite representing opposites on the political spectrum, the two parties are expected to unite around their mutual hatred of the EU/International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailouts, which ushered in a series of painful austerity measures in Greece.
The former ruling New Democracy was routed in the election and reduced to around 76 seats.
Syriza says it does not want to leave the euro. But its opposition to the bailouts has led to fears of further instability within the eurozone.
The Guardian
Greek radicals sought on Monday to redraw the political map of Europe, forming a coalition government of left and right, united only by their desire to defy the European financial establishment and shrug off the constraints of austerity.
The coalition, led by 40-year-old Alexis Tsipras, was expected to dispatch its new finance minister to Brussels in the next few days to seek a fundamental renegotiation of Greece’s economic bailout package, vowing “the end of humiliation has come”. Tsipras and his Syriza party have promised to replace the austerity programmes imposed by its international creditors with policies aimed at helping the third of the population now living in poverty.
Finance ministers from the eurozone, meeting at EU headquarters, responded cautiously, acknowledging the new political realities in Greece and offering to negotiate, while ruling out the straight debt write-off Tsipras is demanding.
Reuters
Greek left-wing leader Alexis Tsipras was sworn in on Monday as the prime minister of a new hardline, anti-bailout government determined to face down international lenders and end nearly five years of tough economic measures.
The decisive victory by Tsipras' Syriza in Sunday's snap election reignites fears of new financial troubles in the country that set off the regional crisis in 2009. It is also the first time a member of the 19-nation euro zone will be led by parties rejecting German-backed austerity.
Tsipras' success is likely to empower Europe's fringe parties, including other anti-austerity movements across the region's economically-depressed south. The trouncing of the conservatives represents a defeat of Europe's middle-ground political guard, which has dallied on a growth-versus-budget discipline debate for five years while voters suffered.
BBC
Germany has warned the new Greek government that it must live up to its commitments to its creditors.
German government spokesman Steffan Seibert said it was important for Greece to "take measures so that the economic recovery continues".
His comments were echoed by the head of the eurozone finance ministers' group.
The far-left Syriza party, which won Sunday's poll, wants to scrap austerity measures demanded by international lenders, and renegotiate debt payments.
However Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup, said on Monday: "There is very little support for a write-off in Europe."
Speaking after a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels, he said members should "abide by the rules and commitments".
The Vane (via Gawker)
editor's note: Story by Dennis Mersereau aka weatherdude
After a short night of restless sleep, it appears that forecasters are still predicting the end of the world in the Northeast this evening. If you haven't panicked yet, you have several hours to do so before it's too late. Hug your children. Hoard booze. This is not a drill. Here's what you need to know to make it through the storm.
The Storm
Today: Snow will likely fall lightly throughout the Northeast this morning, building in the afternoon to accumulations of one to three inches by early evening and wind gusts as high as 30 miles per hour.
Tonight: The heaviest snowfall and strongest wind will likely begin tonight, accumulating a foot or more of snow in New York City at a rate of two to three inches an hour, with accompanying winds of up to 40 miles per hour.
Tomorrow: Heavy snowfall could continue all the way through Tuesday, accumulating another foot of snow in New York City and north. By Tuesday the Northeast might be buried in record snowfalls—as much as three feet in Boston, two feet in New York, and a foot in Philadelphia.
Reuters
Retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Monday appeared to lend his support to talks with the United States in his first comments about his longtime adversary since both countries agreed last month to restore diplomatic ties.
But Castro stopped short of an enthusiastic endorsement of the rapprochement, announced on Dec. 17 by his younger brother and Cuba's current president, Raul Castro, and U.S. President Barack Obama.
"I don't trust the policy of the United States nor have I had an exchange with them, but this does not mean ... a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts or the dangers of war," Fidel Castro, 88, said in a statement published on the website of Cuba's Communist Party newspaper Granma.
The United States and Cuba held historic high-level talks last week in Havana that are expected to lead to the re-establishment of diplomatic ties severed by Washington in 1961.
McClatchy
NEW DELHI — You know all about Brangelina. But here in India, there is “Mobama,” the budding friendship between U.S. President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Obama, who is the midst of a quick, three-day trip to India, and Modi appear be genuinely enjoying their time together. And the Indian media -- both newspapers and TV -- can’t seem to get enough of what they have dubbed Mobama. Local networks are even speculating whether the two leaders might take a selfie.
Al Jazeera America
This article is part one of a three-part series on China’s role in redeveloping southern Louisiana called China’s Louisiana Purchase.
ST. JAMES PARISH, La. — A prominent Chinese tycoon and politician — whose natural gas company's environmental and labor rights record recently started coming under fire in the Chinese press — is parking assets in a multibillion dollar methanol plant in a Louisiana town. And he appears to be doing it with help from the administration of likely GOP 2016 presidential ticket contender Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Not many locals in a predominantly black neighborhood of St. James Parish — halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — know that Wang Jinshu, the Communist Party Secretary for the northeastern Chinese village of Yuhuang and a former delegate to the National People’s Congress, is the man at the helm of a $1.85 billion methanol plant to be built in their town over the next two years with a $9.5 million incentive package from the state. The details of the project are unclear, residents say, largely because they were not told about the project until local officials, amid discussions with state officials and Chinese diplomats, decided to move forward with the project in July 2014.
“We never had a town hall meeting pretending to get our opinion prior to them doing it,” said Lawrence “Palo” Ambrose, a 74-year-old black Vietnam War veteran who works at a nearby church. “They didn’t make us part of the discussion.”
Al Jazeera America
WASHINGTON — If there was a single sign that the federal push for legislation to tighten gun restrictions has entered the do-not-resuscitate phase of its political life, it may have been President Barack Obama’s conspicuous omission of the topic in his State of the Union address last week.
Even in an address replete with agenda items that most acknowledge have no chance of getting past the Republican-controlled Congress, guns warranted only a vague reference to the president’s grieving with the families of Newtown.
Close watchers of the gun debate in the United States said that gun control’s moment — at least in Washington — has passed.
“President Obama spent all of his chips or made his strongest effort in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and with the failure of that effort when Congress failed to act — the Senate specifically — there was a sense that he had made his best effort and it wasn’t going to get anywhere,” said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York at Cortland specializing in the politics of gun control. “He’s made a political calculation that it makes more sense to spend his resources on other issues.”
The Guardian
Federal prosecutors in New York have unveiled criminal charges against three men for their alleged involvement in a spying scheme for Russia’s foreign intelligence service.
According to a criminal complaint, Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev and Victor Podobnyy conspired in the United States to gather intelligence on behalf of Russia and to recruit New York City residents to help.
The conspiracy ran from 2012 to the present, and during that time, Buryakov worked at a bank, Sporyshev was a Russian trade representative, and Podobnyy was an attaché to Russia’s mission to the United Nations, the complaint said.
Buryakov was arrested on Monday in the Bronx borough of New York City, according to the office of US attorney Preet Bharara for the southern district of New York.
Reuters
Oil prices were up for a second straight day on Monday ahead of the first major snowstorm expected this year in the U.S. Northeast.
Gains were limited, however, by the absence of any market disruption in top oil exporter Saudi Arabia after King Abdullah's death.
An 11-year high in the U.S. dollar =USD against other major currencies, and fears of fresh instability in the euro zone after a decisive Greek election victory by the left-wing Syriza party also capped oil's potential for rebound, traders said.
Light snow began falling on the U.S. East Coast on Monday morning, the first signs of a potentially historic blizzard that officials predicted could dump up to 3 feet of snow in the coming day, snarling transportation for millions of people.
NPR
This week, Congress returns with House leaders vowing to revisit the anti-abortion bill they pulled off the floor last week. The ban on abortions after 20 weeks was withdrawn when it appeared there weren't enough Republican votes to pass it.
Why did it need quite so many Republican votes? Because the GOP can no longer count on a contingent of Democrats to help out on abortion-related votes.
That was obvious last week, on Thursday, when the leaders brought out a backup bill relating to federal funding for abortion (which is already illegal). It was the 42nd anniversary of the abortion-permitting Roe v. Wade decision, and it looked bad not to mark the occasion.
The backup bill did pass, but it had to do so with only three Democrats supporting it out of the current 188 in the House. And that speaks volumes about how the House has changed since President Obama was inaugurated.
Vox
The billionaire Koch brothers' network of wealthy conservative donors plans to raise $889 million for the 2016 elections, the Washington Post's Matea Gold and Politico's Ken Vogel reported Monday.
The astonishing number is far more than an organized outside group network has ever raised during a political campaign cycle. Indeed, it's more than either the Democratic or Republican Party raised from 2011-2012, according to tallies by the Center for Responsive Politics placing the parties' fundraising at about $800 million each.
Furthermore, unlike donations to political parties, the details of the Koch network's fundraising can be kept secret. The network has many members beyond Charles and David Koch, and while some of their names have leaked to the press, the names of others — and the amounts they contribute — are unknown.
Reuters
The Justice Department has been secretly gathering and storing hundreds of millions of records about motorists in an effort to build a national database that tracks the movement of vehicles across the country, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The newspaper said the main aim of the license plate tracking program run by the Drug Enforcement Administration was to seize automobiles, money and other assets to fight drug trafficking, according to one government document.
But the use of the database had expanded to include hunting for vehicles linked to other possible crimes, including kidnapping, killings and rape suspects, the paper said, citing current and former officials and government documents.
While U.S. officials have said they track vehicles near the Mexican border to combat drug cartels, it had not been previously revealed the DEA had been working to expand the database "throughout the United States," the Journal said, citing an email.
DW
Huge crowds have gathered in Dresden for a free concert promoting tolerance and diversity. The event seeks to provide a counternarrative to the anti-Islamization PEGIDA group.
So many thousands of people gathered in front of Dresden's Frauenkirche, the city's famous baroque church, for a concert promoting tolerance and diversity on Monday evening that police and event organizers were forced to close the square and direct would-be concert goers to the nearby Schlossplatz.
The event - "Open and Colorful - Dresden for Everyone" - was set up to counter the idea of Dresden as the city of PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). The right-wing umbrella group which has been holding weekly marches since October 2014 to protest what they see as the increasing influence of Islam in Germany and lax immigration policies from the government.
DW
Kurdish fighters and a monitoring body have reported that "Islamic State" fighters have fled the Syrian-Turkish border city of Kobani. Apart from sporadic fighting on the outskirts, the area was said to be secure.
Extremist fighters with the self-styled "Islamic State" ("IS") were driven out of Kobani on Monday, activists and Kurdish officials said, in what would be a key coup for forces opposing the Sunni Islamist militia.
"The Islamic State is on the verge of defeat," said Kurdish official Idriss Nassan, speaking from Turkey near the Syrian border. "Their defenses have collapsed and its fighters have fled."
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported the partial IS retreat out of Kobani, officially known as Ain al-Arab, but noted some sporadic fighting.
"The Kurds are pursuing some jihadis on the eastern outskirts of Kobani, but there is no more fighting inside now."
Spiegel Online
El Al Flight 324 landed a full three hours ago, but Lucie Podemski is still waiting for her father to emerge. She is sitting in a café in the Tel Aviv airport along with a balloon she brought along for the occasion. "Welcome," it says. Suddenly, she receives a text message from her father including a photo of the new ID card he had just been given. He is now an Israeli citizen.
André Podemski looks happy in the picture on his new document. "In France, you always have to look so serious," Lucie Podemski says. "Here, we can smile."
More than six years ago, just after she graduated from university, Lucie Podemski emigrated from France to Israel and opened a daycare center in Tel Aviv. Several weeks ago, her cousin arrived. And now, on a recent Monday, her father. Only her sister is still living in Paris. "But she is afraid," Lucie says. "Armed police are posted in front of her children's school." Since the attacks in Paris a couple of weeks ago, even her sister wears a bullet-proof vest when she pick up her children after school.
Spiegel Online
With broad public resistance and a European Parliament majority against it, EU officials are rethinking their positions on the proposed free-trade agreement with Washington. Many fear investor protection rules will wreak havoc on national laws.
When Bernd Lange talks about the advantages of a free trade agreement with the US, he often cites the example of the VW bus. The hippy favorite has been the target of a 25 percent tariff since 1964, a punitive move after the European Economic Community raised levies on imported chicken, shutting the Americans out of the market. Sales have been hampered for decades as a result. But if the levy were significantly reduced, its price tag would plunge.
The Guardian
Liberian health authorities have announced that there are currently only five confirmed cases of Ebola in the entire country – a dramatic turnaround in the west African nation where the virus has taken its deadliest toll.
At the height of the outbreak in August and September, Liberia was recording more than 300 new cases of the virus every week. To date 3,636 Liberians have died of Ebola, according to the World Health Organization.
But the outbreak has begun to wane. On Monday, Tolbert Nyenswah, who heads the country’s Ebola response, said there are now just five people in the country being treated for the virus.
In her state of the nation address on Monday, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said that, at the height of the outbreak, Liberia was the “poster child of disaster”.
“Our hospitals and clinics as well as our schools closed down. People ran away from their families and homes. Our economy was on the verge of collapse,” she told lawmakers, adding that the initial response from Liberia and the international community was weak.
Reuters
Israel's top military electronic surveillance unit expelled dozens of veterans on Monday for refusing to spy on Palestinians living under occupation, Army Radio said.
The commander of Unit 8200, named as Brigadier-General "A", barred the 43 reserve soldiers who wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top army chiefs in September, saying they could no longer serve in the unit, the radio said.
Coming a few weeks after Israel's 50-day war against Islamist militants in the Gaza Strip, the letter was seen as an unprecedented rebuke of Netanyahu's security policies but the military dismissed it as a publicity stunt by a small fringe.
By decrying the sweep of eavesdropping on Palestinians, and the role such espionage plays in setting up air strikes that have often inflicted civilian casualties, the move opened a window on clandestine practices.
Reuters
The sons of deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak were released from prison on Monday, security officials said, a move that could fuel tension after the violent anniversary on Sunday of the 2011 uprising that toppled the autocrat.
An Egyptian court last week ordered the release of Alaa and Gamal Mubarak pending their retrial in a corruption case.
Mubarak's sons, big businessmen in his era of crony capitalism, were released at 2 a.m. Accompanied by their lawyer and bodyguards, they were driven to their home in Cairo's upscale Heliopolis area, security officials said.
Security and medical officials said they had also visited Mubarak in the military hospital where he is still in detention. Judicial sources have said Mubarak could soon be freed pending retrial in a corruption case as the former air force commander currently has no convictions against him.
NPR
In the U.S. view, the most serious threat coming from Syria is the self-styled Islamic State, or ISIS. That's why the Pentagon is sending forces to train what it terms moderate Syrian rebel fighters.
But here's the catch. Moderate rebel commanders say it will be hard to explain this mission to their troops, who took up arms with the aim of toppling Syrian President Bashar Assad, not ISIS.
The U.S. plan calls for the Americans and their allies to train and equip about 5,000 Syrian moderates. U.S. troops are heading to Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia for the training.
Zakkaria Abboud, a law student turned commander in the southern city of Daraa, says that in four long years since the uprising began, he's lost 200 family members and friends. His face is scarred from combat.
"As a moderate military, we have the right to support and aid from the American government," he says, "because we became the American government's trusted friends."
BBC
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has announced plans to disband Argentina's intelligence agency.
In a TV address, she said she would draft a bill to set up a new body.
Ms Fernandez said the intelligence services had kept much of the same structure they had during the military government, which ended in 1983.
The move comes after the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman - hours before he had been due to testify against senior government officials.
He had been investigating the bombing of a Jewish centre in the capital in 1994 which left 85 people dead.
Mr Nisman, 51, had accused several senior government figures - including President Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman - of involvement in a plot to cover up Iran's alleged role in the bombing.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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The Guardian
The measles outbreak which started at Disneyland appears to be continuing to spread across the United States, alarming even parents of children vaccinated against the disease.
Officials in Michigan confirmed on Friday that an adult in Oakland County had been diagnosed with measles, suggesting the outbreak is zigzagging east from the theme park in California.
Six other states – Utah, Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Nebraska and Arizona, plus Mexico – have recorded cases since a young woman, dubbed patient zero, fell sick at Disneyland just before Christmas.
There are now an estimated 100 cases in the US, most in California.
Hospitals and doctors’ offices in the state expect a continued spike in requests for vaccinations and advice.
The Guardian
The closest pass to Earth by a large asteroid until 2027 is due to happen on Monday, according to Nasa, which said the half-kilometre wide object posed no danger to the planet.
The asteroid, which is called 2004 BL86, will pass within 745,000 miles of Earth – around three times the distance to the Moon – meaning it will be visible from the surface with telescopes or even binoculars.
In the US the closest moment of the pass will come just after 11am ET, when BL86 will be visible in the sky between Jupiter and the constellation Gemini.
Asteroids pass the Earth almost constantly but BL86, which was discovered in 2004, is unusual in its size – at approximately 550 metres across it is one of the larger objects to pass our planet this century. Another object of comparable scale isn’t scheduled to pass us by for another 12 years, Nasa said, when asteroid 1999 AN10, an 800m-1800m behemoth which last passed the Earth in 1946, is set to return to our skies.
The Guardian
A failure to address the mountains of waste in the developing world will result in as much plastic in our oceans as fish, the head of Ocean Conservancy has warned.
Andreas Merkl, CEO of the Washington-based environmental NGO, said the combination in the developing world of a burgeoning middle class and low recycling rates will lead to an exponential rise in the amount of plastic washed out to sea.
If governments and the private sector fail to solve this problem, “we end up with an ocean that has an amount of plastic that’s in the same order of magnitude as the amount of fish, in terms of tonnes”, Merkl told Guardian Sustainable Business.
“We have enormous uncertainty about what that actually means, but it is a situation where you cannot call yourself an ocean conservationist or any person that cares about the ocean and find that even remotely acceptable.”
NPR
When Amy Seitz got pregnant with her second child last year, she knew that being 35 years old meant there was an increased chance of chromosomal disorders like Down syndrome. She wanted to be screened, and she knew just what kind of screening she wanted — a test that's so new, some women and doctors don't quite realize what they've signed up for.
This kind of test , called cell free fetal DNA testing, uses a simple blood sample from an expectant mother to analyze bits of fetal DNA that have leaked into her bloodstream. It's only been on the market since October 2011 and is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration — the FDA does not regulate this type of genetic testing service. Several companies now offer the test, including Sequenom and Illumina. Insurance coverage varies, and doctors often only offer this testing to women at higher risk because of things like advanced maternal age.
"I think that I initially heard about it through family and friends," says Seitz. "They had had the option of it given to them by their doctors."
NPR
Across the country, efforts to make marijuana more accessible have quickly gained traction. Medical marijuana is now legal in 23 states, and recreational use is also legal in four states and the District of Columbia.
Science, however, hasn't quite caught up. Largely due to its illegal status, there's been very little research done on marijuana's health effects. And researchers don't fully understand how pot affects the developing teenage brain.
This may explain the why the nation's pediatricians have changed their recommendations on marijuana and children.
On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics revised its policy on medical marijuana, saying pediatricians should avoid prescribing it to children until more research is done, except in cases where patients are suffering from chronic, debilitating conditions. The pediatrics group is also recommending the decriminalization of weed, but it's advising against legalization.
NPR
Thinking machines are consistently in the news these days, and often a topic of discussion here at 13.7. Last week, Alva Noë came out as a singularity skeptic, and three of us contributed to Edge.org's annual question for 2015: What do you think about machines that think?
In response to the Edge.org question, I argued that we shouldn't be chauvinists when it comes to defining thinking — that is, we should resist the temptation to restrict what counts as thinking to "thinking like adult humans" or "thinking like contemporary computers." Marcelo Gleiser suggested that we're already living as transhumans, enhanced by our technogadgets and medical improvements. And Stuart Kauffman considered Turing machines, the quantum and human choice.
In addressing the relationship between humans and thinking machines, all three of our responses — and those by many others — raised questions about what (if anything) makes us uniquely human. Part of what's fascinating about the idea of thinking machines, after all, is that they seem to approach and encroach on a uniquely human niche, homo sapiens — the wise.
C/NET
Microsoft's consumer devices are starting to show signs of life.
The company's fiscal second-quarter earnings posted Monday indicate that its consumer businesses are consistently growing. Its Lumia phones are selling better than ever and Surface, its tablet line, is officially a billion-dollar business. Though these divisions are still nowhere near as large as Microsoft's software, servers and Internet services divisions, the numbers represent a promising start.
Though its core businesses are still as strong as ever, Microsoft is very much a company in transition. CEO Satya Nadella's mission is now twofold: to have Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows 10, run across as many devices and screens as possible, and to make consumers love Windows again, not just use it out of necessity. For Nadella, that means pushing Windows as aggressively into the hands of consumers as it has in the corporate realm.
Helping the cause, the software giant is positioning its next operating system as the Swiss Army Knife of computing, with executives explaining at a Windows 10 event last week at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters that the company can both evolve its OS while appeasing longtime users who felt put off by the missteps of Windows 8. But Microsoft is still far behind on mobile with its software running on about 3 percent of phones worldwide. Surface, too, has much ground to cover to compete with both Apple's iPad tablet and the scores of low-cost laptops with which it also competes.
C/NET
Just how jolly was Apple's holiday quarter? If the latest Wall Street estimates are accurate, the answer is "very."
When it comes to the consumer electronics giant's financials, all eyes will be on the iPhone. The Cupertino, Calif., company generates more than half its revenue from its smartphone business, and the fiscal first quarter, which ends in December, is typically Apple's biggest quarter of the year because of holiday sales and the recent introduction of the latest iPhones.
This year's first quarter marked Apple's first full period of 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch 6 Plus sales, which could result in higher revenue and profits than ever before. (The last record quarter for sales was 2014's fiscal first quarter with revenue of $57.6 billion.) Apple said it sold more units at launch than any previous iPhone model, and it's likely demand didn't slow down in the following months.