90 Seconds to Midnight

How billionaires Putin and Xi are funding war

Despite years of intense sanctions, regimes like Russia and Iran are not only surviving but thriving at keeping the money rolling in. 
 
What makes it worse is that we can’t blame it all on Tehran or Moscow. The uncomfortable truth is that much of this network of corrupt finance was created by us in the West… London being a primary culprit. 
 
In this episode David Patrikarakos speaks to Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum about how these countries are using shadow financial networks to earn and launder hundreds of billions every year, how it's having an increasingly dangerous effect on global geo-politics and why the West is partly to blame.
 
Producer: Max Bower 
Editor: Alex Graham 
Executive Producer: Bella Soames 
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 
Host: David Patrikarakos 

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The Doomsday Clock is the symbolic countdown to human extinction; a universally recognised, annual indicator of the world’s vulnerability to man-made global catastrophe. If the clock strikes midnight, the world will have ended. 
Today, the clock sits as close to midnight as it has ever been – just 90 seconds away. 
And is it any wonder?
Ongoing wars in the Ukraine and Middle East. The continued expansion of nuclear arsenals around the world. The advance of generative AI and its potential for disinformation. The climate crisis. The list of potentially world-ending dangers feels increasingly – and depressingly – long. 
The Doomsday Clock is set annually, but, given the scale of the challenges facing humanity on a daily basis, as of September 5, we will be setting our own version of the clock each week. 
Welcome to 90 Seconds to Midnight: the Daily Mail’s new weekly global news podcast, promising listeners informed analysis, discussion, and on-the-ground reporting about the week’s most influential geopolitical flashpoints. Hosted by the Mail’s Special Correspondent David Patrikarakos, every episode ends with one question: are we closer, or further away, from midnight?