Michael Sullivan
Michael Sullivan is NPR's Senior Asia Correspondent. He moved to Hanoi to open NPR's Southeast Asia Bureau in 2003. Before that, he spent six years as NPR's South Asia correspondent based in but seldom seen in New Delhi.
Michael was in Pakistan on 9-11 and spent much of the next two years there and in Afghanistan covering the run up to and the aftermath of the U.S. military campaign to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda. Michael has also reported extensively on terrorism in Southeast Asia, including both Bali bombings. He also covered the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Michael was the first NPR reporter on the ground in both Thailand and the Indonesian province of Aceh following the devastating December 2004 tsunami. He has returned to Aceh more than half a dozen times since to document the recovery and reconstruction effort. As a reporter in NPR's London bureau in the early 1990s he covered the fall of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Before moving to New Delhi, Michael was senior producer on NPR's foreign desk. He has worked in more than 60 countries on five continents, covering conflicts in Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Chechnya, and the Middle East. Prior to joining the foreign desk, Michael spent several years as producer and acting executive producer of NPR's All Things Considered.
As a reporter, Michael is the recipient of several Overseas Press Club Awards and Citations for Excellence for stories from Haiti, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. He was also part of the NPR team that won an Alfred I DuPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of 9-11 and the war in Afghanistan. In 2004 he was honored by the South Asia Journalists Association (SAJA) with a Special Recognition Award for his 'outstanding work' from 1998-2003 as NPR's South Asia correspondent.
As a producer and editor, Michael has been honored by the Overseas Press Club for work from Bosnia and Haiti; a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for a story about life in Sarajevo during wartime; and a World Hunger Award for stories from Eritrea.
Michael's wife, Martha Ann Overland, is Southeast Asia correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education and also writes commentaries on living abroad for NPR. They have two children.
Michael is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He's been at NPR since 1985.
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Officials say most of the victims are children. Thailand's prime minister expressed his condolences to the families. Authorities say the man who carried out the attack was a former police officer.
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The former prime minister was sentenced to three years for violating the official secrets act, on top of a 20-year sentence already handed down by the military junta that took power in 2021.
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Typhoon Noru has made landfall in Vietnam, after causing at least eight deaths and widespread flooding in the Philippines.
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The government in Vietnam's capital Hanoi is bringing back archaic neighborhood loudspeakers to deliver information to the people. Few of them seem to want it.
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Vickie Bowman and her husband were detained for sending information to an activist group and others opposed to military rule, a senior military official said.
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Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in Illinois, could be key to securing the freedom of Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, two Americans who are being held in Russia.
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Myanmar's military government has executed four people it accused of carrying out acts of terror. They're the first official executions in the Southeast Asia nation in decades.
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Cambodian American lawyer Theary Seng and dozens of others were convicted of treason last Tuesday, as Prime Minister Hun Sen continues to crackdown on dissent.
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This week's summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations provides the latest opportunity for the Biden administration to push for isolating Russia internationally over the war in Ukraine.
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The verdict was not unexpected. She is already serving a six-year term after being sentenced last year by a military-run court for violating COVID restrictions and illegally importing walkie-talkies.