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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The anti-government protesters there have a new young face — high schoolers who call themselves Bad Students. They're demanding changes to the constitution and curbs on the monarchy.
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Authorities in Bangladesh have begun relocating thousands of Rohingya refugees to an isolated island despite calls by human rights groups for a halt to the process.
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Premier Prayuth Chan-ocha, who seized power in a coup six years ago, issued a statement addressing months of unrest, promising to use "all" the country's laws to quash the protests. -
Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won in a 2015 landslide and is expected to win again. But with voting denied or canceled in some areas, more than a million voters are disenfranchised. -
The Southeast Asian nation holds a general election this weekend — the second time since the military ceded absolute power in 2011. There's little doubt the National League for Democracy will win.
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Southeast Asia drug cartels are thriving during the pandemic and increasingly moving their product through a cash-strapped country such as Laos — which some fear could turn into a narco-state.
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Thousands of mainly young Thais were back on the streets of Bangkok on Sunday for a fifth straight day of protests. They are demanding sweeping political change.
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In a pre-dawn announcement, authorities in Thailand declared a strict state of emergency for the capital — a day after student-led protests took aim at the country's monarchy.
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Got that itch to travel? With many international routes still closed, Asian countries with low COVID-19 rates are offering "flights to nowhere" that start and end at the same airport.
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Last week, Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul took the stage at a rally to read a manifesto calling for reform of Thailand's politically powerful monarchy — a move that could land her in jail.
