Donald Kirk is a veteran correspondent and author on conflict and crisis from Southeast Asia to the Middle East to Northeast Asia. Kirk has covered wars from Vietnam to Iraq, focusing on political, diplomatic, economic and social as well as military issues. He is also known for his reporting on North Korea, including the nuclear crisis, human rights and payoffs from South to North Korea preceding the June 2000 inter-Korean summit.[1] Career After several years as a metro reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Post, 1960-1964, Kirk free-lanced from Indonesia in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” 1965–1966, writing about the fall of Sukarno and mass killings in Java and Bali. He covered Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the late 1960s and early 1970s for the old Washington (DC) Star and then for the Chicago Tribune, reporting on the 1968 Tet Offensive, the 1970 downfall of Prince Sihanouk and the U.S. incursion into Cambodia and the 1972 Easter Offensive in Vietnam. He also wrote articles for The New York Times Magazine and The New Leader and two books before gravitating to northeast Asia. Kirk was correspondent for The Observer (London) in Japan and Korea from the late 1970s to 1982, covering the assassination of President Park Chung-hee of Korea in 1979, the 1980 Gwangju revolt, and financial, diplomatic and political issues in Japan for The Observer and newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. After covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 from Beirut and Tel Aviv, he joined USA Today in August 1982 as the paper's first world editor. For USA Today, he ranged from Europe to Asia, reporting on war in Lebanon, revolt in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the 1985-1986 People Power revolution in the Philippines, the democracy revolt in Korea, the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, the 1989 fall of Ceausescu, and the Gulf War from Baghdad, including the U.S. bombing, 1990-91. After publishing an unauthorized biography of Chung Ju-yung, founder of the Hyundai empire, in 1994, Kirk served in Korea as correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, 1997–2003, and the Christian Science Monitor and CBS Radio, 2004-2020, covering the sinking of the South Korean navy ship Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010, North Korean nuclear and missile tests, anti-American protests, U.S.-Korea trade disputes and Korean politics. He has visited North Korea eight times, writing for Forbes Asia and