Matthew Pennington is an Associated Press reporter, currently based in Washington, DC., who has been writing about Asia for the past two decades. He first worked in the region as a U.N. volunteer in Laos before moving to Thailand where he covered the 1997 Asian economic crisis, Myanmar and Cambodia for Agence France-Presse. He joined AP in 1999 as a Bangkok-based writer and later worked as a supervisor on the agency’s Asia desk before becoming AP bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan. He led the AP reporting team that won the American Society of Professional Journalists' deadline writing award for its coverage of the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto.