Joe Lauria

Joe Lauria has been a United Nations correspondent for 25 years. This included six and ahalf years as the Wall Street Journal correspondent based at U.N. Headquarters in New York.Mr. Lauria has covered ever major world crisis that has come before the U.N. over the pastquarter century. Among those stories was the fraught diplomacy before the First Gulf War andthe 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq; the 1990s wars that broke up Yugoslavia; the genocide inRwanda; the destruction of Libya; the coup d'etat in Ukraine and resulting civil war; thedevastating conflict in Syria; African coups and the U.N. response to earthquakes, tsunamisand other natural disasters.Mr. Lauria has interviewed numerous presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, andambassadors and questioned many other leaders in press encounters, including YassirArafat, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, Jacques Chirac, Jimmy Carter, HillaryClinton and Barack Obama.He reported numerous exclusives and front- page U.N.-related stories for the WSJ. Theseincluded a U.S. exclusive on the U.N. General Assembly considering a new probe into DagHammarskjld's death; the U.N. envoy to Yemen saying Saudi bombing derailed a politicalsettlement close to completion; senior U.S. officials asking the U.N. to pull its chemicalweapons inspectors from Syria; Rwandan President Paul Kagame saying he would't pull histroops from Somalia after a critical U.N. report; the Indian foreign minister suggesting Indiafavored negotiating with the Taliban; Somalia's prime minister saying he would welcome a binLaden-style US raid on militants in his country; China revising its anti-separatist stance inSouth Sudan; and U.N. corruption favoring Price Waterhouse Coopers on a multi-milliondollar contract and more.Before the WSJ, Mr. Lauria was the Boston Globe's U.N. correspondent for six years and hasalso reported from the U.N. for the London Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, TheJohannesburg Star, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen and Vancouver Sun; and the GermanPress Agency dpa.Mr. Lauria has been an investigative reporter for The Sunday Times of London, having takenpart in investigations that led to the suspension of a British member of parliament forcorruption and the unmasking of an FBI/MI5 double agent. At Bloomberg News he led aninvestigation that brought about the resignation of an Argentine provincial governor after heissued a counterfeit government bond.Mr. Lauria's work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TheGuardian, New York Magazine, and other publications. He is the author of two books.Thefirst was with former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Mike Gravel, a history of U.S.foreign policy and the defense industry, published by Seven Stories Press, with a Forewordby Daniel Ellsberg. It was entirely conceived, researched and written by Mr. Lauria. Thesecond was a ghostwritten history of the three major Middle East religions with an emphasison the history of Islam.Mr. Lauria has traveled to more than 70 nations. Much of his reporting has focused on theMiddle East, having visited the region more than two dozen times in the past four years,including lengthy stays in Egypt and Iraq. With the exception of Yemen and Iran, he's visitedevery country in the region, many multiple times.Mr. Lauria has won two journalism awards and taught journalism at two U.S. universities. Hehas lectured on three continents and has appeared numerous times on radio and television,including on CNN (where he was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer), Good Morning America(interviewed by George Stephanopoulos) as well as on the BBC, the PBS News Hour, C-Span, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Sky Arabia, and RT. He's also been a guest on LeonardLopate's and Brian Lehrer's radio shows on WNYC in New York.