NBC News foreign correspondent Keir Simmons has officially been promoted to Today senior international correspondent.
Viewers of the NBC morning show will be seeing more of the veteran London-based TV newser reporting on stories of international import.
Today co-anchors Hoda Kotb and Willie Geist (sitting in for Savannah Guthrie) introduced him this morning with his new title.
Simmons joined NBC News from ITV News in October 2012, where he had been UK editor for the last five years.
Simmons has reported on a wide variety of stories since his arrival, everything from Meghan Markle and the Royal Family, to the G20 summit protests in Hamburg in 2017, where he at one point was talking to Katy Tur while sprinting away from a German water cannon.
Simmons was on the program this morning to report that parents of the late Otto Warmbier are asking North Korea to pay $1.1 billion for their son’s death, a figure that’s actually 2.5 percent of the nation’s 2015 GDP.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier filed the lawsuit in a federal court in Washington last April. In the lawsuit, they say the country tortured their son, killed him and as a result they’re suing for damages and say they want closure and justice for him.
North Korean authorities arrested their son in January 2016 for stealing a propaganda poster, and he was sentenced to 15 months in a North Korean prison. Warmbier died last year after he was released from North Korea in a coma and returned to his native Cincinnati after 17 months of being tortured in captivity at a North Korean labor camp.