Lauren Frayer
Lauren Frayer covers India for NPR News. In June 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.
Before moving to India, Lauren was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.
In Europe, Lauren chronicled the economic crisis in Spain & Portugal, where youth unemployment spiked above 50%. She profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. From Paris, Lauren reported live on NPR's Morning Edition, as French police moved in on the Charlie Hebdo terror suspects. In the fall of 2015, Lauren spent nearly two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans – and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.
Farther afield, she introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.
Lauren has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.
Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, an assignment for which the AP nominated her and her colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize.
On a break from journalism, Lauren drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.
Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Lauren holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.
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Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, made a lightning assault across Syria. Where did the rebels get the cash, weapons and training that made their takeover possible? -
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While Syrian refugees in Lebanon return home, many Lebanese remain on edge. Years of conflict have left the Syria-Lebanon borderlands scarred, and fears grow that instability could spill over again. -
The U.K. used coal power to drive the Industrial Revolution and expand the British Empire. It's now the first major economy to quit the fossil fuel, a primary contributor to global warming. -
In a video released by Kensington Palace, the Princess of Wales says she's finished chemotherapy for cancer, but that her "path to healing and full recovery is long."
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The U.K. exports explosive devices, guns and fighter jet components to Israel. But it's suspending some arms shipments, fearing Israel could used them in violation of international law. -
Lord Sainsbury didn’t like the design of the wing his family funded. He paid for it though, and slipped a 1990 letter into a pillar during construction. Construction workers found it 33 years later. -
As the U.S. women's basketball team plays its Olympic opener against Japan, expectations are high. The U.S. has won the last 7 gold medals, and hasn’t lost at the Olympics in most players' lifetimes. -
After 14 years of Conservative rule, Britons elected a new prime minister, Keir Starmer, and Parliament dominated by the Labour Party, which hadn't won a national election since Tony Blair, nearly 20 years. -
Keir Starmer, 61, is a social liberal, fiscal moderate and leader of the United Kingdom's Labour Party, which won Thursday's election in a landslide.
