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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The funeral of Pope Francis draws the Catholic faithful to St. Peter's Square, as well as royalty and world leaders. The Vatican estimates about 200 thousand people participated in the open-air Mass.
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Pope Francis' body lies in state for public viewing at St. Peter's Basilica as the Vatican prepares for his funeral on Saturday. -
The Vatican is crowded on the eve of public viewing of Pope Francis' body. He'll lie in state through Friday. A day later, world leaders including Trump and Zelenskyy are expected at his funeral.
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Vilified by the Assad regime, these Nobel-nominated first responders operated only in rebel areas. Now their founder is in the new government and they're extending their reach to all of Syria. -
On Wednesday, Britain's top court clarified the legal definition of a woman: Someone born biologically female. The ruling has implications for transgender rights.
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U.K.'s Supreme Court has ruled the legal definition of a woman under its equalities law is someone born biologically female. The ruling has big implications for transgender people there.
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When Syria's Assad regime fell, victims gained access to archives on 130,000 missing people. Organizations compiling those documents lost U.S. funding under Trump, hobbling war crimes investigations.
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Since antiquity, Aleppo has been famous for gold. But a post-war crime wave means jewelers no longer display gold in windows. The city is installing solar-powered streetlights to fight crime.
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Almost immediately after dictator Bashar al-Assad fled, Syria came under attack. Israeli airstrikes have hit several hundred times since December. Syria's new leaders are starting to speak up. -
When Syria's new leaders shut 60 Damascus bars, drinkers protested, and the government reversed itself. It's an example of the tussle between secular and Islamist values in the new Syria.
