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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NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks to Mujtaba Rahman, Europe director at the Eurasia Group, about the upcoming elections in the U.K. as well as the impact of a far-right swing in recent EU elections.
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An anti-establishment candidate has thrown a wrench into the U.K. election. Nigel Farage is running for Parliament with a new populist party -- which is likely to split the Conservative vote.
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Indian police accused Stan Swamy of terrorism. His supporters say he was framed and evidence planted on his computer. Some call it Narendra Modi's Watergate. Six years on, no one has resigned. -
NPR investigates the death of a jailed Catholic priest and alleged cyberhacking by the Indian government. Critics call this Narendra Modi's "Watergate," but it's virtually unheard of outside India.
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It started with a civil rights rally, and ended in riots. NPR investigates how 16 of India's most famous human rights activists were jailed for an alleged terror plot. They say they were framed.
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A third of the city of Rafah is under evacuation orders, as Israel presses its offensive into southern Gaza. Israel is also expanding attacks in central and northern areas of the Gaza Strip.
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The United Nations says 7,500 metric tons of unexploded ordnance litter the Gaza Strip. The U.N. says it could take 14 years to dispose of these dangers. -
As cease-fire negotiators talk, soldiers and militants keep fighting. Israeli warplanes pound Gaza's southernmost city Rafah, where some 1.4 million Palestinians have sought refuge.
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Hamas said it accepted a proposal for a cease-fire. Israel responded that the deal didn't meet its requirements and announced it was pushing ahead with an assault in Rafah. -
Israelis mark Holocaust Memorial Day amid a spike in antisemitic incidents, pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses worldwide and an impasse in Gaza cease-fire talks.
