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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Sen. Harris is the first person of South Asian descent on a U.S. presidential ticket. Her mother's side of the family is from southern India. Hindu faithful offer prayers for a Biden-Harris victory.
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It's the latest in a series of U.S.-India military agreements designed to counter China's growing power in the Indo-Pacific region. -
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper are in India's capital to sign military agreements, and continue to push the Trump administration's anti-China message.
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President Trump has forged a friendship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. NPR discusses what might happen to U.S.-India ties if there's a change in the White House.
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As the parts of the U.S. experience a surge in new COVID-19 cases, other countries are also seeing a spike in infections.
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Demonstrations erupted across India over the attack on a woman from the country's most marginalized caste. The woman died in a hospital, and four men from a dominant caste are under arrest.
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The human rights group says its work in India has come to "a grinding halt" after it learned earlier this monththat the Indian government froze its bank accounts. -
As the world marks the sad milestone of 1 million lives lost to the coronavirus, NPR's international team reviews the way nations have handled the pandemic.
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The Taj Mahal reopened this week for the first time in more than six months. But Indian hospitals are still full, and the country's coronavirus cases are soaring.
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The Taj Mahal reopened at sunrise Monday for the first time since March 17. It is limited to 5,000 visitors a day, and all must wear masks. Before the pandemic, up to 70,000 people visited every day.