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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Spaniards head to the polls today after the previous election failed to produce a government. While some voters want change, others are worried that Brexit-like discontent will cause more instability.
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Johnson took a gamble by leading the campaign for Britain to leave the EU. He's now a leading candidate to replace his college friend and fellow Conservative David Cameron. -
Britain's farming minister favors leaving the European Union. But some farmers fear losing subsidies and foreign workers if that happens. "As a farmer," says one, "I want to stay in business." -
Many of London's expensive homes are owned by obscure foreign companies. Critics say the city has become a haven for those hiding ill-gotten gains, and the government is starting to respond. -
Nicholas Winton arranged safe passage from Czechoslovakia for more than 600 Jewish children on the eve of World War II. Winton died last year at 106. A memorial is being held Thursday in London. -
About one million Poles live in Britain, but they won't be able to vote in the June 23 referendum that will decide if Britain stays in the EU. -
Mom-and-pop businesses are considering how a British exit from the EU could affect them. The owner of Britain's oldest salmon smokehouse, who wants out, says EU membership dilutes British culture. -
The "Kindertransport" program of the late 1930s rescued hundreds of European children from the Nazis. Some former refugees, now in their 90s, want the U.K. to accept 3,000 unaccompanied Syrian kids. -
On Spain's Atlantic coast, the city of Santander has installed 12,000 sensors that measure everything from when streetlights need to be dimmed to when trash dumpsters are full — saving millions for cash-strapped public coffers. It's becoming a model for cities worldwide. -
After a bitter election campaign, Londoners have chosen the Labour Party's Sadiq Khan to be the new mayor. He comes from humble immigrant origins, and is the first Muslim to hold the post.
