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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Mohammad Taslim tried to warn authorities about other Muslims who'd been radicalized. He was shot soon after. Two men he flagged are now under arrest for links to Sri Lanka's Easter terrorist attacks.
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Demonstrations continue in India's northeast over legislation that grants Indian passports to religious minorities from three nearby countries but excludes Muslims.
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Firefighters finally managed to put out the flames after a fire broke out Sunday in a handbag factory in the city's old quarter. Many of those killed were migrant workers from all over India.
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Police say the men attacked officers as they were investigating the crime scene and were shot dead in self-defense. Many are celebrating swift, sure justice; others call it an extrajudicial execution.
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Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the civil war-era defense secretary, is considered a hero to many majority Buddhists but the prospect of his winning Saturday's presidential election terrifies some minorities.
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"The Dalai Lama's reincarnation is a civilizational struggle between China and Tibetans over who controls Tibetan Buddhism," says Amitabh Mathur, a former Indian government adviser on Tibetan affairs.
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He has been called racist, sexist and not manly enough. But the spiritual and political leader — who would have turned 150 on Wednesday — is deeply revered in India and around the world.
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Wednesday marks 150 years since Mahatma Gandhi's birth. NPR sat down with biographer Ramachandra Guha and discussed the Indian leader's legacy.
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The government expressed alarm at the growing rate of use by young people and possible health hazards.
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After losing contact with the unmanned craft as it was trying to land on the moon, scientists appear to have captured an image of the lander on the surface, and they're trying to establish contact.