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 happiness of Eid is in not hugging each other and not shaking hands this time over," said a leading Indian imam. "Eid is related to life and happiness and we have to give the same." -
Cyclone Amphan has been downgraded to a depression and cleanup is underway as authorities assess the damage in coastal India and Bangladesh.
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Both countries were already beset by the coronavirus. Now they must cope with the powerful cyclone, which came ashore along their border Wednesday and threatens to snarl virus response efforts. -
Cyclone Amphan — the strongest such storm in two decades — makes landfall Wednesday. The last one killed nearly 10,000 people. Millions of people are trying to socially distance amid evacuations.
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Before the pandemic, 100 times more Indians were being detained annually on the U.S.-Mexico border, compared to 10 years ago. Officials say the economic migrants believe smugglers promising asylum.
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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a relief package to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus.
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A look at how Kenya, India and the United Kingdom are dealing with the issue of when and how to reopen after the coronavirus lockdown.
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A previous lockdown extension was due to expire Sunday, but has been extended through May 18. Starting Monday, areas will be divided into zones according to the concentration of COVID-19 cases. -
"We call it a 'social distancing clamp' or a 'lockdown-breaker catcher,' " a policeman in Chandigarh, India, tells NPR. -
India's decision came on Monday amid accuracy concerns surrounding the kits. It's the latest irritant in a relationship that's come under increasing strain over the coronavirus.
