
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Special correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is based in Berlin. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and read at NPR.org. From 2012 until 2018 Nelson was NPR's bureau chief in Berlin. She won the ICFJ 2017 Excellence in International Reporting Award for her work in Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Nelson was also based in Cairo for NPR and covered the Arab World from the Middle East to North Africa during the Arab Spring. In 2006, Nelson opened NPR's first bureau in Kabul, from where she provided listeners in an in-depth sense of life inside Afghanistan, from the increase in suicide among women in a country that treats them as second class citizens to the growing interference of Iran and Pakistan in Afghan affairs. For her coverage of Afghanistan, she won a Peabody Award, Overseas Press Club Award, and the Gracie in 2010. She received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College in 2011 for her coverage in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Nelson spent 20 years as newspaper reporter, including as Knight Ridder's Middle East Bureau Chief. While at the Los Angeles Times, she was sent on extended assignment to Iran and Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She spent three years an editor and reporter for Newsday and was part of the team that won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for covering the crash of TWA Flight 800.
A graduate of the University of Maryland, Nelson speaks Farsi, Dari and German.
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Germany's interior minister proposed establishing 10 principles to preserve German identity at a time of mass migration. He said asylum seekers and others should adapt to German culture or get out.
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Germany's anti-immigrant party, the AfD, is in turmoil after its most prominent politician Frauke Petry dropped out of the upcoming German parliamentary elections.
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Easter is one of the few times the 3-year-old war in Eastern Ukraine takes a hiatus. The overnight curfew lifted on Saturday so residents could pray and play all night into Easter Sunday.
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Hungary is closing all of its refugee camps across the country, and sending asylum seekers to a camp on the border with Serbia where they will live in converted shipping containers while their cases are processed.
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In Poland, in-vitro fertilization programs were among those hardest hit when the populist Law and Justice Party took charge in late 2015.
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The museum opened March 23 in Gdansk, where the war began. "This is the museum of a war, but not a military museum," says historian Pawel Machcewicz. The government wants something different.
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The Nobel Prize winner says he will use any political clout he has left to help take down the Polish government to protect democracy. He wants Poles to petition for a referendum on new elections.
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Central European University is widely considered Hungary's top private university. It was founded by financier George Soros, who has a strained relationship with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
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Voting in the controversial Turkish referendum that led to the nasty spat between President Erdogan and Western European leaders starts in Germany. It's home to the largest ex-pat European community outside Turkey. It goes on for several weeks.
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Martin Schulz, a former bookseller with no high school diploma, could become the next chancellor of Germany, thanks in part to an anti-Trump sentiment.