Joanna Kakissis
Joanna Kakissis is an international correspondent based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she leads NPR's bureau and coverage of a conflict that has upended millions of lives, affected global energy and food supplies and pitted NATO against Russia.
Kakissis began reporting in Ukraine shortly before Russia invaded in February. She covered the exodus of refugees to Poland and has returned to Ukraine several times to chronicle the war. She has focused on the human costs, profiling the displaced, the families of prisoners of war anda ninety-year-old "mermaid" who swims in a mine-filled sea. Kakissis highlighted the tragedy for both sideswith a story about the body of a Russian soldier abandoned in a hamlet he helped destroy, and sheshed light on the potential for nuclear disaster with a report on the shelling of Nikopol by Russians occupying a nearby power plant.
Kakissis began reporting regularly for NPR from her base in Athens, Greece, in 2011. Her work has largely focused on the forces straining European unity — migration, nationalism and the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. She led coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and the mass migration of Syrian refugees to Europe. She's reported extensively in central and eastern Europe and has also filled in at NPR bureaus in Berlin, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London and Paris. She's a contributor to This American Life and has written for The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker online and The Financial Times Magazine, among others. In 2021, she taught a journalism seminar as a visiting professor at Princeton University.
Kakissis was born in Greece, grew up in North and South Dakota and spent her early years in journalism at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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The lawmakers demanded Thursday that European Union leaders punish Hungary's government for using the COVID-19 pandemic to grab power via a new law allowing the prime minister to rule by decree.
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An annual survey by the watchdog Freedom House says authoritarian leaders and the influence of China and Russia are undermining democratic progress achieved since the end of the Cold War.
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Greece has had surprising success so far in containing the spread of the coronavirus, which struck just as the country was pulling out of a decade-long financial crisis.
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The tree killer is a bacterium called xylella fastidiosa. It has killed millions of olive trees in Italy and is now threatening Spain and Greece. These countries produce 95% of Europe's olive oil.
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At least 150 people in a shelter have tested positive for COVID-19, says the International Organization for Migration. Most are from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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It's a time when churches are full, blood-red eggs are cracked to symbolize Christ's resurrection and lambs are roasted as part of family feasts. But the coronavirus has shut down those celebrations.
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Many in Europe's largest ethnic minority group live in poor, marginalized communities where conditions could lead to a swift outbreak, say researchers and activists.
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Greece is looking at enormous losses in a main industry due to COVID-19. Authorities have launched a website for virtual visits "until we can all be together in person again," a tourism official says.
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At least 20 refugees in a camp outside Athens have tested positive for COVID-19. Some 60,000 refugees live in camps in Greece, some crammed into tight quarters with little access to water or soap.
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Reporters Without Borders says the government has forbidden state-controlled media from using the word and ordered its removal from health brochures distributed at hospitals, schools and workplaces.