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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Hungary's nationalist government has granted sweeping emergency powers that Prime Minister Viktor Orban says are necessary to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Critics say he's simply grabbing power.
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The Dutch market is a global blossom powerhouse but sales are withering as virus-hit countries hunker down.
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"This trial, too, shall pass," Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I said. "But our lives will have changed forever." He asked parishioners to stay home for their own safety and the safety of others.
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Their parents are missing back home in China, likely in prison or detention. "We want them to know they belong to a family that's much bigger than the one they have lost," the school's founder says.
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Once viewed as a refuge by members of the Muslim minority group, Turkey has detained Uighurs and told them to hush criticism about the Chinese government. Some have already been deported.
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Four million Syrian refugees are living in Turkey, and another million displaced Syrians are trapped between Russian-backed Syrian forces and the Turkish border. Turkey says to head for Europe.
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The prime minister of Malta is resigning next month after nearly two weeks of protests over his top aide's alleged complicity in the 2017 murder of a prominent journalist.
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The town of Stroud has long been an incubator for activism. Last year, it gave rise to the group Extinction Rebellion, which has rallied thousands globally to demand action on climate change.
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Despite a cash-for-contracts scandal that brought down his government in May, Kurz, 33, the country's youngest-ever chancellor, is likely to win back his job on Sunday in a snap election.
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"Domestic violence never happens because there's a problem with the woman. The men are killing. They are the problem," says a rights activist in Istanbul.