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 lead singer in Ukraine's biggest rock band is one of Ukrainian celebrities who are using their fame and connections to speed relief supplies to those who need them most.
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Lahiri famously brought a disco vibe to India's biggest film industry. He composed dozens of hits in the 1970s and '80s — which appeared in many top Bollywood movies.
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President Biden hosts the leaders of Japan, Australia and India at the White House on Friday. The four key democracies are teaming up to counter China, which is also a major trading partner.
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President Biden will meet on Friday with the leaders of Japan, Australia and India. Their agenda includes the pandemic and climate change. But analysts say the Quad group is mainly about China.
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The Taliban's ideology has distant links to India. Scholars say Afghanistan's new leaders might listen to clerics in the birthplace of Deobandi Islam, though the clerics deny ties with the Taliban.
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For India, the power shift in Kabul may mean a loss of security, as well as a loss of economic power and influence in a region increasingly dominated by another neighbor that it's uneasy about: China.
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Thursday's bronze is India's first field hockey medal since 1980 — before any of the current players were born. More history could be made Friday, when India's women go for their first Olympic medal.
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Was it a brutal gang rape and killing? Or a terrible accident with a bungled response? Police are searching for clues — as protests erupt in India's capital.
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That's the number of "excess deaths" from January 2020 to June 2021, reflecting the true toll of COVID-19, say researchers in a new study. Why the big disparity?
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Bangladeshi soldiers are enforcing a seven-day lockdown. As the West opens up, poorer countries with low vaccination rates are being hit by wave after wave of COVID-19.