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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Rescuers are scouring the crash site for survivors, and Nepal has declared Monday a day of national mourning. -
Some say it's a sign of prosperity. In conservative India, if women can afford not to work, they don't. But economists say there's more to it. -
Three Russian citizens have been found dead in the same part of eastern India since Christmas — fueling conspiracy theories about possible assassins.
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Vinod Kumar of India and Anish Adhikari of Nepal are among the many migrant workers who helped build the stadiums. Adhikari says he was misled about working conditions. Kumar died on the job. -
Controversy has erupted at one of India's top film festivals over the screening of a movie with Hindu nationalist themes. Were the jury head's comments an artistic critique or political commentary? -
As the world aims to reduce carbon emissions, particularly from developing nations, India is bragging: It's installed a record volume of solar power in 2022 to wean itself off of coal.
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India, on track to become the world's most populous country, gets about 70% of its electricity from coal. But the government is aggressively investing in renewable energy — particularly solar. -
The world population reached 8 billion on Tuesday, according to the UN. It credits advances in public health and nutrition. But the milestone also poses challenges for coping with climate change.
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South Asia's "economic miracle" needs help from the International Monetary Fund. High fuel prices mean rolling blackouts and a loss of productivity at garment factories — once an engine of growth.
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India's Hindu conservatives are championing Iran's female Muslim protesters. But they oppose Muslim students in southern India who are fighting for the right to wear the hijab in schools.
