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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Scientists, public health experts and opposition politicians have raised questions about one of the two vaccines the country of 1.4 billion people has authorized for emergency use against COVID-19.
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Only one other country — the United States — has surpassed the milestone of 9 million total cases, since the pandemic began.
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The Taj Mahal reopened at sunrise Monday for the first time since March 17. It is limited to 5,000 visitors a day, and all must wear masks. Before the pandemic, up to 70,000 people visited every day.
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With more than 5 million coronavirus infections and the world's highest daily tally of new cases, India is expected to become the world's worst-affected country within weeks.
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Indian lawmakers were required to get tested for the coronavirus within 72 hours before entering parliament — which met on Monday for the first time since March.
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"This year, we are facing an extraordinary situation," Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told a conference last week before GDP figures were released. "We are facing an act of God."
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Mumbai officials get creative to allow devotees to celebrate the elephant-headed god safely, even as virus cases surge in other parts of India.
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Despite one the world's earliest and most restrictive lockdowns, India's numbers continue to soar, exceeded only by the United States and Brazil.
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Despite imposing one of the earliest and most severe mitigation efforts in the world, India's coronavirus infections have soared.
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Her father got injured. She came to care for him and took him home via bike. Now she's reportedly signed to star in a Bollywood film based on her life. But some ask: Why was this her only option?