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 International Court of Justice concluded it is "plausible" that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza. But the court did not call for a ceasefire.
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The United Nations' top court in The Hague stopped short of ordering a cease-fire in Gaza. But demanded that Israel do more to contain the death and damage its military operation has wrought there.
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A U.S. academic's recipe for the perfect cup of tea has sent Brits into a tizzy. Salt? Warm milk? The horror!
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In the past three months, 2 million Palestinians have been internally displaced by war. Some far-right Israeli officials want them to leave Gaza altogether — evoking the trauma of past displacement.
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It was a somber moment remembering the 23,000 people killed in Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel which killed 1,200 people last October.
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Palestinians and Israelis watch the genocide case at a United Nations court — as fighting continues between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
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People in northern Israel are living through a low-level war. Israeli troops are trading fire with Hezbollah in nearby Lebanon. What's adding to the risk of a wider conflict?
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Tensions are high on the Israel-Lebanon border after Tuesday's killing of a Hamas leader in Beirut. The U.S. and Europe are sending diplomats this weekend.
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In 2024, Uber will offer its platform to London's black cabs. But cabbies — who pass an encyclopedic test of London street geography called "The Knowledge" — aren't impressed.
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Prince Harry and 100 other celebrities sued UK tabloids for allegedly hacking their phones to get scoops in the 1990s & early 2000s.