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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Part of a Crusader castle crumbled. An 18th century minaret felled. Church mosaics burned. Archaeologists are assessing damage to UNESCO World Heritage Sites from Israeli strikes on Lebanon and Syria. -
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, made a lightning assault across Syria. Where did the rebels get the cash, weapons and training that made their takeover possible? -
Even in war, Lebanon's migrant workers -- many of them South Asian -- play cricket weekly. A vacant lot has become a space for the marginalized, with Filipina cooks and Syrian refugees joining in.
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With a ceasefire in place, Hezbollah wants to rebuild Lebanon. But its supply chains across Syria have been weakened by Israeli airstrikes, rebel fighting and the ouster of its ally Bashar al-Assad. -
While Syrian refugees in Lebanon return home, many Lebanese remain on edge. Years of conflict have left the Syria-Lebanon borderlands scarred, and fears grow that instability could spill over again. -
Under a shaky ceasefire with Israel, Lebanon has another worry: Syria. Border residents are doing armed patrols with Hezbollah. They fear Syrian rebels could invade them next. They've done it before.
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Parts of southern Lebanon now look like Gaza. The World Bank estimates $8.5 billion in damage to Lebanon from the Israel-Hezbollah war.
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Following the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanese refugees are returning to the south of the country to see if their homes are still standing.
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Under the deal, Israel will withdraw forces over 60 days as Lebanon's army takes control of territory near the border to ensure that Iran-backed Hezbollah does not rebuild its infrastructure.
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The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has taken effect. The deal was negotiated by the U.S. and France, and was announced by President Biden after Israel's cabinet approved it.
