
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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King Charles III was crowned today — in a display of pomp and pageantry in London.
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King Charles III is being formally crowned the monarch of the United Kingdom during an elaborate ceremony in London Saturday, the first British coronation since 1953.
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Saturday is King Charles III's coronation. The ceremony in London will be full of pomp and pageantry. But there will also be some big changes to this more than 1,000-year-old ritual.
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This weekend's British coronation will be about pomp, history and attempts to reflect diversity.
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Pomp and pageantry? Check. Flag-waving tourists? You bet. A modern monarchy appealing to young diverse Britons? Maybe. In Charles' coronation, the royals will try to balance tradition and reality.
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The royal family has decided to leave the 105-carat gem out of this weekend's coronation ceremony. The Kohinoor has become a focus of anti-colonial anger. India wants it back.
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Mined in India, the Kohinoor diamond passed through Persian and Afghan hands before being "gifted" to Queen Victoria. It's a symbol of imperial plunder that you won't see at Charles' coronation.
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A top Conservative Party donor, Richard Sharp was found to have breached rules by failing to disclose a $1 million loan he helped arrange for then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
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Prince William received a large payout in 2020 from Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper arm in an alleged phone hacking case, according to court documents made public Tuesday.
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The world's worst cyclones hit Bangladesh. Floods are devastating. Yet death tolls are falling. The country's climate disaster strategies offer lessons for all coastal communities.