Laurel Wamsley
Laurel Wamsley is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She reports breaking news for NPR's digital coverage, newscasts, and news magazines, as well as occasional features. She was also the lead reporter for NPR's coverage of the 2019 Women's World Cup in France.
Wamsley got her start at NPR as an intern for Weekend Edition Saturday in January 2007 and stayed on as a production assistant for NPR's flagship news programs, before joining the Washington Desk for the 2008 election.
She then left NPR, doing freelance writing and editing in Austin, Texas, and then working in various marketing roles for technology companies in Austin and Chicago.
In November 2015, Wamsley returned to NPR as an associate producer for the National Desk, where she covered stories including Hurricane Matthew in coastal Georgia. She became a Newsdesk reporter in March 2017, and has since covered subjects including climate change, possibilities for social networks beyond Facebook, the sex lives of Neanderthals, and joke theft.
In 2010, Wamsley was a Journalism and Women Symposium Fellow and participated in the German-American Fulbright Commission's Berlin Capital Program, and was a 2016 Voqal Foundation Fellow. She will spend two months reporting from Germany as a 2019 Arthur F. Burns Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists.
Wamsley earned a B.A. with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Wamsley holds a master's degree from Ohio University, where she was a Public Media Fellow and worked at NPR Member station WOUB. A native of Athens, Ohio, she now lives and bikes in Washington, DC.
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As we spend more of our lives in the digital world, our personal information can be compromised. NPR's Life Kit spoke to experts on how to protect your digital privacy.
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Door-to-door trick-or-treating and crowded costume parties are out, and haunted forests and outdoor movie nights are in. "If screaming will likely occur, greater distancing is advised," the CDC says. -
The CDC says the guidelines were posted to its website in error. The now-deleted updates were notable because so far the agency has stopped short of saying that the virus is airborne.
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Scientists have linked an increasing prevalence and intensity of wildfires to climate change, and residents of Western states are grappling with the dread that severe fire seasons are the new normal.
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FEMA says pandemic-related funding is available from other sources, including millions of masks from Health and Human Services. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden blasts the policy change.
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Although daily COVID-19 deaths have fallen somewhat in recent days, the number of infections has continued to rise in many places with no end in sight.
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Joseph James DeAngelo, now 74, admitted to committing more than a dozen murders in the 1970s and '80s after investigators identified him using public genealogy websites to trace his DNA.
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"Two hours of walking will soon be mandatory?" asks one headline in the German press. "Is the paternalism going too far?" demands another.
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The hunt is on to find the source of the coronavirus outbreak, now at 30 cases. The country is working to understand how the virus slipped through its defenses.
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The state has agreed to suspend a requirement that mail-in ballots must be signed before two witnesses or a notary. The high court rejects a Republican effort to reinstate the rule this fall.
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Four new likely cases of COVID-19 are linked to a cluster in an Auckland family announced Tuesday. The country returns to tighter restrictions and is promoting an app to help with contact tracing.
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The federal civil rights lawsuit alleges the parties are responsible for McClain's death last year after police put the 23-year-old in two chokeholds and injected him with ketamine.
