Jackie Northam
Jackie Northam is NPR's International Affairs Correspondent. She is a veteran journalist who has spent three decades reporting on conflict, politics, and life across the globe - from the mountains of Afghanistan and the desert sands of Saudi Arabia, to the gritty prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and the pristine beauty of the Arctic.
Northam spent more than a dozen years as an international correspondent living in London, Budapest, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, and Nairobi. She charted the collapse of communism, covered the first Gulf War from Saudi Arabia, counter-terrorism efforts in Pakistan, and reported from Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Her work has taken her to conflict zones around the world. Northam covered the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, arriving in the country just four days after Hutu extremists began slaughtering ethnic Tutsis. In Afghanistan, she accompanied Green Berets on a precarious mission to take a Taliban base. In Cambodia, she reported from Khmer Rouge strongholds.
Throughout her career, Northam has put a human face on her reporting, whether it be the courage of villagers walking miles to cast their vote in an Afghan election despite death threats from militants, or the face of a rescue worker as he desperately listens for any sound of life beneath the rubble of a collapsed elementary school in Haiti.
Northam joined NPR in 2000 as National Security Correspondent, covering US defense and intelligence policies. She led the network's coverage of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Her present beat focuses on the complex relationship between international business and geopolitics, including how the lifting of nuclear sanctions has opened Iran for business, the impact of China's efforts to buy up businesses and real estate around the world, and whether President Trump's overseas business interests are affecting US policy.
Northam has received multiple journalism awards during her career, including Associated Press awards and regional Edward R. Murrow awards, and was part of an NPR team of journalists who won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for "The DNA Files," a series about the science of genetics.
A native of Canada, Northam spends her time off crewing in the summer, on the ski hills in the winter, and on long walks year-round with her beloved beagle, Tara.
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NPR's Jackie Northam was a freelance reporter based in Kenya when the Rwandan genocide erupted. In this essay, she recalls covering those terrible events and trying to make sense of them afterward. -
Thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing, the U.S. finds itself awash in domestic energy 鈥� and moving rapidly toward self-sufficiency and a position of strategic and economic strength. -
Europe has been trying to reduce its energy dependence on Russia for years. The crisis in Crimea has given the effort a greater sense of urgency. -
Ten supertankers are under construction and there are orders for another 15, but just three years ago the tanker market was barely moving.
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The World Bank is undergoing a vast reorganization, its first in nearly 20 years. The process has been controversial, but the bank's president says it's needed to foster better internal collaboration. -
Launched in August, the Maersk McKinney Moller is the first of a new class of megaships. It's 20 stories high and a quarter-mile long. NPR's Jackie Northam hopped on board in Poland. -
New container ships stack their cargo 10 stories high. They're so wide they won't fit through the Panama Canal until it's widened. Companies say this is what they need to survive in the 21st century. -
For decades, American companies have sent their manufacturing work overseas. Extremely low wages in Asia and elsewhere reduced costs. But as costs overseas go up, a growing number of American companies are rethinking that business model. -
Many spirits are tied to a particular place, but liquor companies have gone global and a small number of firms now dominate the market internationally.
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The canal is being widened to handle much larger ships. But after five years of building, the project is expected to cost at least $1.6 billion more than planned. The builders and the canal operators both say the other side should pay.
