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 . She became a Newsdesk reporter in March 2017, and has since covered subjects including , , , and .
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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"The pandemic illuminated inequities that have existed for generations and revealed for all of America a known, but often unaddressed, epidemic impacting public health: racism," Walensky said. -
These digital credentials could return us to normal life more quickly, but they have stirred controversy in some quarters. -
Precise numbers are hard to come by, but several factors 鈥� including school closures and parents working from home 鈥� appear to have led to an increase in households that are homeschooling. -
A new study found no difference in infection rates between schools in Massachusetts that required 3 feet of distance and those requiring 6 feet, so long as everyone wore masks. -
The group that suffered the largest drop in life expectancy was Black males 鈥� a decline of three years. Hispanic males also saw a large decrease, with a decline of 2.4 years. -
The administration says there will only be a few million doses of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine available to distribute right away, assuming the company gets FDA authorization in the next few weeks. -
"The far-right remains highly mobilized and extremely dangerous," with threat numbers as high as in the years before the Oklahoma City bombing, according to an expert at Southern Poverty Law Center. -
The bulletin did not cite any specific threat but said that the risk of violence will persist for weeks. It warned that some extremists may be "emboldened" by the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. -
Despite days of widespread incitement on social media in advance of the insurrection encouraging extremist Trump supporters to assault the U.S. Capitol, law enforcement was unprepared and overwhelmed. -
The groundwork for the attack on the U.S. Capitol had been laid for weeks, say experts on extremism and social media 鈥� but it was a surprise when this time, the rhetoric turned into real violence.
