Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Special correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is based in Berlin. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and read at NPR.org. From 2012 until 2018 Nelson was NPR's bureau chief in Berlin. She won the ICFJ 2017 Excellence in International Reporting Award for her work in Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Nelson was also based in Cairo for NPR and covered the Arab World from the Middle East to North Africa during the Arab Spring. In 2006, Nelson opened NPR's first bureau in Kabul, from where she provided listeners in an in-depth sense of life inside Afghanistan, from the increase in suicide among women in a country that treats them as second class citizens to the growing interference of Iran and Pakistan in Afghan affairs. For her coverage of Afghanistan, she won a Peabody Award, Overseas Press Club Award, and the Gracie in 2010. She received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College in 2011 for her coverage in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Nelson spent 20 years as newspaper reporter, including as Knight Ridder's Middle East Bureau Chief. While at the Los Angeles Times, she was sent on extended assignment to Iran and Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She spent three years an editor and reporter for Newsday and was part of the team that won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for covering the crash of TWA Flight 800.
A graduate of the University of Maryland, Nelson speaks Farsi, Dari and German.
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Two German soldiers with far-right views, accused of plotting the assassination of public figures, sparked a probe of that country's military to see whether it's been infiltrated by the far right.
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Teachers and students at an American university in Budapest founded by investor George Soros are bracing for the worst after the adoption of a new Hungarian law that could close the institution.
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For a group of residents on the outskirts of the Ukrainian breakaway city of Donetsk, a Soviet-era war shelter has become their home for the past three years.
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Germany's anti-immigrant party, the AfD, is in turmoil after its most prominent politician Frauke Petry dropped out of the upcoming German parliamentary elections.
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Easter is one of the few times the 3-year-old war in Eastern Ukraine takes a hiatus. The overnight curfew lifted on Saturday so residents could pray and play all night into Easter Sunday.
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Hungary is sending all people seeking asylum to a camp on its border with Serbia to temporarily live in converted shipping containers. Hungary's government says it's to keep out terrorists.
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Hungary is closing all of its refugee camps across the country, and sending asylum seekers to a camp on the border with Serbia where they will live in converted shipping containers while their cases are processed.
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The museum opened March 23 in Gdansk, where the war began. "This is the museum of a war, but not a military museum," says historian Pawel Machcewicz. The government wants something different. -
Central European University is widely considered Hungary's top private university. It was founded by financier George Soros, who has a strained relationship with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. -
Voting in the controversial Turkish referendum that led to the nasty spat between President Erdogan and Western European leaders starts in Germany. It's home to the largest ex-pat European community outside Turkey. It goes on for several weeks.
