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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Following an attack on two Jewish men in Berlin, one Jewish leader in Germany is calling on men to not wear skullcaps in big cities there to avoid making them targets of violence.
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Hamburg soon will become the first city in Germany to ban most diesel vehicles from driving on several key streets in an effort to cut down on air pollution.
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Orbán, 54, handily secured his third consecutive term on an anti-migration platform in an election with a record-high turnout. His right-wing Fidesz party is poised to regain majority in parliament. -
Some election observers say it may be mail-in ballots from new citizens who live outside Hungary that decide whether incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party win Sunday's election.
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Hungary's right-wing nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban could be heading to a third term after elections on Sunday, unless the fractured opposition can unite against him.
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The U.S. and Canada are also joining the effort, in response to the attempted killing of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Great Britain at the beginning of March.
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An investigative journalist and his fiancée were killed, sparking a political upheaval. But that failed to quell the largest protests in the Central European country since the 1989 Velvet Revolution. -
The murder of a a young investigative journalist in Slovakia led to street protests and the collapse of the government. Now protesters want fresh elections to sweep away corruption.
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Members of Germany's Social Democratic Party have voted to join a coalition government under Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Hungary and Poland have grown closer together as their populist leaders come under criticism from the rest of the European Union.
