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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The move by Eli Lilly came less than 24 hours after Johnson & Johnson paused further dosing in all of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate clinical trials while it investigated a volunteer's illness. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
Gov. Ron DeSantis says the portal was designed to frustrate users, "so people just say, oh, the hell with it, I'm not going to do that." Florida has been among the slowest states to process claims. -
Obama describes having trouble sleeping and periods throughout the pandemic in which she has felt down: "Spiritually, these are not ... fulfilling times." -
In a dissent, Chief Justice Bernette Johnson compared Fair Wayne Bryant's sentence to "Pig Laws" in the years after Reconstruction, which enacted harsh penalties for theft and other petty crimes. -
Amid high temperatures and a pandemic, green spaces are a lifeline. But new data shows parks in low-income and nonwhite areas are smaller and more crowded than those in high-income and white areas. -
The instances spanned 40 states and the District of Columbia, and allege excessive force by state and local police, and National Guard troops and federal agents against racial justice protesters. -
Vaccine candidates are in advanced clinical trials, and WHO's director-general expresses hope they will be effective. But until then, he said, the world is reliant on "the basics" of disease control. -
About 1,000 prisoners who escaped during the attack were later found by Afghan security forces. The attack shattered a three-day ceasefire between Afghan forces and the Taliban.
