Frank Langfitt
Frank Langfitt is NPR's London correspondent. He covers the UK and Ireland, as well as stories elsewhere in Europe.
Langfitt arrived in London in June 2016. A week later, the UK voted for Brexit. He's been busy ever since, covering the most tumultuous period in British politics in decades. Langfitt has reported on everything from Brexit's economic impact, Chinese influence campaigns and terror attacks to the renewed push for Scottish independence, political tensions in Northern Ireland and Megxit. Langfitt has contributed to NPR podcasts, including Consider This, The Indicator from Planet Money, Code Switch and Pop Culture Happy Hour. He also appears on the BBC and PBS Newshour.
Previously, Langfitt spent five years as an NPR correspondent covering China. Based in Shanghai, he drove a free taxi around the city for a series on a changing China as seen through the eyes of ordinary people. As part of the series, Langfitt drove passengers back to the countryside for Chinese New Year and served as a wedding chauffeur. He expanded his reporting into a book, The Shanghai Free Taxi: Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China (Public Affairs, Hachette).
While in China, Langfitt also reported on the government's infamous "black jails" — secret detention centers — as well as his own travails taking China's driver's test, which he failed three times.
Before moving to Shanghai, Langfitt was NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi. He reported from Sudan, covered the civil war in Somalia, and interviewed imprisoned Somali pirates, who insisted they were just misunderstood fishermen. During the Arab Spring, Langfitt covered the uprising and crushing of the democracy movement in Bahrain.
Prior to Africa, Langfitt was NPR's labor correspondent based in Washington, DC. He covered coal mine disasters in West Virginia, the 2008 financial crisis and the bankruptcy of General Motors. His story with producer Brian Reed of how GM failed to learn from a joint-venture factory with Toyota was featured on This American Life and has been taught in business schools at Yale, Penn and NYU.
In 2008, Langfitt covered the Beijing Olympics as a member of NPR's team, which won an Edward R. Murrow Award for sports reporting. Langfitt's print and visual journalism have also been honored by the Overseas Press Association and the White House News Photographers Association.
Before coming to NPR, Langfitt spent five years as a correspondent in Beijing for The Baltimore Sun, covering a swath of Asia from East Timor to the Khyber Pass.
Langfitt spent his early years in journalism stringing for the Philadelphia Inquirer and living in Hazard, Kentucky, where he covered the state's Appalachian coalfields for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Prior to becoming a reporter, Langfitt dug latrines in Mexico and drove a taxi in his hometown of Philadelphia. Langfitt is a graduate of Princeton and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
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Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday addresses her ruling Conservative Party as she faces intense pressure from her political rivals over her plan to take the U.K. out of the European Union.
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The World Trade Organization is rarely in the headlines — but the Trump administration's hostility and the issues connected with Brexit and the U.S.-China trade dispute has pushed the WTO to the fore.
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The British government has named and issued photographs of two men it says are Russian military intelligence officers who carried out a nerve agent attack in England.
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Scotland Yard says it has sufficient evidence to charge Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov in absentia with attempted murder over the poisonings in the city of Salisbury in March.
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Britain's opposition Labour Party is trying to defuse widespread attacks from Jewish community leaders who've accused the party's leader of being either anti-Semitic or tolerant of anti-Semitism.
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The leaders of Britain's Labour Party are meeting Tuesday to try to diffuse accusations that anti-Semitism is rife within the organization.
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As the pope departed for Rome Sunday night, his visit to Ireland only seemed to reinforce the decline of Roman Catholic authority in a country that was once synonymous with the faith. -
But his contrition was marred by a new allegation. An ex-Vatican official accused Pope Francis of ignoring for years sexual misconduct allegations against a U.S. cardinal, who has since resigned.
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The pope arrives in Ireland to take part in the World Meeting of Families, a Vatican-sponsored gathering of Catholics, shortly after a report on sex abuse in Pennsylvania.
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A man drove a car across traffic and into a security barrier outside the Houses of Parliament in London on Tuesday. Three people were injured in what British police are treating as a terror attack.
