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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The 93-year-old monarch urged self-discipline and resolve amid the pandemic. "I hope in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge."
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The British government is under fire for only testing a tiny percentage of National Health Service staff as deaths from COVID-19 in the United Kingdom quickly rise to nearly 3,000.
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Many supermarket shelves have been stripped bare as the coronavirus spreads in Britain, which led to this tearful Facebook video that has struck a nerve across the country.
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The virus pandemic comes at a vulnerable time for the Britain's overburdened public health care system.
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Britain is ending its more than 40-year membership in the European Union. Here are some of the ways Brexit is expected to play out.
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It will be the third general election since 2015. The stakes are high, voters are weary and the two main candidates for prime minister are polarizing.
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It looks like a big breakthrough in Britain's long process to leave the European Union, but the saga doesn't end here.
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In a dramatic day, a defection robbed Johnson's ruling Conservative Party of its single-seat majority in Parliament and lawmakers set the way to vote to prevent the U.K. from a no-deal Brexit.
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NPR's Frank Langfitt reflects on a decade as a journalist in China and how he bypassed reporting restrictions by offering people free rides. It's the subject of his new memoir, The Shanghai Free Taxi.
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Britain's prime minister vows to bring the country out of the European Union at the end of October — deal or no deal. Here are some of the key challenges he faces.