Deborah Amos
Deborah Amos covers the Middle East for NPR News. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.
In 2009, Amos won the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown University and in 2010 was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award by Washington State University. Amos was part of a team of reporters who won a 2004 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of Iraq. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1991-1992, Amos returned to Harvard in 2010 as a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School.
In 2003, Amos returned to NPR after a decade in television news, including ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight, and the PBS programs NOW with Bill Moyers and Frontline.
When Amos first came to NPR in 1977, she worked first as a director and then a producer for Weekend All Things Considered until 1979. For the next six years, she worked on radio documentaries, which won her several significant honors. In 1982, Amos received the Prix Italia, the Ohio State Award, and a DuPont-Columbia Award for "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," and in 1984 she received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Refugees."
From 1985 until 1993, Amos spend most of her time at NPR reporting overseas, including as the London Bureau Chief and as an NPR foreign correspondent based in Amman, Jordan. During that time, Amos won several awards, including a duPont-Columbia Award and a Breakthru Award, and widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991.
A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Amos is also the author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2010) and Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992).
Amos is a Ferris Professor at Princeton, where she teaches journalism during the fall term.
Amos began her career after receiving a degree in broadcasting from the University of Florida at Gainesville.
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The blind father of a Syrian refugee family in New Jersey gets free dental work from a dentist who knows what it's like to be lost and overwhelmed. Twenty years ago she fled the war in Bosnia.
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As they learn some basic English, members of a family of Syrian refugees in New Jersey also unravel mysteries about life in the U.S. — such as how to drive or what's in the woods.
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The U.S. looks like it will meet the administration's goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the fiscal year in October. Newcomers are already getting a rundown on life in America.
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Faith-based groups are challenging political opposition to Syrian refugees and taking a leading role in resettling them in the U.S. They've provided shelter, jobs and schooling for the newly arrived.
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A State Department official says the U.S. will admit even more Syrians next year. The program continues despite complaints that Islamist militants could slip in amid the legitimate refugees.
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Daring visual artists, whose edgy work challenges religious and political taboos, have become a critical voice in the conservative kingdom — where open calls for reform are a criminal offense. -
Bahram Mekanik was among the seven Iranians and Iranian-Americans pardoned as part of Washington's prisoner swap with Iran. He was accused of shipping millions of dollars in technology to Iran.
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While negotiations over a nuclear deal between the United States and Iran began two years ago, smaller efforts for diplomacy go back to the last decade. -
King Salman's first year on the throne has brought big changes to the kingdom. It has a more aggressive foreign policy, is actively confronting Iran and is speaking out more openly than in the past. -
In power for a year, the Saudi monarch has been aggressive in confronting Iran at a time when many in the kingdom feel the U.S. is not doing enough to counter Iranian ambitions in the region.
