Dina Temple-Raston
Dina Temple-Raston is a correspondent on NPR's Investigations team focusing on breaking news stories and national security, technology and social justice.
Previously, Temple-Raston worked in NPR's programming department to create and host I'll Be Seeing You, a four-part series of radio specials for the network that focused on the technologies that watch us. Before that, she served as NPR's counter-terrorism correspondent for more than a decade, reporting from all over the world to cover deadly terror attacks, the evolution of ISIS and radicalization. While on leave from NPR in 2018, she independently executive produced and hosted a non-NPR podcast called What Were You Thinking, which looked at what the latest neuroscience can reveal about the adolescent decision-making process.
In 2014, she completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University where, as the first Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism, she studied the intersection of Big Data and intelligence.
Prior to joining NPR in 2007, Temple-Raston was a longtime foreign correspondent for Bloomberg News in China and served as Bloomberg's White House correspondent during the Clinton Administration. She has written four books, including The Jihad Next Door: Rough Justice in the Age of Terror, about the Lackawanna Six terrorism case, and A Death in Texas: A Story About Race, Murder and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption, about the racially-motivated murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas, which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers prize. She is a regular reviewer of national security books for the Washington Post Book World, and also contributes to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Radiolab, the TLS and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others.
She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and she has an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Manhattanville College.
Temple-Raston was born in Belgium and her first language is French. She also speaks Mandarin and a smattering of Arabic.
-
In Arabic, haqq is the word for truth. Muslim software designers gathered recently for a "haqqathon" to develop social media products that can compete with violent extremists online. -
President Obama announced that a U.S. drone strike killed two hostages held by al-Qaida: one American and one Italian. Separate operations also killed two U.S. citizens who were members of al-Qaida.
-
Director John Brennan sees discord within the group, despite its great success at attracting new fighters. -
Jordan has indicated that it is willing to swap a convicted terrorist for a Jordanian pilot held captive by the so-called Islamic State. The terrorist is a woman named Sajida al-Rishawi. She and her husband conducted a suicide attack at a Jordanian hotel. Her belt did not detonate but dozens of people were killed. ISIS has demanded her release in part because she has longstanding ties to the group.
-
Thousands of European men and women traveled to Syria to fight, and some have returned home. The concern is that they were dispatched by al-Qaida or the so-called Islamic State to attack the West.
-
Two of the men involved in the Paris attacks met in prison, where they transformed from small-time criminals to jihadists. France is now redoubling its effort to prevent radicalization in its prisons. -
For the latest on Friday's tense situation in Paris, NPR's counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston offers information she has learned from U.S. officials who are following the standoffs.
-
FBI Director James Comey offered new evidence that North Korea was responsible for the cyber attack against Sony. Some technology experts had been skeptical of the proof the FBI had offered before.
-
In recent cases, teenage Americans were caught en route to Syria. They seem to be more naive than actual threats. U.S. law enforcement is trying to decide how to deal with them. -
It began with messages sent through an anonymous app. Slowly, the Denver-area girls were lured in, until one day they weren't at school. One girl's dad quickly realized why: They were flying to Syria.
