Vanessa Romo
Vanessa Romo is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She covers breaking news on a wide range of topics, weighing in daily on everything from immigration and the treatment of migrant children, to a war-crimes trial where a witness claimed he was the actual killer, to an alleged sex cult. She has also covered the occasional cat-clinging-to-the-hood-of-a-car story.
Before her stint on the News Desk, Romo spent the early months of the Trump Administration on the Washington Desk covering stories about culture and politics – the voting habits of the post-millennial generation, the rise of Maxine Waters as a septuagenarian pop culture icon and DACA quinceañeras as Trump protests.
In 2016, she was at the core of the team that launched and produced The New York Times' first political podcast, The Run-Up with Michael Barbaro. Prior to that, Romo was a Spencer Education Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism where she began working on a radio documentary about a pilot program in Los Angeles teaching black and Latino students to code switch.
Romo has also traveled extensively through the Member station world in California and Washington. As the education reporter at Southern California Public Radio, she covered the region's K-12 school districts and higher education institutions and won the Education Writers Association first place award as well as a Regional Edward R. Murrow for Hard News Reporting.
Before that, she covered business and labor for Member station KNKX, keeping an eye on global companies including Amazon, Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft.
A Los Angeles native, she is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University, where she received a degree in history. She also earned a master's degree in Journalism from NYU. She loves all things camaron-based.
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The massive tornado skirted the metropolitan area but struck several towns to the west of Kansas City, Kan., leaving damaged houses "for a mile in every direction." -
A knife-wielding man attacked a group of elementary school children as they were boarding a bus around 7:45 a.m. local time in the city of Kawasaki, according to news reports. -
The dangerous twisters, which began late Monday night, caused considerable damage. Dayton is now under a boil-water advisory. -
A new law, signed by the governor earlier this week, is aimed at helping diabetics afford the lifesaving medication. -
Nearly all the phony accounts were caught by artificial intelligence and a boost in human monitoring. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said breaking up the company would make purging abusive accounts harder. -
New documents filed on Wednesday allege that the woman was sexually assaulted multiple times. An exam after the birth of the child in December indicated she may have been pregnant before. -
Kenneth Feinberg has been tapped to facilitate talks between the company's lawyers and plaintiffs' representatives over the next two weeks. -
The two-week pilot program will put five autonomous semitrucks on the road, making the journey between Phoenix and Dallas. -
The company's CFO, Steven Taylor, called it a difficult decision but said the "chain has not been operating at an acceptable level of profitability in today's retail environment." -
The child's mother informed federal agents that her 2 ½-year-old son was sick after they were taken into custody last month on the north bank of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, U.S. officials say.
