• June 17, 2002
• Vol. 57
• No. 23

A New Life

Daniel Pearl's Wife, Mariane, Welcomes Baby Adam

"Come out, come out, the world is not such a bad place," Daniel Pearl once sang to a friend's overdue baby. Tragically, he was not there to croon those words to his own son. On May 28 his widow, French-born journalist Mariane, gave birth to a 5-lb. 11-oz. boy, Adam D. Pearl. "My sister and her son are fine, very well," says her brother, Satchi Van Neyenhoff.

A Buddhist, Mariane, 34, says she has leaned heavily on her beliefs since her 38-year-old husband, the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, disappeared while investigating Islamic extremists in Pakistan earlier this year. After a grisly videotape delivered to the American consulate in Karachi proved Daniel had been murdered, Mariane opted to stay for a time in Pakistan to "show defiance against fear," as she later explained in a New York Times editorial.

Now living in Paris, Pearl, who is writing a book about her experiences, played host to Laura Bush two weeks before Adam's birth. "One of the things they [talked] about," reports presidential advisor Karen Hughes, who was along for the visit, "was that it is important for everyone in all countries to teach children that it is wrong to hate."