NEW YORK

Slain reporter’s widow gives birth to baby boy

The widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has given birth to a baby boy in Paris.

The baby, Adam D. Pearl, was born Tuesday, said Ashley McCown, a spokeswoman for the family. The baby and his mother, Mariane Pearl, “are doing fine,” McCown said Thursday.

Adam weighs about 6 pounds, said a Dow Jones & Co. spokesman in New York. The Wall Street Journal is published by Dow Jones.

Pearl, 38, the newspaper’s South Asia bureau chief, disappeared Jan. 23 in Karachi, Pakistan, while researching a story on militants.

Mariane Pearl, a free-lance journalist, now lives in Paris.

WASHINGTON

Public’s trust in government on the decline, polls reveal

The post-Sept. 11 romance between the public and the federal government is fading fast, according to a survey released Thursday by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Public Service.

While polls conducted in the weeks following Sept. 11 found that long-languishing trust in government had increased dramatically, a survey conducted earlier this month suggested that confidence in government was headed back down.

Forty percent of Americans say they trust the federal government to do what’s right at least most of the time. That’s down 17 percentage points from a survey conducted for the center in October but is still higher than the 29 percent recorded in July.

LONDON

Britain gets its first black Cabinet minister

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s latest government shuffle has given Britain its first black Cabinet minister more than a century after the country elected its first nonwhite lawmaker.

Paul Boateng, the new chief secretary to the Treasury, is the first nonwhite member of the Cabinet.

He previously served as a junior health, Home Office and finance minister, lower-ranking government positions outside the Cabinet.

Boateng was promoted Wednesday in a shuffle following the resignation the day before of Stephen Byers as transport minister.

Russia

Rebel Chechen minister balks at ‘terrorist’ label

The rebel foreign ministry of breakaway Chechnya on Thursday condemned a statement by Secretary of State Colin Powell labeling Russia’s opponents in Chechnya as terrorists.

“Powell’s assertion is a misleading statement and an affront to the truth, decency and morality of the thousands of Chechens made homeless by Russia’s dirty war in Chechnya,” the ministry said.

After a Russia-NATO summit in Rome on Tuesday, Powell told reporters: “Russia is fighting terrorists in Chechnya, there’s no question about that.”