NEW YORK: Mariane Pearl, the widow of the abducted and murdered US journalist Daniel Pearl, has signed up as a roving columnist for the lifestyle magazine Glamour, the New York Times reported on April 17.

According to the newspaper, Pearl, 38, will contribute monthly despatches from around the globe, including one on the travails of a former Cambodian sex slave. “What motivates me is finding out what makes a human being stand up and rise to the occasion,” Pearl told the Times in a telephone interview from Paris.

Pearl said she was partly motivated by the desire to demonstrate to her son, Adam, that journalism can be worthwhile and that on occasion, “it can be worth dying for”.

Her husband, Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia correspondent, disappeared in Karachi on January 23, 2002. A graphic video depicting his gruesome decapitation at

the hands of his captors was delivered to the US consulate. Adam, who turns four years old next week, was born just a few months after his father’s murder.