Angelina Jolie is expecting a baby this summer with Brad Pitt, PEOPLE has confirmed. “Yes, I’m pregnant,” Jolie told a charity aid worker in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Monday. The pregnancy has since been confirmed by representatives of both stars.

This is the first biological child for Jolie, 30, who is already the mother of son Maddox, 4, whom she adopted from Cambodia, and daughter Zahara, 1, adopted from Ethiopia in July.

Jolie, who has often spoken about expanding her family, added that she’d like to adopt again. In October she told PEOPLE: “There’s something about making a choice, waking up and traveling somewhere and finding your family.”

She is currently in the Dominican Republic filming The Good Shepard with Matt Damon. She is also working with Yele Haiti, a charity for the empowerment of Haitian citizens.

Pitt, 42, who recently took steps to adopt Maddox and Zahara, including changing their names to Jolie-Pitt, has talked of wanting a family for years. He has no children from his 4-year marriage to Jennifer Aniston.

CREDIT: FLYNETIn July, Pitt accompanied Jolie to Ethiopia, where she completed the adoption process for Zahara.

More recently, the couple have been spotted all over the globe, including Kenya, England, Ethiopia, Canada, Tokyo and Pakistan, where they spent Thanksgiving.

Jolie has never been happier, say friends. “This is a woman who values her relationships with her children more than anything,” a source tells PEOPLE. “Now she is creating a family in the context of an adult relationship.”

Two important roles have taken Jolie around the world — her roles as U.N. goodwill ambassador, and as mother of her son, Maddox, and new daughter, Zahara.

“They’re the greatest little people I’ve ever met, and they give me so much joy,” Jolie said.

Both of Jolie’s children are adopted. Maddox came from Cambodia four years ago, and Zahara came from Ethiopia, where she fought to stay alive in a world of hunger and desperation.

“She had a choice of life or death — because some children that were in a very similar situation to her passed away at that time, [kids] who didn’t get out in time,” Jolie said.

Jolie managed to get Zahara out at 6 months old. She was one of the lucky ones.

“A child dies, I think the stats are, every three seconds in Africa from completely preventable diseases, for the most part,” said Sarah Mraz, director of child programs at Wide Horizons for Children, a private, nonprofit adoption and child welfare agency in Waltham, Mass., that places children from 10 countries, including the United States, with U.S. families.

“The reason these children are placed with international families is because they cannot be cared for in their country of origin,” she added.

When Jolie arrived back in the U.S. from her last adoption trip, the cameras started clicking again. She and little Zahara graced the covers of numerous magazines, and the public took note.

“I remember being at the store and seeing Angelina on the cover of, I think it was People magazine,” said Ann-Charles Watt, “and I said, ‘Oh my gosh! We can do this.’ ”

Watt and her husband, Jason Hillard, residents of Athens, Ohio, wanted to adopt a child. When they saw Jolie on that magazine cover with her adopted daughter, their decision to raise a child from Ethiopia was clear.

“In the grand scheme of things, she changed our lives,” Watt said. “It’s kind of hilarious to think of, but yeah, Angelina Jolie probably brought us an African child.”

Americans have been adopting from around the globe for many years. The highest adoption numbers in 2004 came from China, Russia and Guatemala. Ethiopia’s number is much lower. Some say it’s because of lack of awareness.

But that seems to be changing. Since Jolie adopted Zahara, international adoption agencies in the United States say inquiries about Ethiopian babies have doubled.

“Anyone similar to Ms. Jolie in celebrity status does bring increased media attention, and does increase interest for other parents to come forward and help these children,” said Mraz.

As for Watt and Hillard, they should hear in the next six months if they will make the trip to Ethiopia to pick up their new baby.

“It feels like we are reaching out in a way,” Hillard said. “We’re inviting a whole new genealogy to our family line. We invite culture and diversity into our family and those are the things that inspired me to adopt.”

Jolie hopes more people follow in her footsteps and discover the rewards of saving a child who might not otherwise live to see a first birthday.

“It is wonderful to hear of the relief efforts that are finally coming into New Orleans and the rest of the region today, but as we all know, it is simply not going to be enough,” she said. “The federal government’s response must be dramatically increased in order to prevent a further loss of life.”

Military convoys have now started arriving with supplies of food, medicine and water, and evacuations are continuing. According to the BBC, if casualty figures start to mount, President Bush will come under more pressure to explain what many see as a huge failure of America’s emergency response system.

The President finally managed to visit ‘ground zero’ four days after the hurricane struck. Numerous - and very poignant - interviews with Americans showed them asking George W. Bush to concentrate on providing support for ‘homeland’ disasters instead of waging ‘a war he will never win’ on foreign soil.

“To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not, could not, look at myself in the morning if I did that,” Jolie said in an issue that hits newsstands on June 7.

For months, speculation has swirled around the world that Pitt, 41, the star of movies like “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Troy,” and Jolie, 30, were having a romantic affair since filming “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” last year.

The talk seemed to have some weight when Pitt and his wife, actress Jennifer Aniston, separated in January after more than four years of marriage.

The rumors were revived in March when Aniston filed for divorce citing irreconcilable differences, and then in April when tabloids ran photos of Jolie and Pitt together on a beach in Africa with Jolie’s 4-year-old son, Maddox.

But in the interview, Jolie said that Maddox may be the one with the final word on whom she may become involved with next. Jolie adopted Maddox from a Cambodian orphanage.

“I am not dating anybody. I think the next man I get involved with would have to become Mad’s father, and that’s a high bar as far as I’m concerned. I’m not anticipating that coming any time soon,” she said.

Jolie did say, however, that she has a string of lovers she called “maintenance men” with whom she has “intimate friendships.”

Jolie, who won an Oscar for portraying a psychiatric patient in “Girl, Interrupted,” has divorced twice. She was most recently married to actor Billy Bob Thornton, whom she divorced in 2003.