As my colleagues Salman Masood and Carlotta Gall report, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot and killed by one of his guards on Tuesday.

Mr. Taseer had recently waged a very public campaign to save the life of a Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy law and his assassin was reportedly angered by the governor’s outspoken support for changing that law, despite the objections of Islamist leaders…

In an update posted on New Year’s Eve, for instance, Mr. Taseer declared that even though he was “under huge pressure” from what he called the country’s “religious right” to stop pushing for changes to the blasphemy law, he had no intention of doing so. “Even,” he added, “if I’m the last man standing.”