The son of the murdered Maltese investigative journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia has described finding parts of his mother’s body around the blazing car in which she died and attacked the island as a “mafia state” run by “crooks”.

“My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists,” Matthew Caruana Galizia, who is also an investigative reporter, wrote in a moving and at times graphic Facebook post.

“But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead.”

Read more.

She was excited and scared, as always, but this time more excited. Beijing was “like New York in the 1980s”, as she used to put it – cheap, buzzing and ready for change. “People are actually doing things, not just talking about doing them.”

Kim had been testing the waters, spending the last year and a half living in China for a couple of months at a time. She wanted to make sure she could make ends meet working freelance, with some odd policy analysis reporting to pay the extras.

As always, she was bubbling with ideas. She wanted to write a feature on Mao impersonators, and another on the social repercussions of the one-child policy. She wanted to show a different China to western readers, but wasn’t sure the time had come for a woman to take that role.

That day last June, we went to a Soho bookstore. She started reading through tomes about the history of China while I sneaked downstairs to get her a copy of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. It’s one of my favorite books, and I wanted her to have a copy to always remember why she had to keep writing, despite the difficulties.

The collection of essays talks about a “poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world”. In my head, Calvino’s auspicious image for the next millennium had blonde-reddish hair, and looked a bit like Kim.

Read more.