Dark clouds gather over press freedom in Europe

A week ago, Peter R. de Vries, a star journalist in the Netherlands, was leaving a studio where he’d just appeared as a guest on a TV program, RTL Boulevard, when a gunman shot him five times, including in the head. De Vries has covered the criminal underworld dating back to the eighties and nineties, when he tracked down a man who helped kidnap Freddy Heineken, the beer tycoon; recently, de Vries had been acting as a confidant and spokesperson for a gang informant in a high-profile case...