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It must have been with a sense of disappointment, not to say shock, that readers of this week's edition of New! magazine encountered the admission on page three that "there are often elements of people's private lives we just don't know about".

Say it's not so! Surely, with the all-seeing eyes of "A. Pal", the eavesdropping talents of "R. Source" and the mind-reading techniques of body-language experts, nothing remains secret from the celebrity press?

It's a sector of the media which, in my view, is insufficiently maligned. Shamelessly feeding the market in paparazzi photography, the celeb mags tolerate journalistic standards which would shame the red-top tabloids, the skirts of which they hide behind when the media is being censured for the threat it poses to personal privacy.

The latest Closer boasts cover-line quotes from Charlotte Church, Gavin Henson, Coleen Rooney and Abbey Clancy. Yet a flick through the pages reveals that not one of them has given an interview. Ms Church is nonetheless quoted word-for-word at length via "pals" who presumably were equipped with a digital recorder or taking a meticulous shorthand note when the singer confided in them.

This week's Look boasts a "Shock Confession" from Cheryl Cole. She wants a baby. "I am ready now. I'm a woman not a girl," runs a pull quote. The article begins by acknowledging that Ms Cole and the dancer Derek Hough "haven't officially announced that they're an item" but goes on to quote an "insider" saying that the singer has already chosen a baby name. "She would love a little girl and she loves the names Martha and Isabelle." There is, it turns out, no interview with Ms Cole.

Meanwhile the rival weekly Heat has a rather different take on the story. "The truth" about Cheryl and Derek, it claims, is "that they were in fact never romantically involved". This conclusion is supported by body-language expert Judi James, who examines a pap shot of the pair in the street and opines that "not only has Cheryl allowed an unfeasible spatial gap to occur here, she's even employing that killer bag as an airbag to enforce the barrier between them."

I'd say the celebrity magazine sector is dragging down journalism. These "pals" with their extraordinary sensory powers encourage the public expectation that no conversation, no matter how personal, is private. Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the News of the World, took that culture to its illegal extreme and served four months in jail for hacking into the voicemails of his targets.

The celeb magazines benefit from being seen as fluffy, less nasty than the tabloids. Yet the coverage is often spiteful. New! described Victoria Beckham as "looking knackered" with "greasy" hair as she launched her collection at New York Fashion Week. Closer said Ms Beckham looked "gaunt, rundown and ghostly pale".

The suffocating levels of attention take their toll, as the magazines admit. Heat reports that Mischa Barton has parted company with her boyfriend because "he was expecting they'd get some attention, but he never imagined it would be as bad as it was." In one of the few on-the-record interviews, actress Jaime Winstone tells Look of her split with Alfie Allen: "It's not healthy to have all that attention on a relationship."

Of course some "pals" are close to home, near neighbours or distant relatives. Or it's the celebrity's own agent, trying to do damage limitation by working with a journalist who is writing around a pap picture. Sometimes the source is the D-lister invited to a party in return for generating publicity by dishing gossip on more famous guests.

A New! story this week on the love life of Big Brother star Chantelle Houghton seemed a convenient publicity coup for lingerie store La Senza, where she shopped for frillies in an effort to win back her ex, Samuel Preston. But the romance is off, according to Preston's Twitter account: "I think my friend A. Source has been getting the wrong end of the stick once again."

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At a small gathering in Georgetown last week, Chuck Schumer, senior senator of New York state (and a strong contender to be next senate majority leader), discussed the potential of a Democratic disaster at the ballot box this November. He, like me, remains optimistic. But he also focused on a fundamental Democratic problem when it comes to elections, and particularly these midterms: the party doesn't talk to voters. At least, in a way that appeals to them, that captures their imaginations and frustrations.

It's undeniable that Democrats have done more for the middle class in the last two years than any president in generations has done in eight years of office. Healthcare reform. Tax cuts for struggling businesses. Extended unemployment benefit. The stimulus bill. Financial reform. Equal pay legislation. Reining in credit card abuses. Strengthening voting rights. The policy record could hardly be more impressive.

But as one senior White House correspondent told me this weekend, "Democrats think good policy is the same as good politics." In other words, the party relies on their policy achievements to speak for themselves. Sadly, that's not enough to sway many voters at the ballot box. Americans – though hardly alone in this trait – have a sad history of voting against their own interests. Think of the remarkable re-election of President Bush in 2004; much of his support came from the poorest of Americans whose interest he definitively did not serve, with the richer getting tax cuts and the poorest getting, well, cuts in pretty much every social benefit they needed.

The problem is best illustrated by the recent "Main Street" appeal of the Republican party's leadership, as they do their best to capture both their moderate base and the populism (extremism) of this year's Tea Party enthusiasm. Last week, they presented their "Pledge to
America" – a policy manifesto they had the audacity to compare itself to the declaration of independence and the constitution itself.

Obviously, this was a barely disguised version of Gingrich's much more substantive "Contract with America". But this Republican pledge didn't only lack substance. It was packed with downright fantasy.

The pledge is rife with condemnations of the budget deficit. Yet, practically the only identifiable legislative suggestion is to extend Bush tax cuts for the rich – at a cost of over $3.5tn. And – as the New York Times's Paul Krugman points out – the only spending cut actually proposed is cancelling the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (a Republican baby), which would save less than half of 1% of the money needed for the tax giveaway for the top 1% of Americans. In essence, the message for anyone who cares to scratch the surface of the proposals is this: deficits are bad – let's make this one bigger.

But the substance of the pledge, as absurd and flimsy as it is, is beside the point. Certainly, politicians talk a big game during election periods, but Republicans have no problem downright lying about what they can deliver.

And yet it works. It appeals to voters. Their promises (in this case, delivered in a lumber yard) aren't based on reality, but they do provide a great platform for "down home" rhetoric. Language Americans understand and relate to.

Democrats, on the other hand, are so old-fashioned. Their rhetoric is based on the truth. Absolutely, Democrats were the original masters of message delivery during Clinton's first presidential campaign. But they're much better-off attacking than they are defending their record, as they are forced to do this year. That's because, time and again, they make the mistake of touting real policies at the expense of actually talking and listening to voters. Hence the old Republican charge that Democrats are out-of-touch, elitist and believe they know better than voters what is in America's best interests.

In reality, Democrats are just bad at explaining how they're working for voters.

Of course, part of this is down to a rushed and pressured press corps, driven by ratings to cover political theatre, rather than analyse policy. But that reflects the proclivity of their viewers, and it's a dynamic that isn't going to change anytime soon. Democrats have now acknowledged that media imbalance, and rarely whine about it. But they still do little to play it themselves.

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Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appealed early today to the Palestinian leadership to continue direct negotiations for a peace deal despite his refusal to prevent the resumption of Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.

The midnight deadline set for an end to the partial freeze on settlement building passed amid last ditch international attempts to broker a compromise between Israel and a Palestinian leadership demanding that the ten month moratorium be prolonged.

In a clear message to settlers and the Israeli political hard right, Mr Netanyahu had earlier called on "the residents in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and the political parties to show restraint and responsibility today and in the future" as it had during the moratorium.

That statement from the Prime Minister's Office was apparently designed to avert triumphalist celebrations by settlers of the end of the freeze that might further endanger the talks – and possibly to prepare the ground for limited and undeclared restrictions on settlement building in the months ahead.

As the deadline passed last night without Mr Netanyhau accepting Washington's urgings to extend the moratorium, the Israeli Prime Minister promised "continued contacts" over the coming days to salvage "expedited, honest" talks between the two sides.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, who had originally threatened to pull out of the talks if the moratorium was not extended, was expected to stay his hand pending consultations with his Fatah faction, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation executive, and the Arab League, over the next week on how to respond to the end of the settlement freeze. The leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine suspended its membership in the PLO yesterday to signify its disapproval of negotiations without a freeze.

Dr Sabri Saidam, a senior aide to Mr Abbas and deputy secretary general of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, confirmed the plan for consultations yesterday and said Mr Abbas would be reporting the deadlock to the 4 October meeting of the "follow up committee" of the Arab League, representing Arab States – the body which sanctioned Mr Abbas's entry into direct negotiations in the first place. Dr Saidam said he expected talks with Israel to be put on hold while the consultations continued.

David Axelrod, one of Mr Obama's close aides, said on an ABC Sunday talk show: "We think this [the talks] is an unparalleled opportunity and a rare one, and we have to seize the advantage of that, and we are going to urge and push throughout this day to get some kind of resolution."

In a BBC interview before returning to Israel from the US, where has been in intensive talks to resolve the crisis, the Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, said: "The chance of achieving a mutually agreed understanding about a moratorium is 50-50. The chances of having a peace process is much higher."

Mr Barak – who leads Mr Netanyahu's coalition partner, the Labor Party – is widely thought to have been in favour of prolonging the partial freeze with some support from the Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor, who had proposed extending it in those settlements that Israel would not hope to retain in any final status agreement with the Palestinians. But they are outnumbered by the hawks in Mr Netanyahu's inner cabinet, including Moshe Yaalon, Benny Begin, Avigdor Lieberman, and Eli Yishai, the leader of Shas, the ultra-orthodox party, who did not attend the ministerial meeting which authorised the moratorium in the first place.

In response to Mr Netanyahu's call for restraint, Danny Dayan, the chairman of the Yesha Council, the main umbrella body for settlers, said it was "more important to get back to work than to celebrate". The moratorium had been "of benefit to no one," he said. "It's like a film. You press pause and then you press play. It doesn't make it any more dramatic when you resume where you left off."

Meanwhile, a British ship with 10 passengers, all Jews, from Britain, the US, Israel and Germany, set out for Gaza from Cyprus yesterday in an attempt to break Israel's siege of the territory. The passengers include a holocaust survivor, Reuven Moskowitz, and Rami Elhanan, who lost his daughter to a suicide bombing in 1997, and a former Israeli Air Froce pilot, Yonatan Shapira. The voyage has been co-ordinated by the UK group Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which counts Marion Miliband, the mother of the new Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, among its members. The passengers' spokesman, Alison Prager from the UK, said the voyage was an "opportunity to make clear to world public opinion that not all Jews support Israeli policy."

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One of the world's favourite Frenchmen is coming home after 30 years of official neglect. The largest ever exhibition of the works of the Impressionist master Claude Monet opens in Paris tomorrow. The almost 200 paintings – including some never shown in France before – will be the first large Monet retrospective in his home country since 1980.

If you live in Paris, it is a rule that you never visit the Eiffel Tower. The French art establishment used, similarly, to have little time for Claude Monet (1840-1926), regarded as a pretty but simplistic painter for American billionaires and Japanese tourists.

The exhibition at the Grand Palais, just off the Champs Elysées, should put an end to all that. Over 80,000 advance tickets have been sold. The organisers hope that at least 700,000 people will visit the show before it closes on 24 January.

The exhibition has been accompanied by an avalanche of critical books, reclaiming Monet as not just a painter of poppies and haystacks but a profound and revolutionary artist. He was also a legendary gourmet. The literary outpourings include a reproduction of his favourite recipes collected in a notebook by his second wife, Alice.

The Monet exhibition is the idea of Guy Cogeval, director of the Musée d'Orsay, who believes that France has become too blasé about its extraordinary heritage of late 19th-century art. While working for eight years in the United States, he said, he was confronted with enormous public interest and critical respect for the art that France takes for granted.

"We are a little like spoilt children," he said. "In north America, Claude Monet is considered a living god. The same in Japan and Latin America. I was astonished when I returned to France to find that there is a kind of disaffection for Monet."

Almost all the important works on the artist in the last 30 years have been written by American and British art scholars, he pointed out. One of them, Professor Richard Thomson of Edinburgh University, is a co-curator of the exhibition.

He has organised the show around the fulcrum of the year 1890, when Monet began his celebrated "series" paintings of Rouen cathedral or haystacks or, later, water lilies. Interest in Monet as a painter of the outdoors, light and ephemeral beauty has, Professor Thomson says, distracted from his importance as a subtle and perfectionist painter of moods or emotional "interiors". The exhibition is therefore entitled Monet: L'Aventure Intérieure.

About a third of the 170 canvasses and 20-odd drawings in the Grand Palais exhibition come from the collection in the Musée d'Orsay. They include favourites like the field of poppies near Argenteuil, west of Paris, painted in 1873, or the sun breaking through a mauve London pea-souper fog over the Houses of Parliament, painted in 1904.

Two thirds of the paintings have been loaned from galleries and private collections in the United States, Japan, Russia, Britain and Australia. A handful were sold almost directly by the painter to collectors abroad and have never been exhibited before in France.

One institution which refused to co-operate, however, was just over two kilometres away from the Grand Palais. The Musée Marmottan-Monet in western Paris has the largest collection of Monet paintings in the world: over 100 canvasses left by the painter's son Michel Monet in 1966.

The curators of the large Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais asked the Marmottan for a number of paintings including the iconic Impression Sunrise (1872), a view of the port of Le Havre which helped to give the Impressionist movement its name. The rival museum refused.

If 2010 was going to be the year of a great Monet revival in Paris, the logic presumably went, why should the Marmottan be stripped of its best Monets? The museum, near the Ranelagh gardens in the 16th arrondissement, is therefore organising its own "retrospective". It will put its entire collection of 135 paintings, sketches and notebooks on display for the first time from 6 October to 20 February. These were works that Monet chose not to sell and bequeathed to his son. The exhibition is therefore called La Collection Intime.

In the 14 weeks when the two shows overlap, art lovers will be able to view over 300 Monet canvasses in the rival exhibitions (plus those that remain in the Musée d'Orsay, plus the giant murals of water lillies permanently affixed to the walls of the Musée de l'Orangerie).

You wait for 30 years for a big Monet exhibition and two come along at the same time. On the other hand, the advance sales for the Grand Palais exhibition suggest that – whatever the French art establishment once thought – you can't have too much Monet.

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Pakistan has been hit by the worst floods in its history. An estimated 2,000 people have died so far with close to 1m homes badly damaged or destroyed. The United Nations estimates more than 20 million people are suffering, with over 160,000 sq km affected as a result of the flooding – exceeding the combined total affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

The main flood areas are southern Punjab, interior Sindh and the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Two of these – Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and southern Punjab – are believed to be regional hubs of Islamic militancy.

So far, neither the military nor the government has proven motivated or capable enough to ameliorate the situation. Foreign aid is slow and grossly inadequate. The geographical location of the areas and the presence of militants discourage both foreign and local donor agencies from sending ground teams. The lack of foreign and domestic aid is also being attributed to the credibility deficit of the inefficient and notoriously corrupt government.

Together, these factors have created a vacuum in relief efforts, which can have potentially disastrous consequences in areas where fundamentalist parties and militant groups have strong grassroots organisational structures.

The presence of these groups allowed them the fastest reaction time when calamity struck. Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the alleged humanitarian wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba (responsible for the Mumbai terror attacks) is out helping flood victims in southern Punjab. The Al-Khidmat Foundation, the welfare wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest and most influential rightwing religious party, claims to have mobilised 16,500 volunteers and provided food and medical care to tens of thousands of people all over the country. Another organisation, the Al-Rasheed Trust, which is banned by the US for helping the Taliban, has been very active in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

The relief camps are often set in mosques and madrasas where the local imam is entrusted with disbursing aid. The presence of mosques and imams in every town provides the opportunity of an organised relief effort. The posters outside the relief camps and the messages on the food items are often Islamic, anti-government and anti-US. Many madrasas in southern Punjab fill the void created by the destruction of most public schools, while providing free religious education. The religious groups like the Al-Khidmat Foundation are increasingly recruiting volunteers from the flood-affected areas.

The authorities' abysmal performance is strengthening the Islamic extremist view that the government is corrupt, incompetent and hopelessly dependent on unreliable foreign allies. Many of these criticisms of the government are justified, but excuses cannot be made to allow the militants to regroup – and to win public support.

There are hundreds of thousands of young, impressionable and deeply vulnerable people in the flood-affected areas right now. Since the earliest response in many areas was from the religious organisations and militant groups, victims are beginning to reconsider their views of them.

These groups are being so efficient, as for now they are acting as religious charities. They are winning the hearts and minds of people who feel abandoned by all other sources. I do not expect those affected by the floods to discriminate between sources of aid: in the flood areas it is a Hobbesian world where the self-preservation instinct prevails over everything else.

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A historic vote in the Swiss parliament today has formed an executive consisting of more female ministers than male, propelling the country to the forefront of sexual equality in politics just four decades after it granted women the vote.

The election of Simonetta Sommaruga, of the Social Democratic party, to the seven-member Swiss federal council means there are now four women and three men at the helm of the country's political system. Accepting her new role in French, Italian and German, Sommaruga said the government should work hard to further the rights of minorities.

"The majority must take into account all minorities, whether they be cultural, linguistic, religious, political or of any other kind," she said. MPs, who had been engaged in the four-round vote since the early hours, applauded.

In a country which only gave women the vote in national elections in 1971 – and in which one canton blocked them from local votes until 1990 – the creation of the first female-dominated federal council has been greeted as a symbolic leap forward.

"I think it's wonderful," Anders Johnsson, secretary general of the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), told the Associated Press. "When it comes to the executive, most countries drag their feet."

Before the vote, Social Democrats chairman Christian Levrat said a majority women government would be an "essential, decisive step".

The move sees Switzerland join Finland as a country with a female-majority government. Of the 20 ministers in the Finnish cabinet, 11 are women, including the prime minister, Mari Kiviniemi. Finland's president, Tarja Halonen, is also a woman. Countries such as Spain and Norway also have strong female representation in senior government positions.

In the multiparty Swiss cabinet, 50-year-old Sommaruga will join the federal council president and economics minister, Doris Leuthard, the foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey and the justice minister, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, along with their three male counterparts.

Sommaruga's election was prompted by the resignation of the transport minister Moritz Leuenberger. A second vote to replace another male minister will get underway later.

Observers say that Switzerland's rapid propulsion of women to top jobs in politics has been caused at least in part by its commitment to grassroots activism and to flexible working hours. Even some of the most powerful MPs work part-time, meaning that women with families can more easily hold elected office.

However, many said the vision of sexual equality in the executive gives a misleading impression of Swiss advances. Women are still outnumbered three to one in parliament, while few have made it to the top of the business world. "Particularly compared with the US and Scandinavia there are far fewer high-level women in business,"

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The jailed former oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has urged David Cameron not to end Britain's support for human rights in Russia, amid signs that the coalition is planning to forge a new and pragmatic alliance with the Kremlin.

Writing in the Observer, Khodorkovsky – once Russia's richest man – argues that the prime minister should not improve relations with Moscow without first setting out "principled conditions" in areas such as democracy, civil liberties and human rights. Khodorkovsky, who was jailed in 2003, ostensibly for not paying tax but in reality for challenging Vladimir Putin, refers to himself as "a political prisoner". He is now on trial for a second time, with Putin apparently planning to incarcerate him for another 15 years. Supporters say the latest "show trial" proceedings against him for embezzlement are ridiculous.

"I, as a Russian political prisoner, would very much like Britain to understand the fate of a 150-million strong people, capable and talented, who are searching for a way out of the darkness of totalitarianism into the light of freedom," Khodorkovsky writes, in his first public comments on Anglo-Russian relations.

He continues: "I want to believe and hope that in the process of re-establishing full-scale partner relations with Russia, David Cameron and the British people will firmly take the side of democracy, and will offer Russians not only mutually beneficial economic co-operation, but an interaction based on clear transparent standards."

During Gordon Brown's premiership Anglo-Russian relations plunged to Cold War levels. Britain expelled four Russian diplomats following the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian spy-turned-dissident, in 2006 . The expulsions were in protest at Moscow's refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent whom Scotland Yard detectives believe slipped polonium into Litvinenko's tea.

Moscow responded by kicking out four British diplomats and closing the British Council office in St Petersburg. It also sent members of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi to harass Britain's ambassador and demonstrate outside the British embassy in Moscow. In a further snub towards Britain, Lugovoi became a deputy in Russia's state parliament, blaming Litvinenko's death on MI6.

Next month, however, William Hague will go to Moscow in his first trip as foreign secretary, amid strong signs that the coalition is keen to move on from the Litvinenko affair. It wants to forge a new business-driven partnership with Russia, which is a key market for British companies, especially in oil and gas where they are currently shut out from projects. Speaking in Finland last month, Hague described Britain's recent relations with Moscow as "very poor" and that he wanted to improve ties with the Kremlin "on a reciprocal basis". Hague has vigorously denied he plans to downgrade Britain's commitment to human rights.

The prime minister has made clear that foreign policy will be directed towards securing economic advantage for the UK, with less emphasis on Labour's values-driven agenda. The Tories already work in Europe with Putin's United Russia party, and sit with the Russians in a group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Labour sources in Strasbourg say the Kremlin-appointed Russians frequently exploit their alliance with the Tories. "They are not MPs as we would know them. They are apparatchiks," one source said, adding: "They use Tory MPs like the modern equivalent of Lenin's useful fools."

"There is a chunk of Tory opinion which is quite sympathetic to this kind of patriotic Russian motherland idea," Chris Bryant, the former minister of state for Russia, told the Observer. "I think [the Tories] want to press the reset button on relations with Russia and they are prepared to swallow anything Putin says."

In today's Observer, Khodorkovsky, former CEO of the Yukos oil company, writes: "Russia remains an authoritarian state with an extremely high level of corruption. In contrast to Britain, the principles of equality before the law and an independent court system are virtually absent in Russia … My personal fate is the most eloquent testimony to this."

• This article was amended on 19 September. The original article stated that Khodorkovsky faced being incarcerated for another two decades.

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As one of Britain's most prominent exiled Pakistani politicians and the subject of long-standing death threats, Imran Farooq was always cautious about his security. He regularly changed addresses, rented homes under assumed names and, occasionally, employed a bodyguard.

Such precautions afforded the 50-year-old co-founder of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) no protection as he walked home on Thursday afternoon from the pharmacy in Edgware where he worked to Green Court, an anonymous 1940s apartment block where for the last two years he had shared a maisonette with his wife, Shumaila, and their two sons, aged five and three. Shortly before 5.30pm, Mr Farooq, who was a trained doctor, was approached by a second Asian man in the communal entrance way of the flats.

Neighbours alerted by screams saw the Pakistani politician being beaten about the head by his attacker before falling to the ground, where he was repeatedly stabbed. Paramedics tried for more than an hour to save him but he was declared dead at the scene.

Sam Igbi, 21, a property developer and neighbour of Mr Farooq, said a woman who witnessed the struggle initially assumed it was a minor altercation and watched in horror as it became more violent.

He said: "She saw [Imran Farooq] being knocked on the head a couple of times. She heard screams and she saw someone beating him. She said he struggled and then the guy stabbed him."

The impact of the murder in a quiet London suburb was felt over 4,000 miles away in Karachi, the Pakistani commercial capital and the scene during the 1980s and 1990s of a bloody power struggle from which the MQM emerged victorious, despite claims that it was complicit in torture and summary killings.

Scotland Yard detectives investigating the murder were understood to be looking closely at the possibility that the killing was an assassination emanating from the multiple rivalries in Pakistani politics.

Officers from the SO15 counter-terrorism unit began the day by advising their colleagues but by last night they had taken control of the inquiry.

From its origins as an advocacy group for Pakistan's Muhajir community – Urdu speakers who fled from India following partition in 1947 – the MQM has become one of the country's most powerful parties, controlling Karachi, which provides 50 per cent of the nation's tax revenues.

Mr Farooq, who had been due to attend the birthday party of an MQM colleague on the evening of his death, came to Britain in 1999 after spending seven years on the run in Karachi while wanted on multiple terrorist charges, including murder.

On his arrival in London to claim asylum, he said the allegations were politically motivated and there had been a bounty of several thousand dollars for his capture "dead or alive". Speaking at the time, he said: "It was impossible for me to remain in Pakistan due to the continued threat on my life and liberty." MQM officials in London yesterday indicated that the threats may have followed Mr Farooq to Britain. The Independent understands that, after a period in which he had stepped back from frontline politics, he had also recently been critical of the use of MQM funds in Pakistan and abroad.

Muhammad Anwar, a member of the party's central co-ordinating committee in London and a friend of the dead man for 25 years, said: "This does not seem to be a robbery or a burglary. We have all sorts of fears about what might have happened."

He was speaking at MQM's headquarters, close to the murder scene in an office block rented by the party several months ago after security concerns were raised about its previous accommodation.

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The Roma, the EU's biggest ethnic minority, scattered across a dozen countries, are Europe's pariah people. Thanks to Nicolas Sarkozy, they are a lot less forgotten and ignored than they were a fortnight ago.

The outrage stirred by France's policy of getting EU citizens to sign papers, give them 300 euros, have police escort them on to planes back to Bucharest and Sofia, and call them volunteers has shone a spotlight on the fate of the estimated 12 million Roma in the EU, the vast majority of them in the Balkans and central Europe.

In the democratic revolutions that released that region from Soviet domination 20 years ago, the Roma were the big losers. For most people, democracy brought new liberties, higher living standards and integration with the west. It also brought populist Gypsy-bashing, scapegoating, ghettoes, forced sterilisation, and the sending of their offspring to schools for children with learning difficulties.

With Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic all in the EU and all home to large Roma populations, the Gypsies are now EU citizens, too, and have the right to go wherever they like.

Now eastern Europe's crisis is morphing into western Europe's Gypsy dilemma, increasing the chances of something being done about it. France is hardly alone. The Austrians, the Danes, the Swedes and the Italians have been expelling European Roma immigrants. The Germans are preparing to kick out 12,000.

But much more quietly, not seeking to make political capital the way Sarkozy, his Rottweiler Europe minister, Pierre Lellouche, and others have been successfully stealing votes from the extreme right and improving their ratings by explicitly blaming the Roma for prostitution, begging, child trafficking, pickpocketing and violence.

It is inconceivable that in modern Europe, mainstream politicians could make similar blanket accusations against blacks, Arabs, or Jews.

The Roma are fair game – politically disorganised and lacking a strong lobby, needing a US civil rights-style movement of the 1950s and 1960s to better their lot, they are an easy target. This dispute has put the issue on Europe's political agenda as never before. Pots of money will be thrown at the problem. Integration and education programmes, conferences, seminars, activism, NGO campaigns will acquire new vigour.

George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist, has been campaigning for years on the issue across central Europe. He has been a pioneer.

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Alexei Kropinov thinks it was probably the sex.

"I messed around with heroin for three years but I didn't share needles with anyone," he recalls. "As for girls, back then it was a different one every week. We never used contraception. What for? I thought, 'She's got nice hair, clean skin, she's healthy, right?'"

Now 34, Kropinov, a tall, handsome man with a sculpted face, is one of an estimated 1 million people in Russia infected with HIV.

His story of survival is a triumph of will power rather than heroic intervention by outside forces. For while the country has resources and hi-tech equipment for tackling Aids, critics say a series of strategic mistakes has led to an explosion of the disease in Russia.

Eastern Europe and Central Asia have the fastest growth rate of HIV in the world and Russia accounts for between 60% and 70% of the epidemic. While India and some Africa countries have the largest populations of people living with HIV, the amount of new infections in these places each year has stabilised or dropped. By contrast, the epidemic in Russia peaked in 2001, dipped, and has risen steadily since 2004. Last year there were 58,448 new cases of infection, up 8% on 2008. Early figures for this year show no halt in the increase.

The millennium development goals laid out in 2000 called for universal treatment for people with HIV/AIDS by 2010 for all those who need it, and a reversing of the spread of the disease by 2015.

But, says Joost van der Meer, executive director of AIDS Foundation East West, a Dutch NGO, "Russia is totally failing to meet the MDGs. Bringing the epidemic to a halt is still a distant dream, and reversing the spread of HIV is… well, perhaps more realistic for the next millennium if things continue as they are."

Experts believe the sharp growth rate in infection has concrete origins. About two-thirds of people get HIV via injecting drug use – sharing dirty needles – but harm reduction measures, such as organising needle exchanges, are left to NGOs, whose coverage is patchy at best. Opiate substitution treatment to wean people off heroin, using substitutes such as methadone – recommended by the WHO – is illegal in Russia. And high-risk groups like migrants, prisoners and sex workers are widely ignored by government programmes. Outreach – attempts to bring people like heroin users who are afraid of authorities into health facilities – is practically non-existent.

Kropinov only found out he had HIV when he decided to give up the family construction business in the Kaluga region, in western Russia, and applied to become a policeman. "They sent some blood samples to the local Aids centre. When the third one in a row came back positive, I said: 'Listen, doc, I'll give you money, just write that I'm clean.' I thought I could buy my health."

For a while it seemed he would go off the rails. He drank solidly for a fortnight. He sank into depression. Yet, eight years on, Kropinov has clawed back a stable life. He is a successful businessman, a husband and the father of a healthy four-year-old girl. It began when he set up an organisation called We Shall Live! for people infected with HIV in Kaluga, through which he met his wife, Vika. Today he is the deputy head of a countrywide union of such groups, and is based in Moscow.

drive from www.independent.co.uk