One of the arrested men is reported to be a guard at the synagogue.

"What a coincidence, the gang leader is a metropolitan police officer who for the last four years was the personal bodyguard of the synagogue's rabbi," Chavez said in an interview Sunday with the Venevision TV station, Reuters reported.

Chavez broke diplomatic ties with Israel on Jan. 6, while the Gaza operation was ongoing, expelling its ambassador and staff.

The alleged vandals were arrested during weekend raids and are scheduled to be arraigned Monday.

"We thank the authorities for the quick detention of the suspects," Elias Farache, president of Venezuela's Jewish Association, told the Associated Press.

A larger group of suspects, who include retired military officers, politicians, academics and journalists, went on trial in October, accused of being part of a shadowy group known as Ergenekon.

The 2,455-page indictment holds the group responsible for at least two violent attacks - the bombing of a secularist newspaper in 2006 and an attack on a court in the same year, in which a judge was killed.

Attacks on those key parts of the secular establishment were supposed to provoke Turkey's military into launching a coup in defence of secular interests, it is alleged.

In an extraordinary development, the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the west Indian state of Maharashtra has arrested a retired Indian army major and a serving lieutenant colonel as part of its investigation of September 29 terrorist bombings—bombings the ATS now says were carried out by Hindu supremacists.

Bombs exploded in Malegaon, a city of about one million people in north-west Maharashtra, and in Modasa, a town to the north in the bordering state of Gujarat, within minutes of each other last Sept. 29. The Malegaon bombing killed 5 people, while a 15-year old died as a result of the Modasa bombing. The bombs also injured some one hundred people, many of them seriously.

On October 24, police arrested Pragya Singh Thakur, a 38 year-old former activist of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad—a student group allied with the Hindu supremacist BJP and RSS—and two associates, 36-year old Shivnarayan Gopal Singh Kalsangra and 42-year old Shyam Bhanwarlal Sahu. They have been accused, but not yet charged by the courts, with murder, attempt to murder, and voluntarily causing grievous hurt for their alleged role in the Sept. 29 bombings.

Pragya, who fancies herself a sadhvi or Hindu sage, is said to be the leader of the group.

Five days later the Maharashtra state ATS arrested retired army Major Ramesh Upadhyay and Sameer Kulkarni, a leading member of a small, fanatical Hindutva-ite organization, the Abhinav Bharat. The ATS also had Lt. Colonel Srikant Prasad Purohit brought to Mumbai from his army unit in Madya Pradesh for questioning. Yesterday, the police sought and obtained Defence Ministry permission to lay charges against Purohit.

These developments are all the more remarkable as the immediate response of the police and the corporate media to the Sept. 29 bombings was to blame them on Islamic terrorists--and this even though the bombs’ targets were clearly Muslims. The bombs exploded outside mosques around 9:30 PM on the eve of Eid, the popular celebration marking the end of Ramadan.

The ATS is now describing the bombings as part of a “larger conspiracy,” but has refused to elaborate.

India is in something of a state of shock after learning from official sources that its first Hindu terror cell may have carried out a series of deadly bombings that were initially blamed on militant Muslims. The revelation is forcing the country to consider some difficult questions.

At least 10 people have been arrested in connection with several bomb blasts in the Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon in the western state of Maharashtra in September, which left six people dead. But reports suggest that police believe the cell may also have carried out a number of previous attacks, including last year’s notorious bombing of a cross-border train en route to Pakistan, which killed 68 people. Among the alleged members of the cell are a serving army officer and a Hindu monk.

Bomb attacks are not uncommon in India – there has been a flurry in recent months – but police usually blame them on Muslim extremists, often said to have links to militant groups based in either Pakistan or Bangladesh. As a result, the recent cracking of the alleged Hindu cell has forced India to face some difficult issues. A country that prides itself on purported religious and cultural toleration – an ambition that in reality often falls short – has been made to ask itself how this cell could operate for so long.
India’s military, which prides itself on its professionalism, has been forced to order an embarrassing inquiry.

The near-daily drip of revelations from police has also caused red faces for India’s main political opposition, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ahead of state polls and a general election scheduled for early next year. The BJP and its prime ministerial candidate, Lal Krishna Advani, have long accused the Congress Party-led government of being soft on terrorism that involved Muslims. However, the BJP has refused to call for a clampdown on Hindu groups, and last week Mr Advani even criticised the police over the way they questioned one of the alleged cell members, a woman called Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur.

The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, phoned his rival to ask him not to politicise the issue or the investigation. “There is a strong case so let the police do their job,” he told Mr Advani. While some commentators have expressed surprise about the discovery of the alleged cell, others have pointed out that there has been growing concern about the possible threat from Hindu extremists. In the summer, two members of a right-wing Hindu group were killed while putting together a bomb, and two other suspected members of the same group died in similar circumstances in 2006.

Meanwhile, senior right-wing leaders have made no secret of their wish that Hindus should form suicide squads to protect themselves against Muslim extremists. Bal Thackeray, leader of a group called the Shiv Sena, which has been responsible for communal and regional violence in Mumbai, wrote recently in the party’s magazine: “The threat of Islamic terror in India is rising. It is time to counter the same with Hindu terror. Hindu suicide squads should be readied to ensure the existence of Hindu society and to protect the nation.”

Observers say the fact that the police have arrested the alleged cell members amid considerable political pressure suggests the growing professionalism of its security forces. “It’s the first Hindu cell and it’s the first time Hindus have been shackled and taken to jail,” said Professor Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at Delhi’s Jawarlahal Nehru University. “I’m quite pleased with the way the police have done their jobs.”

It had to happen.

Less than two weeks before we vote for a new president, a white woman says a black man attacked her, then scarred her face, and says there was a political motive for it.

Ashley Todd, a 20-year-old white volunteer for John McCain’s presidential campaign, says she was mugged at an ATM machine in Pittsburgh (my hometown) by a big black man. She further says he threw her down, then disfigured her by carving the letter “B” into her face with a sharp implement when he saw that she supported McCain, not Barack Obama.

Part of the appeal of, and the unspoken tension behind, Senator Obama’s campaign is his transformational status as the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination.

That does not mean that he has erased the mutual distrust between black and white Americans, and this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election.

If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator  Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

For Pittsburgh, a city that has done so much to shape American history over the centuries, another moment of truth is at hand.

I have been worrying about the serious deterioration of civil liberties in the UK for five years now, but a small incident last night convinced me we are living in a country that must be classified as "Not free". I was travelling to the theatre on the tube, and the large majority of passengers were shrouded by copies of either London Lite or the London Paper. Some thirty copies of each banner headline screamed shrilly its message of fear through the train: "Five Suicide Bombers on the Loose in London!" "Jet Terror Plot!" "Terror Jury Holiday Farce Resulted in Acquittals!"

The propaganda, which reflected uncritically the briefing the Security Services and Home Office have been manically pumping out since the non-existence of the "Bigger than 9/11" jet plot was confirmed, was so stark and so divorced from any connection to the truth, that I am convinced we are already in effect living in a totalitarian state where the government controls the population through fear with brutal efficiency and with absolutely no regard to the truth. The government had contrived to turn a major blow for its "War on Terror" scaremongering into a vehicle to ramp up that scaremongering.

The Lite told of there still being bombers around from the "Jet Terror Plot" and gave no indication whatsoever that the jury had decided the jet plot did not exist. Indeed it claimed shamelessly that the three terrorists convicted of conspiracy to murder had been planning to bring down planes - a direct lie.

The London Paper was still more worrying, because it put detail into the line the odious security service spokesman Frank "Goebbels" Gardner has been pumping out on the BBC: juries are unreliable. It said that the failure to convict in the trial was due to interruptions for a holiday for the jurors and because of an injury to a juror in a golf accident. The clear trend of the briefing coming from the government is towards the abolition of jury trials in terrorist cases: Diplock courts.

Meantime in London two men are on trial for "terrorism" because they attended a demonstration at the Uzbek Embassy against the hideous Uzbek regime, at which red paint was thrown at the Embassy to symbolise the blood of Karimov's many thousands of victims. Such protest as paint-throwing should, I think, be illegal, but given events like the Andijan massacre of many hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, I have huge sympathy for those who undertake civil disobedience in the Uzbek case. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but under the notorious Section 58 of the Terrorism Act there is real danger of conviction and heavy sentences.

These are critical times: all good men and women must fight hard against the closing in of the system upon us.