🇱🇧 The Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, agreed to a ceasefire with Israel the day before his death, stated the head of the Lebanese Foreign Ministry.

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THROWBACK: Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh told CNN on August 13, 2006 that the war in Lebanon was planned by then-president George W. Bush and the Israeli government months in advance. The neocon plan envisaged destroying Hezbollah as pre-cursor to an attack on Iran.

"Israel's attack on Hezbollah was going to be sort of a model, prototype, that is, a lot of air against a dug-in underground facility. Everything in southern Lebanon that Hezbollah had was underground," Hersh said. "For them it was going to be a test run for the bombing and the attack they really want to do, probably next year if they can. I'm not saying they've decided, but they want to go after Iran, and Iran, of course, the Persians have been dug in since, what, the 11th century so we know it's a tough call."

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NATO states' new Arctic group is no match for Russo-Chinese cooperation – Swedish former military officer

"There are no neutral countries in the North any more," Mikael Valtersson, former Swedish Air Defense officer told Sputnik, commenting on Canada's push to form a security group to counter Russia and China in the Arctic.

The Western Nordic countries are planning to coordinate on defense, intelligence and cyber activities, as they are all are NATO allies now after Finland and Sweden's admission to the military bloc. Earlier this week, Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told Bloomberg News that Canada and its allies need an "Arctic security dialogue" to discuss defense matters in light of Russia and China's growing activities in the region.

Russia, an Arctic state, maintains security cooperation with China in its territorial waters. It was reported on October 2 that patrol ships of the China Coast Guard entered the waters of the Arctic Ocean for joint patrols with coast guard vessels of the Russian FSB Border Service.

Valtersson expects the new "security dialogue" to work closely with NATO. "It might develop into an evolved Arctic military command within NATO and also a political body where politicians co-ordinate their actions before meetings in the Arctic Council," Valtersson said.

The pundit warned that NATO's potential build-up in the region could "increase the risk for both an arms race in the Arctic and incidents in the region."

But Valtersson believes that the creation of the new Arctic body would neither upset the established balance of power in the Arctic nor endanger Russia's positions in the region.

"The Nordic countries and Canada are too small to challenge Russia, and even more a Russian-Chinese cooperation,” he said. “The US has a lot of other interests in the world and will not focus on the Arctic in the way Russia already does, and should increase doing."

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