Manila, Philippines - President Benigno Aquino III said Monday that the Philippines won't back down in a South China Sea dispute with China and that his country's military will soon get dozens of new aircraft and ships for maritime defence.

Aquino announced in his annual state of the nation address that more than 40 military aircraft - including attack helicopters and two newly refurbished C-130 cargo planes - and other weapons would be delivered in the next two years to bolster Philippine military muscle amid renewed territorial tensions in the South China Sea.

A second former U.S. Coast Guard cutter is to arrive soon from the United States, following a refurbished cutter that was relaunched by the Philippine navy last year as its largest and most modern warship.

Washington has also provided $30 million to strengthen the Philippine military in addition to helping establish a national coast watch centre to help protect the country's 36,000-kilometre (22,370-mile) coastline, Aquino said.

But he stressed that the Philippines hopes to forge a peaceful solution that will be acceptable to China.

With an Islamist president in power, Egypt has eased longtime visa restrictions on Palestinians traveling from Gaza, ending its longtime assistance in Israel's siege of the area.

­Cairo lifted visa requirements for Gazans under 40 traveling with a family to Egypt through the Rafah border crossing, Palestinian and Egyptian officials said Monday.

"We were officially informed by the Egyptian side of a decision to allow any Palestinian under the age of 40 to travel through Rafah with his family without a visa, starting today," said Maher Abu Sabha, director of borders within Gaza's Hamas-run government.mary

Recent remarks by Sir John Sawers, who heads Britain's MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service that is Britain's CIA counterpart), leave us wondering if Sawers is preparing to "fix" intelligence on Iran, as his immediate predecessor, Sir John Scarlett, did on Iraq.

Scarlett's pre-Iraq war role in creating "dodgy dossiers" hyping the threat of non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" is relatively well known. On July 4, the red warning light for politicization was again flashing brightly in London, as Sawers told British senior civil servants that Iran is "two years away" from becoming a "nuclear weapons state." How did Sawers come up with "two years?"

New vindictive restrictions on detainees highlights the falsity of Obama defenders regarding closing the camp.

Most of the 168 detainees at Guantanamo have been imprisoned by the U.S. Government for close to a decade without charges and with no end in sight to their captivity. Some now die at Guantanamo, thousands of miles away from their homes and families, without ever having had the chance to contest accusations of guilt. During the Bush years, the plight of these detainees was a major source of political controversy, but under Obama, it is now almost entirely forgotten. On those rare occasions when it is raised, Obama defenders invoke a blatant myth to shield the President from blame: he wanted and tried so very hard to end all of this, but Congress would not let him. Especially now that we're in an Election Year, and in light of very recent developments, it's long overdue to document clearly how misleading that excuse is.

A wave of bombings and an attack on an Iraqi military base killed more than 100 people on Monday. The death toll made it the bloodiest day of the year in the country, The Associated Press reported.

In addition to those killed, at least 268 other people were wounded by bombings and shootings in Shiite areas of Baghdad, the town of Taji to the north, the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul and many other places, hospital and police sources told Reuters.

The bloodshed, which coincided with an intensifying of the conflict in neighboring Syria, pointed up the deficiencies of the Iraqi security forces, which failed to prevent insurgents from striking in multiple locations across the country.

No group has claimed responsibility for the wave of assaults but a senior Iraqi security official blamed the local wing of al-Qaida, made up of Sunni Muslim militants bitterly hostile to the Shiite-led government, which is friendly with Iran.

A senior Iranian lawmaker says the Islamic Republic's mastery of the technology for the production of long-range missiles has helped elevate its capabilities' global standing.

"The building of long-range missiles by relying on Iranian scientific and technological prowess has promoted the capabilities of our country in the world," Hossein Naqavi-Hosseini, spokesman for the Majlis (parliament) National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said Sunday.

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi appeared before the Majlis committee on Sunday to deliver a report on the country's latest developments and accomplishments in the defense sector.

The Colorado movie theater shooting suspect is making his first court appearance with reddish orange hair.

James Holmes was wide-eyed and unshaven as he sat staring down.

He appeared Monday after being accused of the shooting rampage at a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 people and injured 58 others.

Authorities say the 24-year-old former graduate student is refusing to cooperate and it could take months to learn what prompted the horrific attack on moviegoers at a midnight screening of the latest Batman film.

Investigators say they found a Batman mask inside Holmes' booby-trapped apartment after the attack.

Holmes has been held in solitary confinement since Friday. Prosecutors say they may consider the death penalty but will make that decision after consulting with victim's families.

Luigi Zingales, who teaches at the University of Chicago's business school, had an op-ed in Bloomberg provocatively titled "Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals?" He argues that business schools are "partly to blame" for the decline in ethical standards in the business world, and urges that ethics not be taught as a separate course by lightweight profs, but integrated into all courses.

This piece is so backwards I don't quite know where to begin. It's telling that it blames former McKinsey partner, now convicted insider traders Rajat Gupta's and Anil Kumar's crimes on the failure get ethical training in business school. I'm not making this up: "Where did Gupta, Kumar and others get the idea that this kind of behavior might be OK? Most business schools do offer ethics classes" but contends they are unserious. No other possible explanation is explored. Gee, they both went to the Indian Institute of Technology. Why isn't their education at a more formative stage under scrutiny as well?

Mind you, I'm not saying business schools deserve a free pass. Far from it. But business schools are a combination of finishing school and employment agency. They live in, and my sense is they are lagging indicators of broad cultural shifts in norms. In case Zingales has missed it, American elites are openly corrupt. You can see it with the revolving doors between regulators and top industry jobs, the way CEOs and top politicians tell astonishing lies whenever they are in trouble,the weird combination of precision on inconsequential details versus the carefully coached combinations of misleading but not untruthful answers and "I don't recall" when you sure as hell know they do remember, the way the press is so thick with propaganda that it takes an Enigma machine to pull out any real messages. So with those role models, why should we expect business school graduates to be paragons of virtue? The are aspiring Masters of the Universe. They are smart enough to see what the real game is, and the message conveyed by the business press and who rises to the top in large organizations today is far more powerful than any lecture, no matter how well or frequently delivered

Just hours after the attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Ehud Barak were quick to announce that Iran and the Hezbollah were behind the attack. In fact, it didn't take the Israeli PM more than two hours to blame another country for committing an act of war on Israeli citizens in a third country's territory. Of course, Netanyahu didn't provide any evidence to support his thesis. In fact, even today, three days after the attack, no clear leads suggesting any Iranian or Hezbollah's connection are available.

What was it then that made Netanyahu so determined? Is it because he himself was privy to the knowledge that Israeli agents have been murdering Iranian scientists for years? Did Netanyahu react the way he did because he thought to himself that considering Mossad's assassinations in Tehran, Israel may well have brought on itself an Iranian retaliation? Was Bibi projecting?

U.S. President Barack Obama had intended to spend July 19 campaigning in Florida, but his plans changed the moment he learned alleged gunman James Holmes, 24, killed 12 people and injured 38 more during an early Friday screening of The Dark Knight in Aurora, Colorado.

Addressing the nation from the Harborside Event Center in Fort Myers, Florida, Obama, 50, did his best to make sense of Holmes' mass killing spree. "This morning we woke up to news of a tragedy that reminds us of all the ways that we are united as one American family," he said. "The federal government stands ready to do whatever's necessary to bring whoever is responsible for this heinous crime to justice."

"We will take every step possible to ensure the safety of all of our people. We're going to stand by our neighbors in Colorado during this extraordinarily difficult time."