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A day after American and European forces began a broad campaign of strikes against the government of Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi, the Libyan leader delivered a fresh and defiant tirade on Sunday, pledging retaliation and saying his forces would fight a long war to victory.

Pope Benedict XVI issued an urgent appeal Sunday to military and political leaders to consider the safety of Libyan civilians and ensure they have access to emergency aid in his first comments on the U.S.-led military assault on Libya.

An 80-year-old woman and a teenage boy have been rescued from the wreckage of a house in northeastern Japan, nine days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, police said.

American and European forces began a broad campaign of strikes against the government of Col. Moammar el-Gaddafi on Saturday, unleashing warplanes and missiles in a military intervention on a scale not seen in the Arab world since the Iraq war. On Sunday, American B-2 bombers were reported to have struck a major Libyan airfield.

The attack seemed to have come out of clear skies onto a field of wildflowers. Littered across the landscape, some 30 miles south of Benghazi, the detritus of the allied airstrikes on Saturday and Sunday morning offered a panorama of destruction: tanks, charred and battered, their turrets blasted clean off, one with a body still caught in its remnants; a small Toyota truck with its roof torn away; a tank transporter still on fire. But it did not end there.

A defiant Moammar Gaddafi vowed a "long war" after the U.S. and European militaries blasted his forces with airstrikes and over 100 cruise missiles, hitting air defenses and at least two major air bases early Sunday, shaking the Libyan capital with explosions and anti-aircraft fire.

The U.S.-led international military assault on Libya could achieve its stated goals without forcing Moammar Gaddafi from power, the top U.S. military officer said on Sunday as the bombing campaign continued.

An explosion in a coal mine in Balochistan province of southwest Pakistan today killed five miners and trapped 46 more, officials said.

Thousands of Tibetans across the world today voted to elect the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, an exercise that may usher in a transition in the community's leadership following the Dalai Lama's "flat refusal" to reconsider his decision to retire as its political head.

As American missiles struck Libya, President Barack Obama doggedly promoted his Latin American agenda Saturday, praising Brazil as a soaring economic force and brimming market for trade. Back home, his message was all but lost in the roar over the Libyan conflict.