World Briefs

NEW DELHI – The first lunar probe from India landed successfully on the moon Friday, the Indian Space Research Organization said.

ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair said cameras on board have been transmitting images of the moon back to Indian space control, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

Chief among the lunar mission's goals is mapping not only the surface of the moon, but what lies beneath. If successful, India will join what is shaping up to be a 21st century space race with Chinese and Japanese crafts already in orbit around the moon.

The unmanned moon mission was launched from the Sriharikota space center in southern India on Oct. 22. The box-shaped lunar probe carried a video imaging system, a radar altimeter and a mass spectrometer.

ROME – High food prices are encouraging many Afghan farmers to switch to food crops and drop poppy cultivation, a top U.N. official said Friday.

An oversupply of opium has pushed prices down 20 percent a year over the last four years, causing opium farmers' income to decline, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Revenue from wheat has tripled since 2007.

"It has been very difficult to repress an activity while its profitability was so high," Costa told a news conference in Rome. "When profitability gets lower, people stop cultivating."

Afghanistan's poppy cultivation dropped by 19 percent this year compared to 2007, also thanks to drought and anti-drug campaigns.

This year, opium farmers cultivated 388,000 acres (157,000 hectares), the U.N. said.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Palestinian militants attacked a major city in southern Israel with rocket fire on Friday, a serious escalation of widening violence that has all but buried a five-month-old truce.

Hamas fighters launched rocket barrages at Ashkelon, 11 miles north of Gaza, causing panic but no casualties. They also unleashed rockets at nearby Sderot, where rescue services said one person was lightly wounded by shrapnel. Several rockets hit open areas.

The Israeli military warned residents of communities near Gaza to remain in their homes, and police and rescue services went on high alert in preparation for more attacks. Friday's barrages followed an earlier strike by Israeli aircraft targeting militants firing rockets in northern Gaza. Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of Gaza's Health Ministry said two gunmen were moderately wounded.

The fighting was the latest in a weeklong cycle of violence that has threatened to unravel a truce reached last June.