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Bratislava  - Slovak parliament Friday agreed to deploy up to 16 additional troops with NATO's International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan in
2009.

The 150-seat house voted 134-0 to expand Slovakia's contingent by up to 11 troops and five military medics.

The troops are to guard an airport in southern city of Kandahar, while the medics are to serve in the southern Uruzgan province during the August presidential election, army spokesman Mario Pazicky told the German Press Agency dpa.

Novi Sad, Serbia - The presidents of 14 Central and South- Eastern European countries meeting in the Serbian town of Novi Sad on Friday said the future of the entire region lay in membership in the European Union.

The two-day summit of heads of state from the region began on Thursday under the slogan "Overcoming the challenges: the economy, energy, European integrations" while the working meetings began Friday.

Vienna  - Columbian cocaine production in 2008 dropped by 28 per cent to the lowest level in a decade, owing to the large-scale eradication of coca plants, the UN drug organization said Friday in Vienna.

However, cultivation of coca rose by 6 per cent in Bolivia and by 4.5 per cent in Peru, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its annual survey of the Andean countries.

Warsaw  - Polish forces recently carried out their first major offensive in Afghanistan, captured 29 Taliban fighters, the daily Wyborcza reported Friday.

Some 800 Poles supported by the Afghan army took part in the nearly week-long operation "Eagle's feather," in what was the biggest Polish offensive since they joined the NATO-led campaign.

The operation seized weapons including machine guns and explosives, and destroyed antennas in southeast Afghanistan used by Taliban to communicate with Pakistani supporters, the daily said.

London, June 19 : Former French President Jacques Chirac has revealed that he was left startled by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi''s rather “unseemly" interest with the opposite sex.

On Wednesday, Berlusconi denied that young women had been paid to attend parties at his villas.

But adding fuel to the fire, Chirac, 76, described what he saw as Berlusconi’s guest at one of his properties, in the absence of his wife Bernadette.