THE HEADLINES AT 0800 ON THURSDAY 19TH OCTOBER

It's eight o'clock on Thursday the 19th of October.

President Bush has conceded that events in Iraq may be echoing America's traumatic experience in the Vietnam War.

Canada has called for Nato reinforcements in Afghanistan -- saying its troops fighting there are stretched to the limit.

Britain's biggest mobile phone network is changing the way its seventeen-million customers pay for answering calls abroad.

BUSH
President Bush has said the number of troops losing their lives in Iraq is not a measure of the success or failure of the mission there. In a television interview, Mr Bush said he defined success by the improvements taking place in the country. Mr Bush also spoke about the North Korean crisis, and warned the government in Pyongyang not to try selling nuclear weapons. Here's our Washington Correspondent, Justin Webb:

WEBB: With the latest opinion polls strongly suggesting that President Bush's Republican Party faces a dramatic defeat in congressional elections next month, the president is doing his best to fight his corner. On ABC television, in a rare one-to-one interview with a serious questioner, it was put to Mr Bush that the recent civilian and military deaths in Iraq meant that the campaign there was failing:

BUSH: If that's the definition of success or failure - the number of casualties - then you're right. I define success or failure as to whether or not the Iraqis will be able to defend themselves. I define success or failure as to whether schools are being built, or hospitals are being opened. I define success or failure as to whether we're seeing a democracy, you know, grow in the heart of the Middle East.

WEBB: Mr Bush agreed with the interviewer that the current situation could be compared with the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, where the north Vietnamese inflicted a huge psychological blow on the Americans and their allies. Mr Bush appeared to be suggesting that steadiness of nerve could avoid a repeat of history, though any comparison with Vietnam raises eyebrows here. Mr Bush also had some tough words for the North Koreans; they would be held to account, he said, if any of their nuclear weapons were sold abroad.

RICE
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has arrived in South Korea -- on the second leg of a tour intended to find ways of enforcing UN sanctions against North Korea. American officials say they expect a Chinese envoy -- who's in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang -- to warn the regime against conducting a second nuclear test.

CANADA
Canada has said its troops in Afghanistan are stretched to capacity. More than two-thousand Canadian soldiers are deployed in southern Afghanistan, where they're involved in direct combat with the Taleban. The Canadian government says it wants Nato countries to send reinforcements. Reporting from Toronto, here's Lee Carter:

CARTER: Canada's defence minister, Gordon O'Connor, admitted to a parliamentary committee that recruitment has been less successful than planned, and that his troops will need to be limited to just one combat mission each to avoid completely wearing them out. There is decreasing public and political support for Canada's mission in Afghanistan. Since 2002, forty-two Canadian soldiers have died, many the victims of suicide bombings. It's been a huge departure from the peacekeeping missions Canada has been largely involved in over the past forty years. But the mission has been the main foreign policy priority of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government. It's committed to the Afghanistan deployment until at least 2009.

AFGHANISTAN
Some news just in: a suicide bomber is reported to have targeted a British convoy in Lashkar Gah, the capital of the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand. Details at the moment are sketchy, but witnesses say one of the British vehicles is on fire, and there may be British casualties.

TORTURE
An opinion poll suggests that a sizeable majority of people around the world are opposed to the use of torture -- even if it could provide information that could prevent terrorist attacks. More than twenty-seven-thousand people in twenty-five countries took part in the survey -- which was commissioned by the BBC World Service, and carried out between May and July. Our Diplomatic Correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, has been examining its findings:

MARCUS: Can the so-called "ticking bomb" defence - the argument that using some degree of torture may save lives - ever be a justification for mistreating suspects? The findings of this opinion poll indicate that fifty-nine per cent of the world's citizens say "no". Nonetheless, almost one-third of those questioned - twenty-nine per cent - think that governments should be allowed to use torture in certain cases. Support for torture is generally greatest in those countries who see themselves as actively engaged in a struggle against political violence. Forty-three per cent of those questioned in Israel, thirty-six per cent of Americans, and thirty-two per cent in India believe that some degree of torture should be allowed if it provides information that saves innocent lives. In contrast, in Britain, a striking seventy-two per cent opposes torture, with twenty-four per cent backing its use in certain cases.

ROAMING
The biggest mobile phone network in Britain, O2, is changing the way it bills customers who travel to other European countries. Instead of charging per minute for incoming calls, there'll be a flat monthly fee. With more details, here's our Business Reporter, Nick Cosgrove:

COSGROVE: At the moment, when you leave Britain, you can be charged well over a pound a minute just for answering your mobile phone. This is hugely lucrative source of revenue for the mobile phone networks. It's thought to account for up to fifteen per cent of their profits. The phone companies are under pressure from the European Commission to bring these charges down, but now the O2 network, owned by a Spanish firm, Telefonica, has preempted the EU by pledging to scrap altogether the charge for receiving calls in Europe. By the middle of next year, any of O2's seventeen-million customers will, for a monthly charge of five pounds, be able to answer their phone for free when travelling on the continent. Making calls from Europe will cost twenty-five pence a minute. A new mobile phone price war now seems inevitable.

TAX
Ministers have said most taxpayers wouldn't benefit from proposals by a Conservative Party policy group, calling for tax cuts totalling twenty-one-billion pounds a year. The Tory leader, David Cameron, isn't bound by its recommendations, which will be formally published this morning. He's said in the past he would only cut taxes if the economy could afford it. On the Today programme, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, told us he was looking at so-called "green taxes" -- which would be included in the party's next manifesto:

OSBORNE: We don't rule anything in, but we don't rule anything out. I'm very conscious that some green taxes - indeed, some of the ones favoured by the Chancellor of the Exchequer - are regressive; they fall primarily on the poorest in our society. What I'm looking at is whether there are green taxes that are not regressive, where the burden does not fall on the poorest in society, because one of the tests of Conservative Party policy-making is that it should favour the most vulnerable in our society.

POST MORTEMS
A report claims bereaved families are being ''short-changed'' by ''poor or unacceptable'' post mortem examinations. A team of government-funded experts says, in a quarter of cases -- excluding murder -- the cause of death is wrong. The report says there's a desperate shortage of pathologists - and those there are don't get enough time to do a thorough job. The research has prompted calls for a major overhaul. Michaela Willis -- from the National Bereavement Partnership -- said many families would welcome more information about the cause of death of a loved one after a post mortem examination:

WILLIS: If somebody died of a heart attack, it wouldn't then actually look any further and say, well, this gentleman had cancer - you know, what are the implications for the family? I believe it's their choice, and they should actually have a say in what actually happens in the future, 'cause I'd certainly want to know if there were any implications for my family.

MCCARTNEY
Sir Paul McCartney's lawyers have said he'll "vigorously" defend himself against claims that he physically attacked his estranged wife, Heather Mills McCartney during their four-year marriage. She's said to have made the allegations in court papers filed on her behalf. Sir Paul said he would very much like to respond in detail to the accusations, but the correct forum to do so was in the divorce courts. Here's our Media Correspondent, Torin Douglas:

DOUGLAS: In last night's statement, Sir Paul's lawyers said he requested that his family be allowed to conduct their personal affairs out of the media spotlight, for the sake of all involved. His wife's lawyers also asked that the parties' privacy be respected during what they said was "a difficult and emotional time". But that seems a forlorn hope, looking at the widespread coverage in today's papers, and it's likely to remain so, as long as damaging revelations about both parties continued to find their way into the media. When they announced their separation in May, the couple blamed media intrusion, but said they wanted the break-up to be amicable. It certainly isn't now.

RADIATION
A teenage cancer patient, who was given a massive overdose of radiation at a hospital in Glasgow in January, has died. Lisa Norris, who was fifteen at the time, was treated for a brain tumour at the Beatson Oncology Centre in Glasgow. She was reportedly given seventeen potentially deadly overdoses of radiation -- causing severe burns. An investigation found that human error was to blame.

DARWIN
The complete works of Charles Darwin are being made available online and for free in what's being described as the first project of its kind. Academics and casual readers alike will be able to trawl through many notebooks, manuscripts and diaries which have never been published before -- as well as his famous works such as "The Origin of Species". Dr John van Wyhe -- the founder and director of darwin- online at Cambridge University -- told the Today programme he he hopes the site will dispel many myths about the naturalist:

VAN WYHE: Too many people have heard about Darwin from what others say about him. But now it's no longer necessary to do that. Everything Darwin wrote is available for everyone for free. There's nothing between people and the man himself; they can just go and see what he wrote.

HIPPOS
Conservationists are warning that hippos could disappear from a national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo by Christmas, unless poaching is stopped. The Zoological Society of London says a militia group has killed more than four-hundred hippos near Lake Edward in the past fortnight.