Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Reporter John Sweeney spent eight days in North Korea for the programme 
 
 The BBC says an edition of Panorama filmed secretly during a study trip to North Korea is due to be broadcast as planned, despite claims students may have been put in danger. 
 
 Three BBC journalists accompanied 10 London School of Economics students and spent eight days in the country. 
 
 The university and its students' union have demanded the corporation withdraw the programme. 
 
 But the BBC said the film was strongly in the public interest. 
 
 Alex Peters-Day, of the LSE students' union, said the programme should be dropped because students were lied to and could not give informed consent. 
 
 But BBC head of news programmes Ceri Thomas said the North Korean government was the only party the corporation had deceived. 
 
 He said the students had been informed of the risks on three separate occasions and authorisation for the trip had gone "right to the top" within the BBC. 
 
 "We think the risks as we explained them to the students were justified... but had we had any suggestion that lives were at risk... we wouldn't have gone anywhere near this," he said. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Alex Peters-Day, LSE students' union: "Students were lied to, they weren't able to give their consent" 
 
 "Our assessment was that, at most, the likelihood was deportation, but we explained to the students that the risks might go beyond that - might include arrest, detention and the possibility of not being allowed back into the country." 
 
 Nine of the students were aged 21-28 and one was 18, he said. 
 
 The programme, North Korea Undercover, is set to be broadcast amid rising tensions in the region caused by the secretive state testing a nuclear device and missile technology. 
 
 The BBC said the trip was organised by the wife of Panorama reporter John Sweeney. The couple spent eight days inside the country for the programme, along with a cameraman. 
 
 Mr Thomas said she had organised a similar trip for students a year earlier and the latest visit would have gone ahead even if Panorama had not been involved. 
 
 'Student welfare' 
 
 The LSE has complained that the students were not told there was an undercover team of three or that they were filming a high-profile documentary. 
 
 Analysis Academic research is highly globalised, running across conflict zones and political divisions. When modern wars sweep through a country, there can still be rearguards of scholars protecting the remains of centuries before, such as the ancient manuscripts rescued this year in Timbuktu, in Mali. But while diplomats can claim diplomatic status and journalists can hold up a press card, there is no separately defined protected status for academics. They can only rely on a kind of informal neutral status. But there are plenty of blurred boundaries. Not least because knowledge can quite literally be explosive. Overseas students in the UK have to be vetted before they can take "sensitive subjects" on a specified list, designed to stop students being used to obtain technology for nuclear or biological warfare. 
 
 Mr Thomas acknowledged the students had initially been told there was one journalist but that, when they were in Beijing before flying into Pyongyang, they were told there would be three journalists. 
 
 He said three of the students had since asked "that their images be taken out" and that they would be "pixellated or blobbed". 
 
 But the "public interest arguments" for making and showing the programme were "overwhelming", he added. 
 
 Students' union general secretary Ms Peters-Day - who was not on the trip - told the BBC News Channel: "One of the students made it absolutely clear that she was not made aware of what happened. 
 
 "For us, this is a matter of student welfare - students were lied to, they weren't able to give their consent." 
 
 She added: "I think the trip was organised by the BBC as potentially a ruse for them to get into North Korea and that's disgraceful. 
 
 "They've used students essentially as a human shield in this situation." 
 
 'Damaged reputation' 
 
 Sir Peter Sutherland, chairman of the LSE's board of governors, said the programme created "unacceptable risks" for the school's reputation and the students involved. 
 
 "The BBC unscrupulously used a number of students as human cover for a filming operation without fully informing all of them what was happening," he said. 
 
 "If academics cannot go to any part of the world on the basis of trust in terms of what they say they are doing and what they are about, this undermines the integrity of the institution." 
 
 Meanwhile Universities UK, the umbrella body for UK universities, said it regretted "the BBC's approach in this matter". 
 
 Panorama reporter John Sweeney said the majority of the students he had travelled with supported the programme. 
 
 "What the LSE is saying we dispute," he told BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme. ||||| Dennis Rodman' at New York Friars Club on March 15, 2013 in New York City. 
 
 NBA legend Dennis Rodman is going back to North Korea. 
 
 The Worm showed up at a charity gala tonight at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, and announced he is heading back to impoverished nation whose supreme leader is threatening a nuclear holocaust. 
 
 “I’m going back August 1,” the former rebounder told Gossip Extra exclusively. “We have no plans really, as far as what we're going to do over there, but we’ll just hang and have some fun!” 
 
 For the whole story, visit Gossip Extra. ||||| The BBC has insisted it will broadcast a Panorama documentary about North Korea, despite protests from the London School of Economics (LSE) that journalist John Sweeney put its staff working abroad at risk by posing as a student from the institution to gain access to the communist state. 
 
 Tony Hall, the BBC director general, has rejected a request from the LSE chairman, Peter Sutherland, to shelve the documentary, North Korea Uncovered, due to be broadcast on BBC1 on Monday night. 
 
 Hall, who has already had to defuse a row over the anti-Thatcher song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead less than two weeks after taking over at the BBC, responded to a letter from Sutherland on Saturday. He is understood to have said the documentary would go ahead as there was a clear public interest in reporting on the escalating situation in North Korea. 
 
 Hall is also understood to have said that the BBC had considered the risks involved and made sure the students on the trip were able to make an informed decision about the potential danger. 
 
 However, the LSE disputed whether the students gave their informed consent, claiming they had been deliberately misled by the BBC, and challenged the corporation's risk assessment. "It is LSE's view that the students were not given enough information to enable informed consent, yet were given enough to put them in serious danger if the subterfuge had been uncovered prior to their departure from North Korea," the university said in an email sent to all staff and students on Saturday. 
 
 Foreign journalists can not get visas to enter North Korea but overseas academics and students can. Sweeney spent eight days in the country in March with the LSE group on a trip ostensibly arranged by the Grimshaw Club – the student society of the university's international relations department. 
 
 The LSE said it first became aware of the true nature of his visit last Tuesday during a meeting with BBC staff. The university said North Korean authorities alleged that Sweeney had described himself on his visa application as an "LSE student, PhD in history" and gave as his address a room number that is used by a member of its academic staff. 
 
 Students on the trip reported that their North Korean guides repeatedly referred to Sweeney as "professor" and he went along with this, according to the LSE. Sweeney graduated from the LSE in 1980 with a BSc in government and if he has a PhD, it is not from there, according to the university. 
 
 The LSE said students on the trip were not told before setting off that Sweeney and two other BBC journalists travelling with them would be using the visit to film an undercover documentary. The university identified the two other BBC journalists as Alexander Niakaris and Tomiko Sweeney, John Sweeney's wife, who was involved in organising the trip. 
 
 In advance of leaving London, before they had paid for the trip, the students were told on two occasions – individually and later as a group – that an undercover journalist would be accompanying them to North Korea and if this was discovered they could face arrest, detention and deportation, and would be unlikely to be able to return to the country, according to a senior BBC source. 
 
 In Beijing, they were told of Sweeney's identity and that two other BBC journalists were accompanying him, including a cameraman, the insider said. They were not told more for their own benefit in case the ruse was discovered, the source added. 
 
 The BBC plans to pixelate faces or use other techniques to ensure none of the students can be identified in the Panorama documentary. 
 
 Ceri Thomas, BBC News head of programmes, defended the corporation's actions on Radio 4's The World This Weekendon Sunday, saying the Panorama film was "an important piece of public interest journalism". 
 
 "The material fact is that [the LSE students on the trip] were made fully aware of what the risks were if this journalist were to be discovered. The only people we deceived were the North Korean government," he added. "This is a country hidden from view and central to current events." 
 
 George Gaskell, pro-director of the LSE and professor of social psychology, told The World This Weekend the university had received complaints from three of the 10 students after they returned home. 
 
 "The BBC has admitted the group was deliberately misled about the involvement of the BBC. The line that was used was that a journalist would join the visit," Gaskell said. "We were told the BBC had undertaken a risk assessment and it had been at the highest level. We clearly have a different view on what is acceptable risk. I think it's potentially extremely dangerous." 
 
 Gaskell added that the BBC's actions posed less danger to the students who went on the North Korea trip than to his LSE academic colleagues working in other parts of the world. "Some are in Africa, some in China. They may find themselves at considerable risk." 
 
 Sweeney accused the LSE of putting out statements that were "factually inaccurate". He said he had spoken to the students who were on the North Korea trip since their return and the majority did not believe they had been misled. 
 
 The BBC and Sweeney's actions have divided opinion in the media. Mark Seddon, the New York bureau chief for al-Jazeera English and a former Tribune editor, criticised Sweeney, asking what protection he or the BBC could have given the LSE students if his true purpose had been uncovered. "The BBC's defence of the editorial decision behind this is woeful," he said. 
 
 Ray Snoddy, the former FT and Times editor and ex-presenter of BBC News feedback show NewsWatch, tweeted: "Extraordinary to hear BBC executive say on Radio 4 that the North Korean Panorama undercover filming was worth putting lives at risk for." 
 
 Jason Wong, one of five student representatives on the LSE's court of governors, said he would be seeking a meeting of the university's governing body after the start of the summer term later this month to revoke Sweeney's alumni status. "He is as unwelcomed to be associated with the LSE as Saif al-Islam Gaddafi."
– On the heels of a child abuse scandal, the BBC finds itself embroiled in another controversy—this time over covert reporting in North Korea. The London School of Economics says the media organization "deliberately misled" and endangered 10 of its students during a trip to the country that included a trio of undercover reporters. The leading university wants the BBC to cancel the resulting documentary, set to air today, and offer an apology. But the BBC says students were informed multiple times that there would be a journalist among them, while the program is firmly in the public interest and won't be canceled. "The only people we deceived" were those in "the North Korean government," said the BBC's news chief, who noted that students were informed of risks including "arrest, detention, and the possibility of not being allowed back into the country." Still, the BBC later clarified that the details of the documentary hadn't been revealed to students for their own safety, in case of questioning, the New York Times reports. The students ranged in age from 21 to 28, the BBC reports, and their identities will be hidden in the documentary using techniques like pixelation, the Guardian adds. Meanwhile, Dennis Rodman, whose previous visit to the country was tied to an HBO documentary, says he's headed back, the Miami Herald reports.