Anger at BBC Use of 'Human Shields' in North Korea

The London School of Economics has demanded that the BBC withdraw a television program in which an investigative reporter for the broadcaster is shown traveling to North Korea with a group of LSE students acting as his cover.

The British state broadcaster's 'Panorama' reporter John Sweeney posed as one of the LSE's PhD students on a university society trip in order to film undercover in the country.

On its website, the BBC said that Sweeney witnessed "a landscape bleak beyond words, a people brainwashed for three generations and a regime happy to give the impression of marching towards Armageddon". He then left the BBC's offices and traveled to North Korea where he encountered a similar environment.

While Sweeney said the students were told a journalist was with them, the LSE said that "It is LSE's view that the students were not given enough information enable informed consent, yet were given enough to put them in serious danger in the subterfuge had been uncovered". The LSE is a prestigious British university which typically educates the kind of political and business leaders whose subterfuge put the international economy in in danger during the global financial crisis, and as such there is some doubt as to its students' ability to make informed decisions, based on the precedents set by their predecessors.

While the BBC has tried to portray Sweeney's program as a 'shocking expose', it travels a path so well-worn by hundreds of other journalists before him that Pyongyang – which is desperate for foreign currency - was recently rumored to be considering starting tours for undercover journalists under a specially created state-run company called 'Shocking Expose Tours'.

However, North Korea was ironically forced to cancel the plan after it emerged earlier this year that a number of BBC stars had allegedly abused children over several decades on its premises while staff turned a blind eye, and that as a consequence the 'shocking expose tours' brand has instead recently become synonymous with public visits to the rogue state broadcaster.

The BBC's investigative journalists meanwhile were said to have been unaware of what was sometimes happening just down the corridor from them during the period in which the abuse allegedly took place, and the scandal was eventually publicized in a program by ITV – the BBC's main rival in England, after the rigidly controlled state broadcaster failed to successfully suppress the story. The BBC – having failed to investigate its own secrets - was said to be hopeful it would have better luck exposing the North Korean regime's secrets on official tours which are organized and rigidly controlled by Pyongyang.

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'Dokdo' To Be Carved on Every Korean Schoolchild

Dokdo City - Korean population 210,000

As the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula dominates media headlines around the world, the South Korean government believes it has found a way of keeping the international community's attention on the really important issue of the Dokdo islands, which are Korean territory, by carving the Korean name 'Dokdo' into children. It is hoped that in addition to raising global awareness of Japan's outrageously aggressive territorial claims, the scars will also serve as a permanent reminder to future generations that Korea must never give up its territorial birthrights to the hated Japanese who only wish to revive their colonial past.

A statement issued by the Ministry of Education said "People around the world will see the commitment of our nation's children to its most important cause, and it will prove to them the strength of Korea's evidence of historical ownership to the islands versus the flimsy and unproven fantasy claims made by Japan, which is not prepared to carve the word 'Dokdo' on their children – a lack of commitment which clearly demonstrates the shallowness of their alleged beliefs."

Some people have questioned whether permanently scarring children is the best method of achieving this and a debate has raged in recent weeks on the merits of carving versus tattooing, but tattoos – which might otherwise have been the preferred option – are generally frowned upon for their criminal connotations, whereas many children are scarred during their early life in South Korea anyway, according to numerous research papers.

"We don't want to turn our country into a nation of criminals" said a ruling party lawmaker, who was last year convicted of handing out illegal loans to rival candidates shortly before they withdrew from his election race, although he did apologize when this was discovered.

On the subject of foreign criminals, the government also announced that multicultural children will not have 'Dokdo' carved into them – partly on the advice that this might create a legal precedent for a stake in the ownership of the islands, but mostly out of the fear that those doing the carving may get AIDS from their blood, as it is well-known that people without pure Korean blood can catch and spread AIDS very easily.

While some Korean parents may harbor unpatriotic reservations over the plan, especially if they suffer from undiagnosed or untreated left-wing thoughts, the government has been quick to point out that the Dokdo scars could eventually be mostly removed for cosmetic reasons if necessary when a child reaches adulthood. Stocks in plastic surgery companies, which had already featured heavy buying earlier in the week, soared on the news.

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Should Nurseries Stop Beating Babies?

The beating of an 18-month of infant in an Ulsan nursery has raised the question of what the minimum age should be to induct children into Korea's bullying culture.

While it has long been accepted that children will be beaten by the parents, school teachers, and later their seniors at university, superiors in the military, elder colleagues in the workplace, and increasingly, their children when elderly and infirm, there is no formal social guideline as to what age these regular beatings should begin, and whether they should be administered by parents or professional child carers who have more experience in not leaving marks and scars.

Some argue that beating babies prepares them for the rigors of Korean life at an age which makes their emergence into society less painful, but others say that early beatings result in later, more serious beatings losing their shock value.

Predictably, liberal progressives who typically form the mentally and physically weakest section of society believe that there should be no beatings at all, in the bizarre and illogical belief that dismantling the inherent nature of Korean society will somehow lead to a better country from the anarchy which follows. However, they fail to suggest what people living in the polluted industrial city of Ulsan should do with their time if they can no longer beat children.

Controversies over the minimum age of beatings have recently led to a series of ugly confrontations as professional child-carers and parents have denied responsibility for administering the beatings, requiring intervention by the authorities to decide who should take the credit.

Police are now investigating the Ulsan case using traditional methods of interrogation to question the parties involved.

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