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"They demand not only more cash, but also all kinds of things for themselves and their superiors," said Mr. Kim, a South Korean human rights activist who helps North Koreans flee their totalitarian homeland and resettle in the South. "They've developed a taste for South Korean goods, too."

Under North Korea's new leader, Kim Jong-un, human rights activists and South Korean officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to smuggle refugees out of the country, contributing to a sharp drop in the number of North Koreans reaching South Korea in the past year.

The number of refugees has never been particularly large, since most North Koreans are so impoverished they find it all but impossible to raise the money to attempt an escape. But the tightening of controls at the Chinese border led to a fall of about 44 percent from the previous year in the number of refugees reaching South Korea in 2012. The total was 1,509, according to South Korean government data.

Despite the relatively small number, the flow of North Koreans defecting to South Korea to escape poverty and oppression has long been a major embarrassment for the North. Lately, the Chinese also appear to have tightened their control at the river border to help protect their client government. "The crackdowns in China and North Korea came in tandem," said Mr. Kim, who manages a network of activists and smugglers from his Caleb Mission church in Cheonan, a city about 60 miles south of Seoul. "It's become more difficult for my people to operate in North Korea and China."

A devastating famine in the 1990s caused many North Koreans to flee, and the number of refugees peaked at 2,917 in 2009. Today, about 24,000 people who escaped from North Korea live in South Korea.

In the last years of his rule, Kim Jong-il, the previous dictator and the current ruler's father, added more checkpoints on the roads to the Chinese border, according to South Korean activists and researchers. North Korea built more barriers along the border and rotated patrols more frequently to discourage corruption.

Under Kim Jong-un, who took over a year ago after his father's death, border controls have tightened further, officials and activists say. The government began to jam the Chinese cellphone signals that activists relied on to coordinate their smuggling operations with collaborators in the North. North Korea also deployed equipment to trace cellphone signals.

"That significantly narrowed the window for cross-border cellphone conversations," said Kim Hee-tae, a leader of the International Network of North Korea Human Rights Activists. His group raises money from churches; until last year it typically arranged for 180 to 190 North Korean refugees annually to escape to the South. But this past year, he said, his organization managed to bring in only about 100 people.

"Even after the bribes are paid, there is no guarantee of success," said Do Hee-youn, head of the Citizens' Coalition for the Human Rights of North Korean Refugees, based in Seoul. "We have recently seen cases where border guards were not punished for having taken bribes when they turned over the refugees." Adding to the difficulty, some of the missionaries and brokers involved in the smuggling were rounded up by the Chinese police.

"It just became impossible to use public transportation in China because these days you cannot buy a train or bus ticket without a proper ID, which the North Koreans don't have," said the Rev. Chun Ki-won, another veteran human rights activist, who runs the Durihana Mission, a Christian group based in Seoul.

But for all the tighter controls imposed by the North Koreans and Chinese, there are still ways of slipping through the cracks.

Landing a border assignment is seen by many North Korean soldiers as a chance to make a fortune by collecting bribes from smugglers. The police in North Korea sometimes protect families with relatives in the South so they can take a cut from cash remittances from the South.

North Koreans have also developed an appetite for outside news and entertainment. "If early defectors fled North Korea for sheer 'survival,' an increasing number of North Koreans reaching South Korea flee for 'a better life' than they had in the North," Kim Soo-am, an expert on North Korean refugees at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, recently wrote.

A group of 15 North Koreans that the Caleb Mission team in Cheonan had smuggled out in early December included a striking example of one such defector: a 29-year-old woman who yearned to become a television celebrity. "She had watched so many South Korean soap operas that she developed an illusion about life in South Korea," Mr. Kim said, pointing out a particularly well-dressed woman in a photograph of the 15 North Koreans. "When we smuggled her out of North Korea, she was already wearing nothing but South Korean-made clothes."

The laws will be among the strongest in the country, said Kevin Outterson, a law professor at Boston University and a member of the expert panel that advised the state on how to curb abuses by companies like the New England Compounding Center, the Framingham pharmacy that made the tainted drug responsible for the nationwide meningitis outbreak.

The legislation would establish strict licensing requirements for compounding sterile drugs; let the state assess fines against pharmacies that break its rules; protect whistle-blowers who work in compounding pharmacies; and reorganize the state pharmacy board to include more members who are independent of the industry and fewer who are part of it.

Alec Loftus, a spokesman for the state's Office of Health and Human Services, said that Mr. Patrick expected the new legislation to be passed quickly.

Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard, said the proposed laws seemed sound and comprehensive. But he warned that if other states did not take similar steps, compounding pharmacies engaging in shoddy practices would just move to places with the weakest laws and the least oversight.

"The remaining question is not what Massachusetts is doing or will do, but will there be a minimum level of regulation like this in the rest of the states?" Professor Carpenter said.

The meningitis outbreak, first detected in September, was caused by contaminated batches of a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center. The drug was injected into about 14,000 people's spinal area to treat back and neck pain.

As of Dec. 28, 656 people in 19 states had become ill with meningitis or other infections, like severe internal abscesses in the area where the drug was injected. Some have had both meningitis and spinal infections. The case count is expected to keep rising. Thirty-nine have died.

The New England Compounding Center was shut down, and inspections found extensive contamination. Investigations uncovered a long history of questionable practices that had drawn warnings from the state and the Food and Drug Administration.

On Dec. 21, the company announced that it had filed for bankruptcy. Numerous lawsuits have been filed against it.

At the heart of the problem have been gaps in regulation that have allowed such companies to avoid both state and federal controls. The company called itself a pharmacy, and pharmacies are generally regulated by states, while large drug companies are regulated federally, by the Food and Drug Administration.

Compounding pharmacies mix their own drug preparations, like skin creams and cough syrups, supposedly for individual patients with special needs. But the New England Compounding Center began to act like a manufacturer, making and shipping large amounts of injectable drugs, for which sterility is essential. No state law required it to obtain a license for this type of large-scale compounding, to follow good manufacturing processes or to let the state know it was shipping all over the country.

Dr. Lauren Smith, interim commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said the company "was a manufacturer in pharmacy clothing."

Governor Patrick said, "The tragic meningitis outbreak has shown us all that the board's governing authority has not kept up with an industry that has evolved from corner drugstores to the types of large manufacturers that have been at the center of so much harm."

Dr. Smith said she thought the most important part of the new legislation was the requirement of a license for sterile compounding. "Now we are going to have the ability to develop specialty licenses that will allow us to track and identify those pharmacies that are engaged in different practices that could potentially put higher numbers of individuals at risk, such as those who engage in sterile compounding," she said.

Professor Carpenter said a particularly powerful part of the proposal is that it requires licensure for out-of-state pharmacies that ship medication to Massachusetts. The state, he said, is a huge market for injectable drugs.

"Basically, if you think about the large hospitals, the amount of medical care that goes on in the state, it's in a sense using the purchasing power of the state of Massachusetts to induce changes elsewhere," he said.

The state has also taken other steps recently to rein in compounding, apart from the new legislation. It began conducting surprise inspections, and has required compounding pharmacies to report how much medication they are shipping and where, so that it can keep tabs on those that begin acting like manufacturers. It also requires the pharmacies to report when they become subjects of regulatory actions by other states or the federal government.

It has been too warm for December hockey in the Arctic, the latest sign that climate change is altering the environment and the way people live — especially in the far north, where the effects of rising temperatures are most pronounced.

Nine of the 14 villages in Nunavik, a region in northernmost Quebec, have installed cooling systems at community arenas within the last five years.

In Canada's Nunavut Territory, towns including Arviat, Igloolik, Sanikiluaq and Repulse Bay have resorted to cooling systems. A system is also being installed at the community arena in Cape Dorset, a hamlet of 1,400 just 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

"We used to have natural ice in the arena in October, but that hasn't happened for a long time," said Mike Hayward, a Cape Dorset town official. Now the ice isn't fit for hockey until mid-January, he said. That is why a cooling system is being installed in the building.

The Canadian environmental ministry reports that the country is warming more than twice as fast as the world as a whole, with annual average temperatures in Canada up about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1948. The warming in winter is even faster, almost 6 degrees Fahrenheit over the same period, and scientists have documented a substantially shorter outdoor skating season as a result.

A study published last year by climate scientists at McGill and Concordia universities in Montreal warned that natural ice for skating could disappear from southern Alberta and British Columbia by midcentury and be significantly diminished throughout the rest of the country.

"The ability to skate and play hockey outdoors is a critical component of Canadian identity and culture," the study said. "Wayne Gretzky learned to skate on a backyard skating rink; our results imply that such opportunities may not be available to future generations of Canadian children."

The last several winters have been remarkably warm in Canada, and the winter of 2011-12 was the warmest in the historical record, with temperatures as much as 13 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in parts of the country. Last January, the winter warmth disrupted the N.H.L. All-Star Game festivities in Ottawa, as mild temperatures denied visitors the wintertime tradition of skating on the Rideau Canal.

The warming trend has been especially noticeable in the Canadian Arctic.

In Cape Dorset, Hayward noted, it rained on Christmas Day in 2010. Last month, on the first day of winter, it was only about 27 degrees.

"There's been a big change over the past few years, to the point where without these systems now, it would not be possible for the villages to make their ice inside the arenas," said Joe Juneau, a former N.H.L. player who has run a youth hockey program in Nunavik since 2006.

"When I started the program, I remember some of the villages starting building their ice in early November," said Juneau, who holds an aeronautical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Now it's very problematic. Without these systems, it would not be possible anymore for communities to have natural ice in their arenas."

Hockey in the far north is a relatively recent phenomenon, helped largely by government-backed recreational programs and arena construction over the last two decades. Juneau initiated the Nunavik Youth Hockey Development Program to encourage children to stay in school and away from alcohol and drug consumption. More than 1,000 children are involved, and a handful have gone to Montreal to pursue a higher level of play while attending high school.

Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, has had an arena since the mid-1980s and produced the N.H.L.'s first Inuit player, Jordin Tootoo. When he grew up there was only one team per age group. The hockey program in Iqaluit, the territorial capital, produced a minor league goalie, Paul Dainton, formerly of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who played this season with the Springfield Falcons of the A.H.L.

Those and other Nunavut towns have busy senior men's leagues, and tournaments among the territory's communities are a winter highlight.

But the warming climate has forced arena managers in the far north to forgo natural ice and turn to artificially made ice for longer ice seasons.

Some rinks installed concrete floors to promote cooling, but others employed newer technologies. The new cooling plants in many Nunavut rinks use a thermosiphon system, in which metal pipes below the arena floor send warm air outside the building.

The rinks across Nunavik and in Cape Dorset use a less expensive refrigeration system called Eco-Ice, which employs compressors standing outside the building to draw cool air in, force warm air out, and keep the building interior at a constant temperature of minus-3 Celsius, or 26.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Eco-Ice systems were installed in Nunavik because the communities wanted to extend the hockey season for the kids," said Frédéric Gagné, director of the municipal public works department for the region.

"With global warming, it's getting pretty difficult for northern communities to make ice," said François Bilodeau of LeProhon Group, the Quebec manufacturer of the Eco-Ice system, which has been installed in 42 rinks across Canada in the last 15 years.

"If it wasn't getting so warm, we would probably not be in business," he said.