j’s blog

Yahoo! News - On April 15, headaches and unpleasant surprises

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the last significant simplification of the tax code. Since then, succeeding presidents and Congresses have messed it up again with layers of complexity.

Anyone who saw this coming could have made killing. A $5,000 investment in the stock of tax-return preparer H&R Block in the fall of 1986 would (with dividends reinvested) be worth more than $170,000 today.

But for those not inclined to put their money where their cynicism is, the increasing complexity of the tax code has made for nothing but misery. The code has become so complicated that it is best seen as a tax in itself. Call it the complexity tax.

On top of the tax paid on income and capital gains, we pay a cost - in dollars or in hours - because lawmakers like to accommodate lobbyists seeking deductions, exemptions and credits. Some of the ways the public pays:

• Help! Help! Sixty-one percent of taxpayers have been driven into the clutches of tax-preparation services, according to the National Taxpayers Union. That’s up from 38% in 1980 and 46% in 1986.

•Are we done yet? Taxpayers and their accountants will spend an average of 13 hours on their Form 1040s this year, up from nine hours 15 years ago. They will spend almost four hours on 1040EZs, up from one hour in 1990.

• The cost of compliance. Individuals and companies spend about 6.5 billion hours filing their taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. Estimates of the cost to the economy run from $125 billion to $140 billion.

What makes all of this anguish and expense more remarkable is that it comes despite the arrival of user-friendly tax preparation software such as Turbo Tax. Even these tools are no match for a monster code.

Now comes a new reform plan. President Bush has appointed former senators Connie Mack, R-Fla., and John Breaux, D-La., to chair a commission on simplifying the tax code. It’s set to hold its seventh hearing on Monday.

Taxpayers would be well served if the commission could persuade Congress to fix the code. But given the track record of tax reform, they might want to hedge their enthusiasm. In fact, perhaps they should go out and buy shares of H&R Block.

Yahoo! News - Americans Spend 6.6 Billion Hours on Taxes
By MARY DALRYMPLE, AP Tax Writer

WASHINGTON - People scurrying to meet tonight’s tax deadline might consider this: It’s taking you and your fellow Americans 6.6 billion hours to do all that paperwork. The basic tax return — the Form 1040 filed by most people every year — accounts for 1.6 billion hours.

The Internal Revenue Service furnished those statistics to the White House budget office, which keeps tabs on the government’s bureaucratic demands. The budget office notes that tax work “towers over the entire paperwork burden for the rest of the federal government” and accounts for some 80 percent.

“If anything, those numbers are probably understated,” said David Keating, president of the National Taxpayers Union, which reports annually on the increasing complexity and demands of tax returns.

“A lot more of the cost is just planning to do the tax-smart thing. That can actually take a lot more time than reporting what you’ve done,” he said.

Tax returns must be postmarked by midnight tonight.

Sensitive to the demands that tax laws put on weary taxpayers, the IRS has seven people working full time to reduce the anguish for filers. The IRS Office of Taxpayer Burden Reduction looks for requirements that can be streamlined, reduced or eliminated under the law.

“We’re trying to reduce unnecessary burden,” said Michael Chesman, the office director.

Some of the burden cannot be avoided because it is a requirement of the tax laws. By attacking unnecessary burden, the office has shaved more than 200 million hours from tax paperwork since the office was created in 2001.

Chesman said the office plans next year to simplify the process for requesting an extension. The idea is to replace the current four-month, and subsequent two-month, deadline extensions with one simpler and automatic six-month extension.

Small changes can make a big difference. Letting more people use the simpler 1040 forms trimmed 5 million hours off the paperwork, for example. But the improvements are often swamped by the burdens associated with new tax laws. President Bush has enacted tax changes every year he has been in office.

For individuals wondering how long they will spend on tax forms, the taxpayers’ group said it takes an estimated 26 hours and 48 minutes to prepare the Form 1040 and its most common supporting schedules. That includes keeping records, learning the law, preparing forms, copying and mailing.

That actually is less than last year, when taxpayers could have expected to spend 28 hours and 30 minutes on the same forms.

Tax preparation software has made the task more manageable for many. Where the IRS estimates it takes 13 hours to fill out the Form 1040 by hand, Julie Miller, spokeswoman for Intuit, said its TurboTax software can do the same work in two hours to four hours.

Kathy Burlison, director of tax implementation at H&R Block, said software makes individuals and paid preparers more confident they have not missed something. It also makes mistakes much easier to fix.

Nevertheless, the forms are not just a drain on people’s free time, but on the productivity of the country, Keating said.

“That’s a huge, dead weight burden, trying to discern the tax code, what it rewards most,” he said. “If we turn the nation into a paper-shuffling, law-figuring-out country, no one actually gets anything done.”
___

On the Net:

Internal Revenue Service: http://www.irs.gov/

National Taxpayers Union: http://www.ntu.org/main/

but can’t understand why there’s so much violence in the schools. Questions remain, did the concussion ‘un’gift the loser and who will bash the remaining brains out of who at the rematch? Will it be bloody enough for PPV?

Yahoo! News - Police: Teacher Starts Brawl in Class

DALLAS - A high school teacher faces an assault charge after police say she walked into a middle-school classroom, grabbed that teacher’s hair, yanked her out of her chair, and dragged her across the room while punching her in the face and kicking her.

According to the police report, Paulette Baines grabbed Mary Oliver in front of the class full of gifted students Friday. Baines was angry because Oliver told her daughter to quit loitering by lockers and go to class, Dallas school district spokesman Donald Claxton said.

Oliver said Baines was yelling at her as she entered the classroom.

“I want you to know I didn’t raise a finger. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t do anything to aggravate the situation,” Oliver said. “I did everything possible to defuse the situation.”

Baines was charged with assault with bodily injury, according to Dallas County Jail records. Baines, 45, was released early Saturday after posting $2,500 bail, a jail official said.

Baines, who was placed on paid administrative leave, did not immediately return a call seeking comment placed by The Associated Press on Monday.

Oliver, who teaches seventh-grade science at a Dallas school for gifted students, said she had bruises on her face, a concussion and two broken ribs.

The incident happened after Oliver talked to Baines’ daughter and several other students about going to class. Students are not allowed to be at their lockers during class time, Claxton said.

Oliver said she did not single out Baines’ daughter, an eighth-grader. The girl went to the school counselor, who called Baines to tell her what had happened, Claxton said.

An excellent and moving film about Cambodia. A serious film, worth renting.

The Killing Fields (1984)

Sydney Schanberg is a New York Times journalist convering the civil war in Cambodia. Together with local representative Dith Pran, they cover some of the tragedy and madness of the war. When the Americans forces leave, Dith Pran sends his family with them, but stays behind himself to help Schanberg cover the event. As an American, Schanberg won’t have any trouble leaving the country, but the situation is different for Pran; he’s a local, and the Khmer Rouge are moving in.

Summary written by Murray Chapman {muzzle at cs.uq.oz.au}

Yahoo! News - Khmer Rouge Haunts Cambodia 30 Years Later
By DAVID LONGSTREATH, Associated Press Writer

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary peasant army, the horrors of their brutal, murderous rule still stain the fabric of this impoverished Southeast Asian kingdom.

On the outskirts of Phnom Penh, near the Choeung Ek Genocidal Museum, the evidence of mass murder is easily found. Just scraping the surface of communal graves turns up bone fragments, teeth and clothing worn by those put to death by the Khmer Rouge.

Seeking to create a utopian society, the Khmer Rouge abolished private property and money and emptied the cities by driving the urban population at gunpoint into the countryside to live in communal camps.

The genocidal experiment began on April 17, 1975, and wreaked havoc for nearly five years. An invasion by the Vietnamese army early in 1979 ended the group’s reign, but not before an estimated 1.7 million or more Cambodians had died from violence, starvation or overwork.

The Khmer Rouge waged a guerrilla war for two more decades, but its abuses have largely gone unpunished since fighting stopped in 1998.

Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, fell from favor and leadership of the group’s last active faction in 1997. A year later he was dead, and many speculated he had committed suicide. Ta Mok, an 80-year-old known as “the Butcher” who deposed Pol Pot, languishes in a Phnom Penh cell awaiting a U.N. war crimes tribunal that most Cambodians believe will never come to pass.

Prime Minister Hun Sen made deals with other leaders, such as Noun Chea, right-hand man to Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, prime minister of the Khmer Rouge government. They defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1998 and now live safe from prosecution in the autonomous zone of Pailin.

Noun Chea sits quietly in the bedroom of his simple wooden shack watching the sun rise as he listens to morning news broadcasts on a cheap Chinese-made portable radio. He, like Khieu Samphan, grants few interviews and refuses to speak about the past.

Pailin, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in the west along the Thailand border, is a derelict town. The gemstones that paid for the arms and ammunition that kept the Khmer Rouge fighting for 20 years have mostly been mined. Teak trees, another source of funds, are gone as well.

Many in Pailin live a grinding existence, much like the rest of Cambodia, where half the people get by on $1 a day.

The once lush jungle of Pailin, the perfect hiding place for the guerrillas, has been turned into slashed and burned farmland that waits for a rainy season now two years overdue.

Staring at dust swirling at his border farm, former Khmer Rouge infantryman Kave Meik says: “Before we didn’t have the freedom and independence but we had plenty of food. Now we have freedom but we don’t have enough to eat.”

Yahoo! News - Russian draft collects `bums, real scum’ as most defer dangerous military posts

By Mark McDonald, Knight Ridder Newspapers

MOSCOW - A certain amount of panic will take hold of Russia on Friday, when the country begins its annual military draft.

Generals will be panicked that they’ll end up with another crop of druggies, convicts and misfits. Mothers will be terrified at handing over their sons to a military that’s notorious for its brutal hazing of new recruits.

And tens of thousands of draft-age young men will fear for their lives as they face two years of menial labor, sadistic senior officers, and, worst of all, a possible deployment to Chechnya. Many will wangle phony deferments, fail to report or simply flee.

“What (the military) ends up with are the social fallouts, trigger-happy people, bums, the homeless, the real scum,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst in Moscow. “And they’ve all got guns.”

Shootings of officers, desertions, suicides, alcoholism, torture in the barracks and drug abuse are rampant in today’s Russian military, according to Felgenhauer and other experts.

Even the chief of the Russian general staff has said the military situation in Russia is “beyond critical” - not an encouraging comment given the country’s huge nuclear arsenal, long-range missiles, and biological- and chemical-weapons depots.

All of which makes the annual draft critical to Russia’s national security - and perhaps the world’s.

“An unsound or unstable Russian military populated with dissolute officers and destitute troopers would be a global liability,” said a senior U.S. official who asked for anonymity because he didn’t wish to be seen as meddling in Russian affairs.

“Nobody should want to see any further degradation in the military here.”

President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia, with its million-man military, can’t afford an all-volunteer army, though planners are aiming for an equal mix of conscripts and volunteers by 2007.

Calls for young men to join are countered by an outcry over what many parents feel are the brutal conditions of Russian military life.

“I’m really stunned by the attitude of so many of our Russian women,” said Maria Fedulova, whose son was drafted 10 years ago and sent to Chechnya. “The mothers of these boys are hypnotized. How can they let their sons go to the army? How could anyone?”

Fedulova works for the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, an anti-draft group that opposes Russia’s use of military force in Chechnya. The Mothers are trying to start their own political party, and with a new draft season starting, they’re busier than ever.

“The most terrible thing is that parents still believe the government propaganda,” said Valentina Melnikova, the head of the Mothers committee.

“The adults still say that all kids should do military service. They bring them (to the recruiting station), hold a farewell party and they all drink vodka. Then three weeks later, when their kid has been beaten in the barracks, they show up in our office saying, `How could we know such an awful thing could happen?’”

The military’s target this year is about 150,000 draftees, and recruiters are angry that once again they’ll have to scrape the bottom of the social barrel to meet their quotas.

Senior military planners complain there are so many legal deferments that only 11 percent of draft-age men ever get inducted. And of those, only 30 percent are physically fit enough to get through boot camp.

In the 2003 draft, for example, 17 percent of draftees had various “psychic disorders.” Another 14 percent were alcoholics, 7 percent had police records and 40 percent were high-school dropouts.

The ritualized hazing of recruits in their barracks kills several hundred young soldiers every year and traumatizes countless others. Closely held army reports say that a fourth of all non-combat deaths are suicides, and dozens of soldiers die each winter after overnight punishment sessions outdoors.

Draftees make about $5 a month, and many will find themselves doing menial chores or manual labor, such as building summer houses for senior officers. Many also sell their blood to get extra money.

So it’s little wonder that draft-dodging is epidemic every spring.

An estimated 22,000 young men won’t answer their draft notices this week - it’s called a “summons” here - and tens of thousands of others will use phony medical exams, fake university enrollments or bribery to avoid serving.

When Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov recently floated the idea of ending student deferments, student groups immediately took to the streets in protest. Ivanov quickly backed off, although a major curtailment of deferments is being drafted in the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.

Some young men hurriedly join police forces or fire brigades to get deferments. Quickie “marriages” to single mothers aren’t uncommon: Men with dependents also receive deferments. (Young women aren’t subject to the draft.)

Andrei Nikolayev, a former army general and Duma member, said no more than 500 people ever tried to evade the draft in a given year during the Soviet era. Now the rate is 44 times higher.

Alternative service exists in Russia, but the term is three years, a year longer than the regular military hitch. Young men seeking alternative service also can be assigned to work as civilians - cleaning latrines or painting barracks - in the military units they were trying to avoid.

Maria Fedulova’s zeal to stop the draft stems from her memories of her son, Denis, as a 19-year-old draftee. Denis had fired a weapon only three times in boot camps before he was sent to Chechnya. He worked mostly as a driver, collecting injured soldiers from battlefields, but she remembers him talking about hearing and feeling the crunch of bones as he drove over bodies.

When he was kidnapped by separatists in Chechnya, no one in the military told her. She learned it for herself after his letters stopped and she traveled to southern Russia to find him. An American journalist gave her the news, she said.

Eventually, her son was swapped for a rebel fighter in Russian hands and he came home. But the experience left him scarred. He didn’t speak for two months, and he couldn’t get a job.

“He’s still like a time bomb, ready to go off,” she said. As for her son, “he’d go to prison before he’d ever go back into the army.”

Yahoo! News - Darfur death toll at least 300,000, MPs say

LONDON (AFP) - More than 300,000 people have died as a result of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, British lawmakers said in a report, a figure more than four times greater than an official UN estimate.

Compiled after interviews with non-governmental organizations, UN officials and British Development Secretary Hilary Benn, the estimated death count dwarfed the World Health Organization’s (WHO) figure of 70,000.

“We think that is a conservative estimate,” Tony Baldry, the chair of the House of Commons’ international development committee, told AFP.

The committee’s report faulted the UN health body for making a “gross underestimate” of the toll of the two-year conflict, began when a rebellion in the vast western Sudanese region was put down by government-sponsored militias which led a scorched-earth campaign against local civilians.

Baldry blamed the faulty WHO figures on the “statistical anarchy in the way the figures were collected”, since they included violence which occurred in refugee camps but not violent deaths which took place in villages across Darfur.

Also, they noted, the WHO estimate covered only a period from March to mid-October 2004, while the alleged atrocities including rape, murder and forced displacement of villagers by the Arab militias had been under way for much longer.

The lawmakers, who visited Darfur in February, credited Benn and the British government for reacting more quickly than most international powers but still faulted the world for its slow response to what has become one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises.

“Our hope for this report is that it will jolt people’s attention to the scale of the crisis in Darfur, the numbers of people who are continuously, silently suffering in Darfur, and will be yet another call to the UK government and the international community that we have a collective responsibility to protect,” Baldry said.

“And there can be no further alibis, excuses for future failure,” he said.

The parliament report comes as the United Nations Security Council considers a draft resolution which would refer 51 suspects identified by a UN probe for trial on war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court.

The British lawmakers firmly backed the move to see Darfur war criminals tried at The Hague court, and said the Security Council should push through debate even if it faced opposition from permanent veto-wielding members the United States and China.

“It’s worthwhile to try to get agreement on stronger action, and absolutely force the issue on the Security Council,” committee member John Bercow told AFP.

It would “put other governments on the spot”, he said, referring to objections by the United States, which opposes the ICC, and China, which has interests in Sudan’s large oil reserves.

If those countries continue to oppose strong measures against Sudan, “let them be named and shamed in the most public, damning way,” Bercow said.

“Darfur is a real test for the international community and civilization as a whole at the start of the 21st century,” Baldry added. “If we can’t resolve the situation in Darfur it bodes pretty badly for the coming millenium.”

Yahoo! News - S. Korea bars secret video of the North

Tue Mar 29, 3:00 AM ET

A tape of a public execution, smuggled into South Korea, is kept off the air.

By Robert Marquand, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - On a bleached and scratchy video image smuggled out of Kim Jong Il’s closed regime, blindfolded prisoners are tied to white posts on a rocky landscape, shot three times, and dragged away. The rare video footage of summary executions in North Korea - a practice considered routine in the North but never captured on film - was taken by hidden camera March 1 and 2, and smuggled through China to South Korea.

At the time, refugee groups in Seoul were ecstatic. It looked like a human rights slam-dunk: Refugees from the North have long described summary executions - public spectacles where prisoners are shot moments after a death sentence is proclaimed. The shootings are a form of social control via terror, experts say.

Yet in a twist not anticipated by underground groups that carried off the filming, South Korean TV authorities have not let the video be broadcast. The tape has been aired worldwide; Japan recently aired three exhaustive reports.

But due to intense though indirect pressure by Seoul officials, the North Korean execution tapes, purportedly of “middlemen” who help refugees escape to China, are not yet available for viewing by Koreans in the South. The indirect censure adds to frustration among those documenting the gulags and torture in the North. They charge indifference in the South to evidence of manifold suffering by ethnic siblings across the demilitarized zone.

It also raises anew questions about a five-year policy in Seoul of studiously avoiding acts that might upset Pyongyang, for fear of harming fragile North-South relations. South Korea’s ambivalence about a get-tough policy with North Korea may also factor into the mechanics of the six-party talks over the North’s recently declared nuclear program.

“We have told of many public executions [in the North]. But officials in Seoul always ask us for material evidence,” says Pak Sang Huk, an escapee from the North. “Now that we have evidence, they don’t want to see it…. The people who brought this tape through China were speechless when they visited KBS [Korean Broadcast Service] studios, and were shunned.” Mr. Pak claims those who filmed the executions risked their lives to do so.

Seoul’s effort to avoid broadcasts of negative images or facts about North Korea is part of a larger strategy dating to the Sunshine Policy and Korean summit of 2000. In this view, unification of North and South can’t be achieved if the South criticizes or acts in a manner that the North deems hostile.

“Kim Jong Il holds public executions to show the Kim family is omnipotent,” says Jae Jin Suh of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. “It is naive to think that Pyongyang will respond to a push by Seoul to change and treat its people better. We need to focus on what is effective, not what we think we should say.”

Of late, the South has stopped raising the North’s abuses in international bodies. In 2003, South Korea withdrew from a UN Geneva process when it required a vote on North Korea’s human rights record. In 2004, Seoul abstained from voting. A new South Korean defense white paper released this month after a three-year delay, deletes a former reference to the North Korean Army as the “main threat.”

Critics say that to stifle or disallow comment about the unpredictable Kim leaves the South in the position of being influenced or governed by Kim’s own whims. Supporters of Sunshine say that patience is needed, and a return to hostile accusations could create a standoff that would slow foreign investment in the South. Critics say millions are suffering now.

The taped executions took place near Hoeryang, along the Chinese border. South Korean intelligence officers have told Western reporters the tape is far too detailed to be a fake. Yet officially the tape’s authenticity is “still under investigation.”

North Korean refugees claim that an underground group called Youth League for Freedom shot the tape, which records about 104 minutes over two days.

The camera is held at mid-body and initial images are of a rush of dark winter coats, a thronging crowd, police officers pushing people into line. Some 1,500 persons appear scattered around a rocky ravine. At one point, a white “propaganda truck” pulls up and over a megaphone one hears a charge read out. The accused are described as prostitute traffickers. (Sources insist the executed were helping Koreans escape the North.)

In due course, white posts are hammered into the ground. Then two men are escorted from a tent. Their arms are tied to the post. People stand on top of bicycles to see. A woman is heard to say, “I can’t watch this.” A police chief’s voice calls out, “Aim, fire, fire, fire.” Nine shots by three soldiers ring out from behind the prisoners, who instantly fall. An official with a megaphone can be heard saying, “How pathetic is the end of these traitors of the fatherland.”

Such footage is rare, coming from one of the world’s most closed states. Since 1956, North Korea has been sorted into a hierarchy of those with greater or lesser adoration for the ruling Kim family. At the top is a “core class” of supporters, followed by a “wavering class” whose loyalty is questioned, and a “hostile class” that are outcast. The Kim family “recognizes only a part of the population,” notes Stephen Bradner, a veteran US adviser in Seoul. “The rest are considered disposable.”

Evidence of a system of gulags where hundreds of thousands of the hostile class live has been confirmed by satellite imagery. From 1995 to 1999, between 1 and 3 million starved to death. Detailed knowledge of the North is difficult to obtain.

Nearly half the geographical area is off limits. Distrust of foreigners is profound. A fifth of the population are alleged to be informers, and a half dozen security agencies compete with each other to quash dissent, say US sources.

What the tape shows, apart from punishment seemingly in excess of the alleged crime, is that the accused have no lawyer, are not allowed to speak, and have no appeal, says Abraham Lee, a human rights lawyer in Seoul who also heads Refuge Pnan, which offers sanctuary for refugees.

US and Japanese sources describe a practice of stuffing rocks in the mouths of the accused - making them unable to shout out last words against the regime.

Many activists express dismay at a disinterest in the fate of fellow Koreans. Gyeng-seob Oh, who runs the newsletter NKnet, says, “When I first saw the footage, I thought it would be front-page news. But South Korea, the most important market for this information, was not interested.”

The only public airing of the tape in Korea came March 25 in a basement room of the Seoul National Assembly Library. One refugee testified that Pyongyang had in recent years declared that executions should be kept indoors. A large public outdoor gathering suggests that a crackdown may be under way, experts mused.

Another refugee plaintively asked the group what South Koreans will say to North Koreans “once North Korea is liberated. “What will we say when they ask us, ‘What did you do to help?’ “

Yahoo! News - South Korean Lawmakers See North ‘Execution’ Tapes

By Jon Herskovitz

SEOUL (Reuters) - Grainy video purporting to show public executions in North Korea captures the depravity of the communist state, South Korea’s opposition leader said on Friday, urging Seoul to press Pyongyang on human rights.

Members of parliament from the main opposition Grand National Party and human rights activists screened two tapes at the South’s National Assembly library that they say were smuggled from the North.

Activists say the tapes were made with a hidden camera and show thousands gathering at two separate events to watch public executions in and near Hoeryong, south of North Korea’s border with China.

"Among all the horrendous things that have happened in the North, this is the most egregious," said Park Geun-hye, Grand National Party leader and daughter of assassinated president Park Chung-hee.

"The government of South Korea should investigate this and stop this," she said. Her party takes a harder line on North Korea than the ruling Uri Party, which has not publicly pressed the North on its suspected human rights abuses.

The videotapes were broadcast over three nights from last week on Japanese national network NTV.

In the first video, which activists said was taped on March 1, a propaganda van travels near a public market in Hoeryong as people in the crowd speak in North Korean accents about getting a good view.

Eleven people are shown. They are charged with being human trafficking brokers who smuggled North Korean women across the border for arranged marriages with Chinese men.

LIFELESS

In an outdoor trial that takes less than 20 minutes — where no defense is presented — two of the 11 are sentenced to death. The Japanese broadcaster magnified the executions, which take place in the distance, so that they can be seen more clearly.

In the distance, one man is tied to a post by his head, torso and legs. Three soldiers fire one round each at the head, breaking the ropes as the man slumps forward, then the chest as the ropes break again and the man slumps forward more, and finally the legs, as the lifeless body falls to the ground.

The other person is executed in the same manner. The bodies are then stuffed into burlap bags and tossed into the back of a van as children run to the scene to get a glimpse of the action.

There is also a second video activists say was taken on the following day in the same general area that shows an execution of one other person in the same manner.

The total running time for the videos is 105 minutes and the Japanese broadcaster used satellite imaging and videotape taken from the Chinese side of the border to match features from Hoeryong with those shown in the video

"The North Korean authorities start to publicise executions by going to factories and other places about a week before they take place in order to build up crowds," said Park Kwang-il, a North Korean refugee, who said executions are a regular part of the system.

The North is one of the world’s most tightly controlled societies, but reports have filtered out of persistent rights abuses that include networks of prison camps, public executions and guilt through association where relatives of criminals are also punished.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights has adopted resolutions expressing serious concern over human rights conditions in North Korea. Pyongyang denies human rights abuses and criticizes the United States and other countries for taking it to task.