Do you know Chechnya? Take the quiz

When Chechnya made headlines in April 2013 as the ancestral land of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the news dredged up memories of terrorist attacks in Russia orchestrated in the name of Chechen independence. How much do you know about Chechen-Russian relations – about the years of war with Russia and heavy-handed policies of a Moscow-installed strongman? And what else do you know about this small stretch of land, long billed as a volatile backwater to Russia?

2. In what sport did the Chechen president and the Chechen sports minister compete in April?

Denis Sinyakov/Reuters
Ramzan Kadyrov, the President of Chechnya, speaks during an interview with Reuters at his private offices near the town of Gudermes outside the Chechen capital in 2009.

Curling

Wrestling

Horse Racing

Boxing

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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