Kim 101: How well do you know North Korea's leaders?

North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un succeeded his father, the late Kim Jong-il, in late 2011. In his first six years, Mr. Kim has expanded North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and has insisted that nuclear arms proliferation is off the negotiation table. But the Kims are known as much for their eccentricities and cults of personality as they are for their iron-fisted rule. How well do you know Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un?

2. Roughly what percent of North Korea’s GDP is believed to go toward its military?

Korean Central News Agency/AP/File
North Korean soldiers march during a massive military parade marking the 65th anniversary of the communist nation's ruling party in Pyongyang, North Korea, in October 2010.

5 percent

15 percent

25 percent

50 percent

Javascript is disabled. Quiz scoring requires Javascript.

Dear Reader,

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.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

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.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.