North Korean Leader seemingly burns holes in his pockets

         North Korea is not part of a growing economy. Their country is suffering from poverty and starvation. Kids are roaming the streets homeless, parent less, and eating dirty scraps of food out of the mud. The country has food aid from the United States. These Problems all arose because one man decided he was not going to help his country. Instead he indulges himself, and his family on some of the most expensive foods in the world.
                                                                      

Kim Jong-Un's extravagant diet has cost lots of money to up hold. Kim has his very own personal chef who makes all of his meals for him. His name is Fujimoto. Fujimoto was recruited by the North Korean Government to work a restaurant in Pongyong. Soon after he was hired as a personal chef for Kim Sung Il. Fujimoto says that he has been on shopping trips all around the world for different kinds of delicate foods. This puts the estimated prices of his food very high. He estimated one meal of special scented rice cakes at 120 for each little bite sized piece.

        In the book "The Orphan Master's Son", there is a part where one of the government agents goes on a trip to L.A. just to buy DVD's. He says that he has 24 hours to buy three-Thousand dollars worth of movies. 
        This is the exact reason that North Korea is in such a poor economic state. Kim Jong- Il is simply not responsible with his money. He knows that there is a country of starving people, yet he still chooses to spend extremely large amounts of money on luxuries to pamper himself, and others who are of "loyalty" in North Korea. 





Kim Jong-il's expensive eating habits putting the country into depression.

Riot prevention surrounding the Pulitzer prize

Many of you who keep up with what is happening in the world of exceptional literature may already know this: there was no Pulitzer Prize awarded for 2012. I wasn't looking into the Pulitzer specifically, but instead I was searching for more information on a book and it's author, The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson. I came across an article called, Thank God, They Awarded a Pulitzer for Fiction This Year; Print Industry Saved From Collapse. The title was what surprised me initially because I would have assumed that they awarded a prize every year. "2012 marked the first time in 35 years that the Pulitzer committee decided that no fiction book was worth of the prize."(Drew Grant). Their reasoning was that none of the novels were truly worthy of the award.

This reason was unsettling to not only the authors and the publishers, but also agents and booksellers who have as much if not more to gain from a prize being awarded. Many were outraged by this including the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn's event coordinator, Michele Filgate, who told The New York Times ""We’re counting on a Pulitzer win this year because of all the literary awards, I feel like the Pulitzer sells the most books...Which is why it was so disappointing last year that there wasn't one at all." Though the prize for most people is about the money, for the authors and the readers it's to know who's is the best of the best, and in this case it is The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson.

Here is a analysis/soapstone of the article:

S: Orphan Master’s Son out did all of the other contestants last year for the Pulitzer prize. Also, because there was no prize awarded last year Adam Johnson satisfied the angry stakeholders who stand to gain a lot from a prize being awarded.

O: Adam Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer prize

A: Other authors, people who enjoy good books, anyone curious about Adam Johnson

P: Inform people about the winner of the most recent Pulitzer prize. Also, this article tells people that there was no prize awarded last year.

S: The author of the article is Drew Grant and he is also the speaker of this article

Tone: Excitement. It is exciting that he was able to win after a year that the committee found no novel worthy of the prize.

If you, our amazing viewer, know anything else about this please let us know in the comments.

        Kim Jong-Il believed that he was the most interesting man in the world. He was definitely interesting, but in a different way.  In reality he was very possibly insane. In his biography he says he was born on a sacred mountain under a double rainbow. I think that is all you need to hear to understand how genuinely crazy he was, but there is much more. He has an array of other "facts" about himself. He says that he does not urinate or
defecate like other people. This is just plain weird. In his first game of golf it is officially reported that he shot 38 under par, and had 11 holes in 1. I'm not sure but when the guys at The Masters are shooting only 8 under at the best with no hole in ones, this sounds extremely crazy. I have to believe that this is forged information. He also had a distinct dislike for short people, even though he was only 5' 3". He had all the short people deported to inhabitable islands so that they wouldn't effect future generations. Kind of funny, because he is very short too. The most crazy thing of all is that he thought he could solve hunger in North Korea by breeding giant rabbits and then selling them to the public as food. He talked to a Romanian farmer who had bred these giant rabbits to see if he could buy a starting fleet for North Korea to grow off of. When he bought the fleet of 10 rabbits, instead of breeding them and selling them to the public, he made a royal feast and ate the 10 rabbits. This is the reason that North Korea is in a state of poverty. Most of the population does not even have access to good food. Kim Jong-Il was simply not leading the nation. He was leaving everyone to die, and making sure that him and a few of the other elites are well feed, and well cared for. He might have just be the craziest man in the world.  If theres anyone crazier than Kim Jong-Il, it is most definitely his very own son Kim Jong-Un!  If you would like to have a good laugh by looking at more facts about Kim Jong-Il, go ahead and click on this link...http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/19/kim-jong-il-18-strange-facts_n_1157276.html

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Children Of The Secret State: Documentary Review

Children of the Secret State is a film made by a UK journalist Joe Layburn, and a North Korean fugitive Ahn Chol. It shows an insight into the lives of orphans. The documentary setting is modern time North Korea. The issue presented in the film is primarily the starving children living on the streets of North Korea. There are multiple other underlying issues such as which crops are being grown, who really receives western aid, and what is really going on in North Korea. We think the main purpose of the filming in North Korea is to expose the terrible actions of the dictator, Kim Jong Il, and try to remove him from power.

Major themes in the movie are suffering, corruption, lack of freedom, and fear.

Joe Layburn poses as a tourist to get into a group for an exclusive tour of North Korea. The group is assigned a tour guide who is meant to censor what they see and hear. They are told Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is a busy city of commerce, however walking through the city they see very few people. later in their visit to North Korea they go, without their tour guide, to a smaller town outside of the capital. This is where they see the true horrors in North Korea. There are thousands of children on the streets without homes, or families. They are begging for food from the vendors but only receive the scraps that fall into the mud. In North Korea there are over 200,000 street children, and they make up the make up the majority of the starving population in North Korea. There is a lot of farmland in North Korea that should be able to produce plenty of food for their population, but why are there still hundreds of thousands starving people? The reason is the governments greed for wealth. They force the farmers to grow opium instead of food crops. This opium is turned into heroin and sold illegally for profit to the government. The illegal heroin brings in 500 million to 1 billion dollars. This is what the farmers are growing so then North Korea so the government still applies for western aid to receive food to help the starving population, but is that really what's happening? Or course not! North Korea instead gives the food to the military, or it goes to the black market and sold to the people who can afford it and not the starving children who really need it.
The purpose of the film is to educate the public about the corruption in North Korea, but that's not the only reason. With this evidence against Kim Jong Il the UN would have a motive to remove Kim Jong Il as dictator. 
We would really recommend this documentary to others who are curious about what is really going on in N. Korea because it shows a censored tour of the capital, Pyongyang, which is insightful to how the North Koreans want the outside world to see them. As well as some secret footage in smaller villages showing the lives of the less fortunate and the children who live on the streets.