Word: medium
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...nuclear-armed North Korea next door. Islamabad and Pyongyang, however, made natural partners: Pakistan had the Bomb but no missiles to deliver it, and North Korea is the world's most active missile proliferator, especially to customers who can't shop elsewhere. In 1998 Pakistan tested a homemade Ghauri medium-range ballistic missile that the U.S. believes originated in North Korea...
...company away from the jug-wine market toward the least expensive varietals--wines labeled Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay and such--selling at $3.50 to $5, and the slightly more expensive premium wines priced at $7 or more. This move upmarket is happening across the industry, from the behemoth Gallo to medium-size upscale wineries that must increase revenue or fall victim to takeovers--particularly in Napa, whose prestigious name puts it on the wish list of every ambitious wine company in the world...
...consolidation among distributors is squeezing out the medium-size producers, who make from 100,000 to 1 million cases a year. They cannot charge the premiums of the small, boutique wineries nor rely on private mailing lists for customers. Nor do they have enough volume to get priority from distributors. "In 1975 there were 45 wine wholesalers in California. Today there are three left," says Carolyn Martini of Louis M. Martini. "The middle category we are in makes it impossible to get distribution worked out." This, Martini says, was the principal reason her family sold out to Gallo last month...
...trading outfit Nissho Iwai, plus a slew of construction, heavy machinery and real estate companies. Goldman Sachs estimates that if all 51 companies on the list were to close, Japan's unemployment rate would jump from 5.4% to 6.1%. And that tally doesn't include thousands of small and medium-sized businesses also likely to go belly-up. Indeed, bleaker estimates suggest that unemployment could spike to 10%. In Japan, that grim prospect is less palatable than trillions of yen in bad debt?not just to politicians but to the majority of Japanese citizens who vote for them...
...even greater concern to the U.S. than North Korea's own arsenals has been its proliferation activities. Always desperate for cash, North Korea had turned its missile industry into a prime foreign exchange earner in the 1990s by exporting medium-range missiles to Iran, Syria and Pakistan. (U.S. intelligence believes, according to the New York Times, that Islamabad paid for its purchases by delivering nuclear-weapons technology to Pyongyang.) Even if North Korea's own strategic posture was essentially defense of the Dear Leader's realm, its export program raised the danger of the viral spread of dangerous weapons...