"Investors are pricing in a scenario under which there will be an outbreak which will severely hurt the airlines' earnings, " said Castor Pang, head of research at Core Pacific-Yamaichi.

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Infy responded by cutting its head count and shifting some of its strategy to other markets outside of its core, such as business processing.

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It also suffered from wrongheaded marketing that focused on "image" rather than hard-core golf values under its former chief executive, ex-Revlon head George Fellows.

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But head honcho Jobs has also said that he believes the innovative insights at the core of the iPhone all start in the software built into the device, not its sleek form factor.

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"While legal issues involving copyright law are always complex, we believe the project is wholly consistent with the core principle of copyright law, " says James Hilton, the head librarian at the University of Michigan.

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But as long as the House of Windsor plc remains in the head-of-state business, it has to keep an eye on its core competence: being born, being non-political, and simply being there.

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"Olly is another core player for us to get under contract for next season and beyond, " said Gloucester head coach Bryan Redpath.

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The head of Iraq's intelligence service suggested earlier this month that there were 40, 000 hard-core rebels, with another 160, 000-odd Iraqis helping them out.

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EMC, which owns a majority stake in VMware, installed Microsoft veteran Maritz as chief executive, and also hired Pat Gelsinger, formerly of Intel, as the head of the value-added software (like security and database analysis) that EMC puts atop its core storage business.

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