Now Durham, because of what he's done in the past - he's known as a very fierce investigator.

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There's this huge bubble passing through the anaconda here, this bulge, and so the competition is very, very fierce.

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"The competition is very fierce here, " says Andrew Yeung of Harbour City, which spent several hundred thousand dollars to host the duck.

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He said the battle had been very fierce and was still ongoing.

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So I invented a very fierce and feisty little girl who would fight back against all the rules and be very rude and cheeky to the matron and be absolutely determined she would get out of the foundling hospital one day and find her mother.

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Chalk it up to fierce competition and customers' continued refusals to part with cash very easily, even as they loosen the purse strings a bit.

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"For a man with a fierce sense of independence and a fear of hospitals, this must have been a very difficult time for him, " she added.

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At a time when the EU is trying to persuade reluctant countries to open up their energy markets to the fierce winds of competition and abandon the French idea of "national champions", Gazprom is a very vivid example that such allegedly old-fashioned out-of-date thinking can work dramatically well for the country concerned.

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