Yet with the pace of decline slowing, most experts focused on signs that the economy was recovering after the longest recession since the Great Depression.
Yet occurrences of food shortages and droughts are causing famine and distress in some areas, and industrial and agricultural by-products are polluting water supplies.
Yet, as she often told the press, acting wasn't real to her. Pain was: colitis, crushed discs, exhaustion, or the pneumonia that almost killed her during the making of "Cleopatra".
Yet John Underhill of Edinburgh University has found evidence that the isthmus is full of landslide rubble, which could have tumbled into a narrow sea channel during an earthquake.
Yet against this gloomy backdrop emerges what US marketers Eric Greenberg and Karl Weber have called "history's most active volunteering generation" - or "generation We".
Yet it left the magnificent five-storey pagoda at the Toji temple in nearby Kyoto unscathed, though it levelled a number of buildings in the neighbourhood.
Yet his decision offers at least some hope for health care reform because it bends over backward to limit the scope of his ruling in two important respects.