Despite the president's deliberate attempt to talk down the markets and the media's dramatic warnings of economic Armageddon posed by a mere 17% of the government remaining temporarily idle, the S&P 500 closed at a record high the day after the shutdown ended.
Lynch went on to emphasize "this wasn't a mere deletion of a few words but a full-fledged blackout of 28 pages of the report".
Support for Welsh independence, Plaid's signature policy, is on a mere 6%.
Duncan has a mere six months to go, so it's worth checking out his progress.
All of which makes you wonder if it's mere coincidence that he's chosen to give his first interview in the week that the job of next director-general was advertised, or that the chosen venue is the so-called "Tsar's Bar" in a hotel opposite Broadcasting House (where the DG and BBC Broadcast are both based) rather than the Production tsar's own HQ in White City.
In a week where Gentleman Jim Davidson has won Celebrity Big Brother, you might find yourself wondering whether there is any semi-pariah in British life who, by mere virtue of hanging around long enough, would not eventually find themselves restored to some sort of vogue given the right passage of time.
The DfE reportedly views the setback as a mere technicality that will be put right by the forthcoming education bill.
The church, home to an altar where the Jesuit founder Saint Ignatius of Loyola celebrated his first mass in 1538, had played host to Francis when he was a mere cardinal and archbishop.
Yet football has been shown in studies to have the lowest rate of "perceived exertion" – a mere 3.9 out of 10 – lower than jogging and fitness training.
In order to concentrate the listener's perception on the rhythm, melodic material – most of it pinched from a book of Lithuanian folk tunes – is extremely simple, sometimes reduced to tiny repetitive patterns of a mere two or three pitches.
And at a mere two minutes, the mordant hilarity and conceptual perfection of Dutch mortality study A Single Life exceeds what many films achieve in 90 or more.
