The news last week that Sony Ericsson was shuttering its plant in the Research Triangle Park was a sobering reminder of two inescapable facts:

- As buffered as our region has been from the most devastating effects of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, we are far from immune from its chill.

- The hemorrhaging of jobs is not over. That is sadly true despite increasing glimmers of more encouraging news that the overall economy has hit bottom and probably is poised to rebound, if not already on the first tentative steps back.

To anyone watching the uncertain status of Sony Ericsson in the highly competitive cell-phone market, the news here was not unexpected. The company has trailed rivals in recent years, and is both shedding jobs wholesale and consolidating marketing and customer-service in Atlanta to be close to its main customer, AT&T.

The loss of jobs in those areas is painful; so too is the decamping of the company's research and development activities to the San Jose, Calif., area.

Beyond the omens for the broader economy in the shutdown, announced Thursday, are the individual tales of more than 400 employees soon joining the growing ranks of the unemployed. And while the jobless rate here continues somewhat less grim than the state as a whole, the announcement the next day the state's unemployment rate has hit 11 percent cannot be encouraging to the latest recipients of pink slips.

Lab coordinator Dave Kim doubtlessly spoke for most colleagues when he told The Herald-Sun's Monica Chen, "I'm distraught and frustrated. It's been devastating."

While there's no spinning away the bad news embedded in the Sony Ericsson announcement, we nonetheless continue to be cautiously optimistic this region will continue to fare better than most.

We've also had our share of good news with the announcement of new firms locating here, home prices stabilizing and showing some recovery and an uptick in home sales.

Our major research universities have brought in over a quarter-billion dollars in federal stimulus funds for research, and Duke University just broke ground for a major new cancer center.

The park itself, and the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce, have been marshalling resources to ramp up already strenuous and strategic efforts to lure companies, especially knowledge-based companies, and predict more payoffs from those efforts.

It remains a stressful economy, but not without reasons for hope nonetheless.