21.   And by early last week a few national British papers were making the story sound as though the Salman Rushdie tragedy were being replayed as grim rural farce.

22.   And there were personal tragedies.

23.   And second, was the tragedy in any way foreseeable?

24.   And there is tragedy lurking, for not even the beautiful and the wealthy are immune to accident and disease and the consequences of their mistakes.

25.   And yet tragedy is general all over Ireland.

26.   And ultimately, there is a tragedy.

27.   And while he was as shocked as the rest of us by the attack, Washington had known that such a tragedy was probably inevitable.

28.   As lethal as those calamities can be, the greater tragedy is that their destructiveness is too often magnified by human failings.

29.   As Olympic officials did not hasten to point out, the tragedy could have been much worse.

30.   At City Hall, Mayor Barb Mastin said the whole tragedy had been hard on townspeople.