In a war that has cost the lives of more than 3,700 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the death of one woman by her own hand has attracted little attention beyond the circle of shattered family and friends.
They have shattered the faith within skating circles with their subjectivity.
But in recent years, two seismic corporate changes have shattered its traditional standing in movie industry circles.
McAlpine has said the Newsnight allegations left him shattered and "consigned him to the lowest circles of hell" when they were made on 2 November.
One awful possibility: they all perished in the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that so recently shattered Japan, with ghostly flotsam mementos now circling the globe in a watery churn of currents.
In the late afternoon, young men drove into the square and spun their cars around in tight circles, their screeching tires echoing off shattered buildings.
And how, under the maple tree, outside the shattered frontage of the launderette on the corner, there was a circle marked in the ground, a page torn from a notebook, bearing the words: "Here a person died.
Bullets, elegant mayhem and a homage to Orson Welles's "Lady From Shanghai" follow amid circling cameras; bodies in fast, furious motion; and shattered film space.
Robben, by comparison, shattered England when he raced from the Dutch side of the centre circle and built quite unbreakable momentum.
Downfall (2004)- This German language feature chronicles the last days of World War II in a shattered and encircled Berlin, from the vantage point of the ever-tightening circle around a broken down, delusional Adolf Hitler Bruno Ganzz).
