  We have studied hadronic events from e+e- annihilation data at centre-of-mass
energies of sqrt{s}=172, 183 and 189 GeV. The total integrated luminosity of
the three samples, measured with the OPAL detector, corresponds to 250 pb^-1.
  We present distributions of event shape variables, charged particle
multiplicity and momentum, measured separately in the three data samples. From
these we extract measurements of the strong coupling alpha_s, the mean charged
particle multiplicity <nch> and the peak position xi_0 in the xi_p=ln(1/x_p)
distribution.
  In general the data are described well by analytic QCD calculations and Monte
Carlo models. Our measured values of alpha_s, <nch> and xi_0 are consistent
with previous determinations at sqrt{s}=MZ.
