Word: tinderbox
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...First Spark. To blame was the state's eight-month drought, which has turned the southern part of Brazil-from the Uruguayan border to Rio-into a tinderbox. All it took was some farmers burning off their land for the next planting, cigarettes carelessly flicked away, campfires not quite snuffed out, or a spark from an old coal-burning locomotive. What started as a few scattered blazes soon blew in to hundreds of fires, then thousands...
...through the assembled throng to present a gift to the new King, jostled a Christian. "Assassins," cried the Christian, and the mob turned savagely on the hated and distrusted Jewish delegation. Beating, kicking and slashing, the Christians surged through the Jewish quarter of London putting the torch to its tinderbox houses. From the capital, the flames of anti-Semitism fanned northward into Cambridge, Norwich, Lincoln, and finally to the city of York, where in an orgy of bloodletting the city's Jewish population was systematically massacred during its Passover celebration...
Badly scared by the savagery of the rebellion, Portugal has begun to ease some of the more repressive practices that provoked it. But after a swing through the troubled land, TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs reports that Angola is still virtually a feudal Portuguese fief−and a tinderbox for further revolt...
...arch-subversive, and at once raised an outcry that Paul had desecrated the holy place. A frenzied mob surged around him and might well have killed him, for the penalty for desecrating the Temple was death. But the Roman authorities, anxious to prevent any disturbance in this tinderbox of a colony, sent him off with an impressive armed escort (200 infantrymen, 200 spearmen and 70 cavalrymen) to the Procurator in Caesarea. Paul remained there in prison for two years, finally invoked his right as a Roman citizen to a trial in the capital. And so, after a shipwreck off Malta...
Inside the tinderbox building one boy woke as the flames rolled across the fiberboard ceiling, and cried out the alarm. Flinging themselves against the windows, some of the youngsters slashed their heads and arms on broken glass, tore frantically at the "escape-proof" steel mesh between them and safety. While others pushed at him in terror, Charley Meadows, 16-year-old night sergeant for the inmates, at last broke through one window guard, and another gave way to the boys' desperate strength. Through the two openings, 48 escaped. By the time the fire trucks arrived, the building had caved...