Word: infernos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cruelest imagined torments of hell once seemed not only very real but a perfectly legitimate form of punishment, since God himself had permitted and even approved the eternal fires. And with what a hunger for retribution did Dante identify each king or warrior he reported seeing in the Inferno, buried up to the eyes in rivers of blood. With what zeal did Bosch and Bruegel similarly portray malefactors being torn at by giant birds or skeletons. Yet the avenger himself was traditionally punished too. Orestes goes mad; Hamlet dies of poison; Captain Ahab ends in a tangle of rope dragged...
...four children and destroying or seriously damaging 60 surrounding houses. The letter warned that Move would "burn this . . . house down and burn you up with us" if the police attacked. Critics armed with hindsight said the note should have tipped city officials that a bomb could spark an inferno...
...strategic fire soon became a phantasmagoric inferno. Half an hour after the explosion, firemen finally moved to control the blaze. There was a rattle of gunfire in or around the Move compound, and according to some reports, the police returned it. Ordered back out of range, fire fighters watched as the flames spread first to adjacent houses, then down the street...
...inferno gathered intensity, the tragedy took yet one more turn that was to remain wrapped in mystery. Police reported that four people -- two men, a woman and a child -- dashed out from the Move compound. Ramona Africa and the child Birdie were seized, but the two men, who were said to have fired weapons at the police, simply vanished. Police first said they fired back; then they denied it. By week's end authorities had identified two of the bodies recovered from inside the house: Frank James Africa, 26, and Rhoda Harris War Africa, 30, mother of Birdie. The Philadelphia...
...fire fighter described the scene as "Dantesque." The term was an apt one for the inferno that engulfed 410 patients in a six-story mental hospital in suburban Buenos Aires late last week. Said one witness: "Some patients leaped out of the windows, and we could hear them screaming. You could hear explosions as windows shattered." As choking, disoriented inmates fled into the streets, a nurse, wrapped in a mattress cover, reportedly jumped to her death from the top of the building. Federal police sources put the death toll at 79, but it could go higher. It was estimated that...