Russian society has become a dry peat bog, waiting for a spark to ignite it.

Price rises have been a major trigger of the discontent this year in the Middle East and North Africa.

The bonfire was sparked by the collapse of the Thai baht in the summer of 1997.

The spark that started the war in the country in 2011 was a graffiti made by teenagers.

BERLIN Egypt lies at the heart of the Arab revolution, even if the original spark occurred in Tunisia.

This is important to bear in mind, because rising food prices have historically been the trigger for political revolutions.

They provided an early spark, but it looks like the spark did not catch.

For once, what has set financial markets ablaze are not their excesses, but those of Wall Street.

As Havel had foreseen, his job (and that of the small circle of dissidents surrounding him) would then be to fan that spark, stoke the fire and guide it.

And yet, while civil society can be a trigger, sooner or later democratic politics has to drive the process of change.

High food prices may have served as a trigger in North Africa, but the speed with which the protesters turned their attention to political reform caught everyone off guard.

Could this little country, like a startup in a mature industry, be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle class in China and India?

But there was no real victory for the country s power elite nor was society defeated. The protests reflected irreversible changes.

And then days will prove if Tunisia is really the first tile of the domino effect in the region, or the situation in Tunisia is totally different than that in Egypt, Algeria, and in the other Arab countries. This post is part of our special coverage of Egypt Protests 2011.

And it should not be forgotten that, along with young people s sense that they lacked a future under the nationalistic military dictatorships of the past, mass poverty was the second trigger of the 2011 revolution.

World War I was the trigger that set off the reversal, with economic globalization declining while military globalization increased, as witnessed by two world wars and a global cold war.

The one final bit of sparkle we'll put in at the very end here is an utterly impractical flight vehicle, which is a little ornithopter wing flapping device that rubber band powered that we'll show you.

But it was the publication in 1962 of the book Silent Spring a polemic against the use of pesticides in agriculture by the biologist Rachel Carson that jump started the modern ecological movement.

History will record that the match Bouazizi lit on December 17, 2010, became the fortuitous spark that ignited an Arab prairie fire.

This next video, sent out 20 days before the revolution started might have been the pebble that started the landslide. At the end of it there's a brief message telling everyone to take their friends, head out to the streets and yell Down with Mubarak and on January 25, 2011, they did. Democracy is not something you get, it is something you aim at because you never get 100 democracy... each one has to wake up in the morning thinking that this revolution depends on him or her.

I first came into contact with black culture because of this project, and it was completely new to me. I used the money from the grant to buy the first computer of my life, and I studied about everything black people have been through , and that proved to be a catalyst for everything I am today.

An attack on Iran, especially if it develops into a longer war involving regional proxies, is bound to become the trigger for mass anti Israel and anti US hysteria, which might draw the Islamist regimes in the region into a dynamic of escalation.

Historically, such clashes have often sparked civil war (for example, Spain in 1936 or Tajikistan in 1992) or brutal military coups (as in Indonesia in 1965 and Turkey in 1980).

The decline will likely be sustained by the substantial US current account deficit, which found in Bernanke s cuts the spark it needed to make its impact fully felt in foreign exchange markets.

Indeed, it was his decision to extend, unconstitutionally, the term of the reliably pro Syrian Emile Lahoud as Lebanon s president in 2004 that triggered the political crisis leading to Hariri s murder and the emergence of a coalition of anti Syrian groups, which included many former Syrian allies.

An attack on Iran, especially if it develops into a longer war involving regional proxies, is bound to become the trigger for mass anti Israel and anti US hysteria, which might draw the Islamist regimes in the region into a dynamic of escalation. It would be impossible to rule out a regional war.

It will be the spark and the first step of the real change. Thanks to the events in Tunisia that forced former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country, as it seems that the Tunisian syndrome is being spread across the Arab world, and some might consider Tunisia as the first tile in the domino effect.