From here, events in "The Negative" begin to snowball out of control.

The crackdown dramatically illustrates the Chinese leadership's paranoia about street protests that could snowball out of control.

"We're trying to keep the business flowing," Ms. Hansen said, "and to see that things don't snowball out of control."

This state of calm would vanish overnight, though, if the financial markets got a sense that the dollar's decline was starting to snowball out of control.

One official, Mr. Stein wrote on June 25 to the person who wanted the Nissan, "is pushing some things that could snowball out of control."

"If you can't show, step by step, how Leontes's emotions snowball out of control, all you've got up there is a crazy guy who's flipping out.

So my question really is: What are you doing in terms of sort of to calm down the Saudis so this does not snowball out of control?

And once again, readers are reminded how easily events can snowball out of control, how everything mundane and taken for granted can vanish in an instant.

"It's a contemporary black comedy/satire which snowballs out of control and into oblivion in the first scene, then spends the next hour trying to reconcile with its own morbidity.

QUESTION: P.J., considering the fragility of the Lebanese situation, are you concerned that this may sort of snowball out of control?

Question Is Judged Important Fears stirred up by his initiatives, as outlined by Mr. Gorbachev today, include concern that increased openness and expanded liberties may snowball out of control.

Neither girl could have had any idea that the whole affair would snowball out of control in 1920, by which time they had probably forgotten the whole incident, or at most filed it away for their own private amusement.

And it's not long before things snowball out of control: at the very moment that her best friend, Meg, is coping with a miscarriage, Emily realizes that she is pregnant - and doesn't know who the father is.

"The real issue for American banks," said Robert E. Litan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, "is the silent run that seems to be going on right now, and whether that run is gradual or whether it snowballs out of control."