If you were expecting some kind of sun sign nonsense, forget about it. This is real astrology for the real world. If it's real astrology for yourself that you want, you can get it by phone or in print. And if you need help deciphering the astrological glyphs in the graphics accompanying this article, see Astroglyphs: Astrological Symbols Guide. Please note: this forecast is expressed in terms of Universal Time (UT).

If you've been following the news lately, you might have noticed that it's following a script; one I published last year in my 2005 World Forecast Highlights, and updated last month in my online forecast for October. For example, in describing the "geocosmic stress window that extends from September 26 into October 11," I described this as "a time of unusually strong storm and seismic activity (including Richter 5+ earthquakes and volcanic eruptions), higher than normal tides, and a risk of floods and mudslides due to heavy precipitation." On the storm side of things, Hurricane Stan blasted across the Yucatan Peninsula October 1-2, unleashing heavy rains in Central America. More than 200 people were killed in floods, mudslides and rough weather at sea. Stan hit Mexico on Tuesday the 4th as a Category One hurricane, and hundreds were evacuated in the state of Veracruz as rivers overflowed. (In Guatemala, 1,400 people died on Wednesday when the Mayan village of Panabaj was destroyed in a mudslide triggered by torrential rains from Hurricane Stan.) On the other side of the world, Typhoon Longwang was wreaking havoc in China and Taiwan. The storm tore into China on Sunday night the 2nd, and by late Tuesday scores were dead in the raging floodwaters.

That was nowhere near the end of the heavy weather. "The month ends," I predicted, "on a note of strong storm and seismic activity . . . in effect from the 28th on into early November." Like the record-breaking Hurricane Beta, for example, which hit Honduras on the 30th and left thousands of people homeless in its wake. The Atlantic hurricane season's 23rd tropical storm, Beta set a mark not seen since record keeping began in 1851.

Far more destructive was the 7.6 Richter quake felt from India to Pakistan to Afghanistan on the morning of October 8. The whole region was rocked by a series of Richter 5 and 6+ aftershocks for hours afterward. Authorities are estimating a death toll in the scores of thousands. You may recall my forecast's mention that, while no place on Earth was beyond the reach of such natural disasters, "such phenomena may be largely focused in the eclipse's zone of visibility (Africa and Europe plus the Middle East and India)."

I had advised you that October would start off with a bang, what with the Mars retrograde station on the 1st signaling "the most significant and sustained Red Planet activation of the year . . . a period of risk, danger and conflict." Just as forecast, October to date has been replete with news of a martial nature, ranging from "collective violence like war to individual violence like murder and other criminality (and including that strange twilight, terrorism), and even including accidents and crashes and fires and explosions due to recklessness or evil intent and sometimes just plain bad luck (e.g. a lightning strike)."

The month began with a bang quite literally, with a trio of suicide bomb attacks on the resort island of Bali on the evening of the 1st. Twenty-two people were killed and over 130 were wounded in the blasts. It was to be the first of many terrorist atrocities by all the usual suspects, in all the usual places. In the deadliest attack in months, Palestinian gunmen killed three Israeli settlers (two women and a child) in the West Bank on Sunday the 2nd. Israel responded by killing someone it called a "senior Islamic militant". (What exactly might that mean, I wonder: the murderer with the most blood on his hands, perhaps?) And so the wheel turns . . . and turns . . . Of course there was plenty of martial mayhem in Iraq. It seemed to accelerate around the mid-month constitutional referendum. In the northern city of Mosul on Sunday the 16th, police found eight men believed to be Iraqi soldiers shot dead execution style. In the western city of Ramadi that same day, US air and ground attacks killed some 70 so-called insurgents.

And then there were the hoodlums, like the crew that ran amok in Toledo OH on Saturday the 15th. In order to protest a neo-Nazi march, an angry mob threw rocks at police, looted stores, vandalized vehicles and set a neighborhood bar on fire. One officer was seriously injured, and more than 100 of the hoodlums were arrested; leaving the rest of us to ponder the great mystery: who is more reprehensible, the white racists or the black hoodlums? And then there was the senseless, brutal murder of Pamela Vitale, the wife of attorney Daniel Horowitz, that same night.

The mid-month Ohio riots paled in comparison to the fracas in France that started in the Paris suburbs on the 27th. Every night for the rest of the month, and on into November, marauding mostly Muslim and African youths torched cars, buses, buildings and people. Night after night the riots grew in violence, destructiveness and scope, spreading to towns all around France and elsewhere in Europe. No surprise there: my October forecast warned that this martial trend "just gets stronger this month . . . (and) peaks in early November as the Sun opposes Mars while the Red Planet squares Saturn."

The thing is, there are so many people being killed and injured in accidents that if the thugs of the world would just back off, there'd still be more than enough carnage to satisfy ghouls everywhere. Take for example the bus crash that killed five people in Wisconsin on the 16th, and injured 29 others. That was just one among many "accidents and crashes and fires and explosions" that have gone hand-in-hand with the elevated Mars factor, per my forecast. Like the one on Saturday the 15th in Texarkana AR, where "a liquid propane gas tank was hit by a Union Pacific train car, exploding in a ball of fire," killing one person and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of homes; not to mention the LPG vehicle that blew up at a filling station in Instanbul, Turkey the same day (five people injured, one seriously, all apparently the inadvertent handiwork of a careless smoker); and then there was the explosion and fire at a Houston refinery on the 16th, which occurred as workers tried to restart equipment that had been shut down since Hurricane Rita hit the area.