If you were expecting some kind of sun sign nonsense, forget it. This is real astrology. See the section above. Please note: this forecast is expressed in terms of Universal Time (UT).
May 4, 8, 14, 17 and 26 were the peak dates I mentioned as central to intervals when "military and paramilitary conflict (including terrorist attacks) are bound to surge to new heights." Yet another Palestinian suicide bomber got that one rolling on May 7, when he blew himself to bits on a fanatical terrorist murder mission that killed more than a dozen innocent people (and injured scores more) at a pool hall in the Israeli town of Rishon Letzion. The next day, in Pakistan, another militant Islamic suicide bomber killed himself along with 11 French navy experts and two Pakistanis.
"Violence at the mano a mano level will likely surge around the 4th, 8th, 17th and 26th as well," I had predicted. "From an increase in ordinary criminality to political assassination, to an up-tick in personal conflict and confrontation in everyday life, this is bound to be a time fraught with tension," I wrote. The ugliness got off to a quick start in the US, where mailbox pipe bombs wounded six people in Illinois and Iowa on Friday the 3rd. (Two other bombs found in Iowa that day failed to explode.) The next day, seven bombs were found 350 miles away in Nebraska, but they were detonated harmlessly by authorities. More bombs were found over the next several days in Colorado and Texas, and on Tuesday the 7th the FBI announced a dragnet for a college student named Luke Helder, suspected of building and distributing the explosive devices. (Helder was captured on the evening of the 7th, in Nevada.) In The Netherlands, Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was shot dead on Monday the 6th. It was "the first time in modern history that a Dutch political leader was assassinated," according to the Associated Press.
On the evening of the 13th - with Mars only a few degrees from the preceding December 14 eclipse point - a priest was shot and seriously wounded in Baltimore by a man who had accused him of sexual abuse years ago. The priest, Maurice Blackwell, was in serious but stable condition. The shooter, Dante Stokes, turned himself in to police. And on the 14th there was yet another mailbox bomb, this time in Philadelphia. A mail carrier noticed a suspicious note on the package and called authorities. As the local bomb squad attempted to defuse the device, it exploded. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
"Accidents," I warned, would be "more likely, too" during those high-tension Mars aspect periods mentioned above. "Collisions, fires and falls - perhaps even all three in combination - are apt to be on tap," is how I put it. And that's how it was, virtually right from the start. It started with a tragic killer fire on the night of the 3rd in a county jail in western North Carolina: eight inmates locked in their cells burned to death. On Saturday the 4th, over 125 people died when a Nigerian airliner crashed into a densely populated section of the northern city of Kano. May 7 saw a couple of deadly airliner crashes, one in China and one in Tunis - "the first time disaster hit two planes on the same day since July 1992 when a Chinese and a Thai airliner both crashed in separate incidents," according to Reuters reporter Lamine Ghanmi. (May 2002 and July 1992 have a Mars-Pluto opposition in common.) There was a deadly collapse at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday the 12th, when the roof of a cavernous spacecraft assembly hangar collapsed. Seven space workers were known dead, and an eighth was missing. On May 14, with Mars less than two degrees from last December 14's solar eclipse, a New York-to-Miami Amtrak passenger train hit a truck at a railroad crossing in southeastern South Carolina. Ten cars were derailed, more than a dozen people were injured.
