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).

"From the 1st through the 7th," I warned, "you may as well plan on severe storms (heavy precipitation, high winds) and moderate to severe seismic activity (Richter 5+ quakes, as well as volcanic eruptions)." The headlines followed up true to form. On the seismic front, there was the 6.4 Richter earthquake that slammed the Bingol region of Turkey on the 1st, killing over a hundred people and flattening at least a dozen buildings. On Sunday the 4th a strong (Richter 5.8) tremor jolted northwest China, flattening houses, killing livestock and causing a 72-year-old man to die of heart failure. At least 1,371 houses in five villages were flattened and more than 1,100 livestock, mostly sheep, were killed, said a government official in Yopurga County, where the quake was centered.

Even as the ground was trembling elsewhere in the world, the sky was stirring violently in the US starting on the 2nd, when tornadoes swept across eastern Oklahoma overnight, damaging homes and overturning trailers but causing no major injuries. Day after day, night after night the storms continued to rage, reducing homes and towns to rubble, until by the 7th there were more than forty people dead from the Plains states eastward to Tennessee. The problem wasn't just the high winds, but also the heavy precipitation and resulting floods: In northern Georgia flooding forced hundreds of people from their homes near the state's border with Alabama and Tennessee.

The National Weather Service reported that the persistent storm system produced more than eighty tornadoes in the hardest-hit states of Missouri, Tennessee and Kansas. Reports of funnel sightings and damage had also come in from seven other states running from the Midwest into the South. Power blackouts were widespread and bottled water was being shipped into areas where supplies were contaminated or pumping equipment knocked out. Hundreds of people were being housed in temporary shelters. The Red Cross said more than 5,000 homes in five Midwestern states were damaged or destroyed, in what was called "the most violent weather in four years."

As rough and tumble as the geophysical environment got, I was right in forecasting that human conflict would end up being more newsworthy than nature on a rampage. "There are enough notable Mars alignments at work this month to make May look like a Wild West stampede, gunfight and range war all rolled into one," I wrote. "This looks more like gangs, factions and terror attacks rather than real military conflict," I noted. "The May 8 Mars-Jupiter opposition and May 14 Mars-Neptune conjunction" were chief among the indicators I singled out for watching in this connection. I think I was pretty clear about what to expect: "these alignments remain within a few degrees of exact all the way up to the 20th . . . ideological fanaticism . . . deception, stealth, oil, poisons and other chemicals . . . fires, explosions, crashes." It's certainly clear how it turned out. From the Abu Sayyaf suicide bombing in the Philippines on the 10th to the Al Qaeda suicide bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on the 13th, terror attacks and explosions were major newsmakers in May, and each happened within just a day or two of the exact aspects I mentioned.