Asteroid Astrology: International

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Salman Rushdie Attacked

On 12 August 2022 Salman Rushdie, 75, famed author of “The Satanic Verses”, was attacked in public as he was being introduced for a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.  Hadi Matar, 24, rushed the stage and flung himself on Rushdie, stabbing him multiple times in the face, neck and abdomen.  Airlifted from a nearby ball field to Erie Hospital, Rushdie remains on a ventilator, unable to speak; his agent stated that he may lose an eye and has extensive liver damage, as well as severed nerves in his arm.

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AAA Profile: Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian politics for almost a quarter century.  A former KGB officer, Putin entered politics after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, an event he describes as the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century.  In 1996 he joined Boris Yeltsin’s administration; appointed as prime minister in 1999, he filled the role of acting president when Yeltsin resigned later that year, being elected to the office in 2000.  At the time, Russia had a prohibition on an individual serving more than two consecutive terms as president, so after being reelected in 2004, in 2008 Putin swapped jobs with then prime minister Dmitry Medvedev for a term, only to assume the top spot again in the following election, four years later.  That would have entitled him to two more terms, but Putin changed the law to allow himself to run for an additional two terms uninterrupted, potentially continuing his occupancy of the presidency indefinitely.

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Ukraine: Eight Stations of the Cross of War

On Thursday, 24 February 2022, at approximately 5 AM local time, Vladimir Putin’s Russian Army invaded Ukraine, accelerating a process of intimidation and aggression that had begun eight years before with the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, and had continued with support for separatist movements in Ukraine’s easternmost sectors, bordering Russia, specifically portions of the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, in the Donbass region.  Since the beginning of the year, a series of planetary stations had reflected the inexorable march to war, eight cosmic turning points which built upon each other like tumblers in a lock, eventually unleashing the conflict.

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The 2022 Winter Olympics

As the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing begin to wind down, let’s take a quick look back at memorable moments from the competition.  A chart set for the opening ceremonies (8 PM local time, 4 February 2022, Beijing, China) shows an exact conjunction of the Sun with Saturn at 15 Aquarius, pulling focus (Sun) to acknowledged masters and top achievers (Saturn) in their fields, in a quest for professional (Saturn again) recognition (Sun).

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Queen Elizabeth II: Platinum Jubilee

At the age of 25, Elizabeth found herself reigning head of an empire upon which the sun literally never set, comprising some quarter of the globe.  The seventy intervening years have seen much change and turmoil, both for Britain and the world at large, but the Queen has been a rock in the stream of time, a stabilizing influence for her people, and an invaluable source of information and experience for her governments over the decades.

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The Russia-Ukraine Crisis

Tensions continue to increase on the border between Ukraine and Russia, where more than 100,000 Russian troops have recently been stationed, in what appears to be a build-up to an invasion.  Russia began a piecemeal takeover of its neighbor in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, followed by further border incursions into adjoining Ukrainian enclaves dominated by its military and local separatist groups wanting to reunite the two nations, as they were under Soviet hegemony.  Reports that families of Russian diplomatic staffers in Ukraine were evacuated in early January heightened the sense of impending crisis.

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