Pluto as seen from New Horizons spacecraft.

Dear Friend and Reader:

If you’re watching your newsfeed or your favorite cable news program and wondering what the holy heck is going on, the answer is simple: the United States is in its Pluto return — its first ever.

Top American leaders this week have been declaring that there is a constitutional crisis, as the president is attempting to block any witnesses, including the Special Counsel, from testifying before Congress in the Russia affair. The president recently re-tweeted a statement by Jerry Falwell, Jr.: “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.” This implies he believes the 2020 election should be canceled.

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Attorney General Willam Barr testifying before the Senate Wednesday. Photo by Sarah Silbiger.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Thursday, the Attorney General of the United States refused to testify before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Yes, he skipped school on an important day. Call the truancy officer. He was going to be asked about why he lied to the American people about the content of the Special Counsel’s report into Russian meddling with the 2016 election, and why he lied when he said he did not know Mueller objected to his characterization of what the investigation discovered.

When the Special Counsel’s results were first reported in the media in late March, based on facts in the 448-page document, the headline could have read, “Mueller Confirmed Trump Campaign had 100 Russia Contacts.” It could have read, “Trump Team Destroyed Evidence of Probable Conspiracy.” It could have read, “Trump Tried to Fire Mueller Repeatedly.” It could have read, “Trump Not Exonerated of Obstruction.”

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Earlier this week, we experienced the first of seven Sun-Uranus conjunctions in Taurus (that was Monday, April 22). News events are moving at a dizzying pace, and defy comprehension. At the time I’m writing this article on April 25, it’s been just over a week since the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, and a week since the release of the redacted version of the Special Counsel’s report. It seems more like a month.

Art by Insspirito.

As of this writing, there are now 20 Democratic presidential candidates, with Joe Biden’s entry into the race. Also today, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin met Kim Jong-un, the Korean leader, for a summit meeting in China. Putin is moving in on a power vacuum abandoned by Trump’s failed attempts at courting diplomacy with Kim.

Texas executed John William King for the 1998 killing of James Byrd, the first time in modern Texas history that a Caucasian man was executed for the death of an African American man. This was the infamous dragging death by a white supremacist.

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Photo by Veronique de Viguerie.

Dear Friend and Reader:

When I first saw Notre Dame Cathedral, I didn’t know what it was. I mean, I knew it was a cathedral, but in Europe, you’re always seeing things like that and they have a way of blending into the scenery — like everything it represents.

I was living on Ile St. Louis during the summer of 2004, as the guest of a Planet Waves reader in a little apartment she loaned me. Every day I would walk across Pont de Sully to Rive Gauche to explore the wider city. One day I stopped on the bridge and looked at the thing, standing there dark and imposing against the horizon, about half a mile away, and said to myself: that is one heck of a gothic cathedral.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

When I first heard of WikiLeaks, they had just published the civilian casualties database from the Iraq War. Then I learned that Julian Assange, its founder, had previously published Collateral Murder, video from the July 12, 2007, airstrike in New Baghdad. This involved the killing of numerous people from 30 mm cannon fire, including two working for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen — basically, a mass murder conducted by the U.S. Army.

Julian Assange shortly after he was arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Thursday. Photo by Hannah McKay.

Assange said he decrypted the helicopter camera footage, obtained from Chelsea Manning, frame by frame. That would qualify as exposing war crimes.

It’s a long way from there to allegedly leaking hacked emails stolen from one political campaign to an adversary’s campaign, with assistance from a foreign power, in this case Russia. Such was the trajectory of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as we know it.

Today, at about 10:15 am local time, Assange was arrested in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been granted political asylum for the past seven years (since August 2012). He was granted asylum from Ecuador to help him avoid arrest from what appeared to be bogus sexual assault charges out of Sweden, associated with his alleged failure to use a condom. Sweden rescinded its arrest warrant in 2017. Many viewed that whole incident as a pretext to arrest Assange (under the Bush-Cheney administration) and eventually get him into custody of the United States.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring the Create section and your weekly horoscopes by Amy Elliott.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Early on Friday the Sun and Moon conjoin in Aries for the Aries New Moon. This is occurring right at the midpoint of the sign, in a rather interesting chart. The sky right now features a strong mix of Aries and Pisces; and while that often occurs at the very beginning of this season, the mix is feeling especially striking to me this year.

Photo by Amanda Painter.

I chalk that up partly to the fact that the Mercury-Neptune conjunction is still going strong, its influence seemingly all the more potent due to its level of exactness when Mercury stationed direct a week ago.

Related to that, for the last week I’ve been repeatedly confronted by a mix of my intuition being right on some things, and other thoughts and feelings — sometimes related to the same topic — being completely wrong. Heightened awareness of energetic, emotional or spiritual boundaries, particularly when I’m starting to overstep them, has been another prominent theme for me.

What has your week been like? Your personal experience of the energy may vary considerably, yet Mercury-Neptune is the background against which tomorrow’s New Moon occurs, so it’s worth considering. I sometimes think of the Aries New Moon as kind of the ‘other shoe’ to the equinox. It’s a ‘restart button’ for a shorter-term cycle (lunar rather than seasonal) that invokes, concentrates and then releases into the same energy of newness, growth and initiative.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring the Create section and your weekly horoscopes.

Dear Friend and Reader:

When everyone around you is wounded and hurting, if you initiate and pursue your own healing it will probably make you stand out. I suspect countless people have had this thought before, but it came to mind as I was thinking about tomorrow’s conjunction of the Sun and Chiron in Aries. I don’t know how many people think of that possibility consciously before starting (for example) a therapy process; even if present unconsciously, however, I imagine it holds some people back.

Photo by Amanda Painter.

Sun conjunct Chiron occurs at 2:38 pm EDT Friday (18:37:51 UTC).

And although it’s not in the very first degree of Aries, it is in the second degree, which is still Aries Point territory (the nexus of personal and political).

Whatever tomorrow’s astrology describes for you personally, it will likely resonate with issues that are prominent in our collective social environment right now.

This is the first conjunction of the Sun and Chiron in Aries since Chiron left Pisces for good on Feb. 18. As far as I can tell, it is the only conjunction these two bodies will have in the first five degrees of Aries for this particular journey of Chiron in Aries (though next year will come close; that one happens in the sixth degree of Aries).

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