Here's a list of important planetary movements and alignments for August:

1st Saturn is exactly quincunx to Uranus
2nd The Sun squares the Moon - i.e. the Moon reaches its First Quarter phase
6th The Moon reaches its maximum southern declination - i.e. its furthest point south of the equator
9th The Sun opposes the Moon - i.e. it's a Full Moon
10th The Moon is at its perigee - i.e. it is closest to the Earth
11th Mercury enters Leo
12th Venus enters Leo
16th The Sun squares the Moon - i.e. the Moon reaches its Last Quarter phase
18th The Moon reaches its maximum northern declination - i.e. its furthest point north of the equator
23rd The Sun enters Virgo
23rd The Sun conjoins the Moon - i.e. it's a New Moon
26th The Moon is at its apogee - i.e. it is furthest away from the Earth
27th Saturn is exactly septile to Uranus
27th Mercury enters Virgo
29th Jupiter is exactly trine Uranus
31st Saturn is exactly opposite Neptune
31st The Sun squares the Moon - i.e. the Moon reaches its First Quarter phase

What do record-breaking VAT fraud, law-breaking cash-for-honours deals, and the welfare system have to do with one another?

On the subject of supercasinos, it's recently come to light that last year John Prescott and some of the civil servants working for him stayed at the ranch of businessman Philip Anschutz (Prescott has had 7 meetings with Anchutz since 2002). Aschutz just happens to want the UK's first supercasino to be at the Millennium Dome in London, which he just happens to own. During that trip Prescott was given a gift of cowboy clothing by Aschutz worth £11,000, but Prescott didn't declare the gift. Conflict of interest? Power for sale? Bribery? 'Sweeteners' (a very Venus-Neptune word)? Plain old-fashioned sleaze, some would say.

Interestingly enough, Philip Anschutz seems to epitomise this Neptune-Venus-5th house combination. The BBC report describes his business activities, all of which carry Neptune-Venus-5th house themes:

"His umbrella organisation, Anschutz Investment Company, has tentacles which spread also to sports and leisure. He owns soccer, ice-hockey and basketball teams including the LA Lakers, as well as thousands of cinemas, and it's believed Qwest will be at the forefront of the move to distribute films via satellite.

Another of his firms, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), having acquired London's Millennium Dome and renamed it The O2 after a sponsorship deal, has announced plans to include Britain's only permitted super-casino in its development of the site.

Philip Anschutz has combined his business acumen with his religious principles through his movie-making Walden Media group. In a recent rare speech, he said he wanted to make movies "that have a positive effect on people's lives and on our culture".

Last year, he combined with Disney to make The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, an adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic children's novel and Christian allegory.

Walden is also in partnership with News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox to produce five films based on children's novels.

But Philip Anschutz has been criticised for his support of right-wing organisations in the United States. Most controversially, he has donated large sums to Colorado for Family Values, an overtly anti-gay organisation.

Qwest has also been investigated for financial irregularities. In 2003, he agreed to pay $4.4 million to settle allegations that he profited from falsely inflating the company's share price.

It is reported that Philip Anschutz owns one of the best collections of US Western art in the world, including important works by Georgia O'Keefe."

Read more on the Neptune transit of the UK's Venus: http://www.astrology21.co.uk/c1ukneptunevenus.html

According to the World Bank, Europeans spend £6 billion on ice cream each year.

That same figure could fully address the problem of AIDS worldwide.

As Bob Geldof has recently said (via the BBC News website), poverty has a structure. In astrological terms, this is about Saturn and Neptune. Saturn = struture, Neptune = poverty, illness.

It just so happens that this year and next there is an opposition between Saturn and Neptune. This happens once every approximately 36 years. This opposition suggests that those who thought Live8 and Make Poverty History were campaigns for a year ago - they took place in 2005 - are very wrong indeed.

These two planets are building up to a crescendo over the next couple of months. They will then separate again from their opposition, and then re-crescendo twice in 2007. These are opportunities to make poverty history for real.

The opposition is a time when we face a choice, head-on. This is the choice set before us:

We can take seriously (Saturn) our responsibility (Saturn) to realise that we live on one planet (Neptune) and therefore we are one global organism (Neptune), or we can barricade (Saturn) ourselves in, imprison (Saturn) ourselves in an ivory tower (Neptune), block out (Saturn) those who are ill (Neptune) and poverty-stricken (Neptune), deny (Saturn) that we are one (Neptune).

We can't avoid the choice, nor can we get away with choosing one side over the other. If we favour denial over union, or deception over reality, or pretending to do what we can do but in reality just whipping up a smokescreen of rhetoric and fake activity (all Saturn-Neptune issues), we will reinforce a negative pattern of decay, despair, and illness that will circle back around to meet us again at the next crucial phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle: 2015.

It so happens that the G8 summit of 2005 made promises (Neptune) that have their deadlines (Saturn) set as 2015. In other words, the bubble will burst again in 2015 unless we build a new reality based not on structures of poverty, but on structures of unity, and the reality of interdependency.

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much...it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." - Franklin D Roosevelt, (USA President, who was born when Saturn conjoined Neptune in Taurus)

Useful links:
Make Poverty History - http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/
Bob Geldof answers readers' questions - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5177148.stm
ONE - http://www.one.org/
DATA - http://www.data.org/
More info on the Saturn-Neptune opposition - http://www.astrology21.co.uk/

Mercury's now retrograde until the end of the month. Here are some thoughts to contemplate, and ideas of how to utilise this phase for your own benefit.*

* The above text is quoted from Strephon Kaplan Williams' book 'Transforming Childhood', which is actually about transforming ourselves as adults and our adult lives.

Here's a list of important planetary movements and alignments for this month:

Aspect formations:
From 30th July to 1st August there is a T-Square between the Sun, Jupiter, and Chiron

You've no doubt heard that if you put a frog into a pan of boiling water it'll jump out, but if you put it in a pan of cold water and slowly bring it up to boiling point the frog will not save itself, and will instead die. This week, journalist Henry Porter has been writing about how the United Kingdom has been progressively 'frog-boiled' in such a manner over the last 9 years. Porter reports Blair's displeasure at being accurately described as what he is - 'authoritarian':

"I started to notice trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society.

Conservative MP David Davis has gone on record as saying:

"If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."

Baroness Kennedy, a legal expert and also a Labour peer, said in April:

"The common law is built on moral wisdom grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state." [Bold added for emphasis]

And Simon Davies of the London School of Economics said:

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively."

Astrologically, much of this began in 2001 when Saturn opposed Pluto. This planetary pair are renowned for correlating with a rise in authoritarianism and general abuses of corporate and State power. We seem to have been 'frozen in time' at that point - the planets moved on, but our human society didn't - and so the country we inhabit today is very Saturn-Pluto in nature. Meanwhile, the children born from 2001 onwards are bringing this theme into their whole lives. Because we lived the Saturn-Pluto themes close to the lowest levels possible - oppression, authoritarianism, and so on - we have sown seeds that will flower in this new generation, unless we break down the ideas and teachings we have been instilling into ourselves for the past 5 years and remove them from our societal structures (which are the Saturn parts of our existence).

In 2008 Pluto will move into Capricorn and remain there for many years, and thus a whole new generation will be born with exactly the same themes stated in a different planetary configuration. Instead of building an increasingly authoritarian society day by day, we need to work everyday towards breaking down the wrong-headed and oppressive ideas that have been put in place and which are becoming normal. We mustn't allow them to become normal, if we want to remain free.

In a few years' time (2011) Pluto in Capricorn will be conjunct the UK's Sun. The choice is ours to use this transit to darken the nation, or switch the light back on. We have already begun to choose, and it's not looking good so far, but there is still time to alter the course of action we've taken. Prior to 2011, Pluto will aspect the UK's Saturn (2006), Uranus (2007 to 2011), Pluto (2008 to 2010), and Ascendant (2010 and onwards). Each transit is an opportunity to let go of what can de-rail all the good we have wrought over centuries of, often painful, national development.

Each transit represents a time of major change, and that change will either be life-enhancing or increasingly authoritarian, oppressive, and destructive. Where Pluto transits are concerned, power is the issue: for the transit to Saturn it is State and corporate power adding burdens on citizens that is highlighted, for Uranus it is autocracy and democracy that are going head-to-head in the nation. The question is being asked of us: do you want to claim your power, or do you want to abdicate your sovereignty as a collection of citizens?

We certainly have our work cut out for us, but the goal is realistic and achievable within the time-scale and we are already participating, if only by our acquiescence. It's time to reclaim our power.

And the winner of the UK frog-boiling championships is........ the frog or the boiler?

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Italicised text is from The Independent newspaper article by Henry Porter which can be read in full at: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1129827.ece

For astrological information about Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, the UK, civil rights and authoritarianism, please visit the 'Current Affairs' section of the website of Astrology for the 21st Century at www.astrology21.co.uk