Dear Friend and Reader:
 
YESTERDAY'S assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the beloved former prime minister of Pakistan and candidate in next month's general election, was not merely the martyring of yet another pro-democracy leader. It was not just the murder of a dynamic, articulate and intelligent woman in a region of the world where women are not regarded as people.

Rather, her murder pushes the world closer to a nuclear threshold, one where we get to start making conscious decisions if we want.
 
Pakistan, often spoken of as a key US ally, is the world's most unstable and arguably most hostile nuclear-armed power. It's the only nuclear-armed Islamic state, which is in an almost constant standoff with India. Many charts from today's event point to the central theme involving a nuclear issue.
 
As reported in this space recently, we are currently in an extended phase of Aries Point events, described in the Dec. 21 edition of Planet Waves. This is a time when the news has profoundly personal implications. Mars is now retrograde in the earliest degrees of Cancer, and had recently opposed Jupiter in Capricorn (these planets directly aspect the Aries Point). We now have a picture of how this is raising issues of world security. It's also opposite Pluto in late Sagittarius, and the Mars-Pluto opposition can be forceful, even fatal, if it is not handled carefully.