> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://capital-to-capitol.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Supreme Court opened its new term with a case asking whether oil companies can be sued for covering up climate change. Justice Alito said separately he is considering retirement. - URL: https://capital-to-capitol.ghost.io/the-supreme-court-opened-its-new-term-with-a-case-asking-whether-oil-companies-can-be-sued-for-covering-up-climate-change-justice-alito-said-separately-he-is-considering-retirement/ - Published: 2026-10-05T19:06:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-13T19:11:16.000Z - Description: The Supreme Court opened its new term with a fossil fuel climate case. Justice Alito said he is considering retirement. A California realtor was arrested at LAX for spying on Taiwan's president's son for China. A'ja Wilson won her record fifth WNBA MVP. Monday opened the week. - Author: Saanjali Ganesh - Tags: Law, Espionage, Security, Democracy, Politics, Sports The Supreme Court opened its new term Monday with a fossil fuel climate case and Justice Alito telling CBS News he is considering retirement. A California realtor was arrested at LAX for spying on Taiwan’s president’s son for China. A’ja Wilson made WNBA history. Here is Monday. --- **The Supreme Court opened its new term with a fossil fuel climate case. Justice Alito said he is considering retirement. He also said same-sex marriage is safe.** [The Supreme Court opened its October 2026 term Monday](https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/10/opening-the-book-on-the-october-term-2026/) with oral arguments in the Suncor case, a lawsuit asking whether state and local governments can sue fossil fuel companies in state courts for their alleged role in causing climate change and for allegedly misleading the public about what they knew. The justices will rule on whether federal law prevents those state court suits from going forward. [The new term also has cases on whether states can ban assault-style rifles, whether the Ten Commandments can be displayed in public schools, and the merits of third-country deportations](https://www.csmonitor.com/Daily/2026/20261005). [Justice Samuel Alito told CBS News in an interview airing Sunday that retirement is something someone his age has to consider every term](https://www.justsecurity.org/159662/early-edition-october-5-2026/). He is 76\. He also said he does not anticipate the court will overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision establishing the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. “People of the same sex got married and entered into contracts,” Alito said. “It was much more concrete.” The Suncor case’s central question is jurisdictional: can state courts hear climate lawsuits against energy companies, or must those suits go to federal court? Energy companies have consistently argued for federal courts, where precedent has been more favorable to them. Cities and counties have consistently argued for state courts. The Supreme Court deciding this question does not rule on whether any company is liable for climate damage. It decides which courtrooms will eventually make that determination. What Alito said about Obergefell is notable because he authored the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, in which he wrote that the logic of Dobbs should not apply to other rights. His CBS interview reaffirmed that position with the specificity of reliance: people organized their lives around Obergefell in ways that make reversing it different from reversing Roe. That is a legal argument, not a moral one. The new term will answer more questions than October 5 raised. Alito just raised one of the term’s most significant by suggesting he may not be there to answer them. --- **A California realtor was arrested at LAX for allegedly spying on the son of Taiwan’s president for China. She is 34\. She was about to board a flight.** [A California realtor, 34, was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for allegedly spying on the son of Taiwan’s president for Chinese intelligence](https://minitruearchivereal.substack.com/p/daily-headlines-october-5-2026/), according to reporting confirmed Monday. The arrest of an American citizen on espionage charges related to Taiwan at a major US airport is a specific kind of incident that sits at the intersection of the most sensitive geopolitical relationship the US manages. The son of Taiwan’s president is a high-value intelligence target for China, which considers Taiwan a renegade province and has been systematically building intelligence networks in countries with close ties to Taipei. A California realtor is not the profile that espionage cases typically generate in public imagination. But the FBI’s counterintelligence cases over the past decade have documented that Chinese intelligence recruitment has specifically targeted ordinary Americans, people in real estate, academia, local government, and business, rather than relying only on traditional intelligence officers. The realtor was arrested at LAX, meaning she was attempting to leave the country. The timing, the same week Trump asked Xi if China wanted to buy US weapons and two weeks after the state dinner that seated both leaders with every major AI CEO, is the context in which a California realtor was stopped at the airport for allegedly passing intelligence about a Taiwanese official to Beijing. --- **The US pulled all its bombers from RAF Fairford after new warnings of an Iran-linked attack plot targeting the base.** [American bombers have flown out of RAF Fairford](https://havanatimes.org/news/international-news-briefs-for-monday-october-5-2026/), the Royal Air Force base in Gloucestershire, England, after the Pentagon’s European Command received new warnings of an Iran-backed plot targeting the base. The Pentagon’s European Command confirmed the departure. This brief covered the September 28 arrest of five British nationals near RAF Fairford carrying explosives, identified because a farmer spotted masked men fleeing vans at night. The RAF Fairford arrests were still under investigation when Monday arrived and the Pentagon pulled every bomber. The decision to remove all bombers is a significant strategic shift: RAF Fairford has been the base from which the US has conducted long-range bombing missions against Iran since the war began in March. Removing the bombers does not end US bombing capability against Iran. The US has other platforms, including carrier-based aircraft and bombers stationed elsewhere. But it does represent the first time the Iran war’s European logistics infrastructure has been compromised enough by a security threat that the US chose to relocate rather than hold. An Iran-backed plot capable of forcing the US to evacuate its bombers from a NATO base in England is a plot that changed the operational picture of the war. --- **India’s Cockroach Movement launched a new wave of protests demanding the Chief Election Commissioner resign. Young people are naming themselves after the insect that survives everything.** [In India, the youth-led Cockroach Movement has launched a new wave of nationwide protests](https://havanatimes.org/news/international-news-briefs-for-monday-october-5-2026/) demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over allegations of bias and procedural irregularities in how India’s elections are administered. The Chief Election Commissioner of India oversees elections for 1.4 billion people, the largest democratic electorate in the world. The Election Commission’s independence is foundational to Indian democracy: a biased or politically compromised commission can determine the outcome of elections not through fraud but through procedural decisions about voter rolls, polling times, ballot design, and candidate qualifications. The Cockroach Movement named itself deliberately, invoking the cockroach’s reputation for surviving when everything else is exterminated, as a statement of persistence. The movement is youth-led in a country whose median age is 28 and where young people are increasingly organizing around democratic accountability. The protests calling for the Chief Election Commissioner’s resignation are a specific institutional demand rather than a diffuse anti-government sentiment. India’s next general elections are years away. The movement is making this demand now because the institutions that administer elections matter more in the years before an election than in the weeks of one. --- **Spain’s prime minister called snap elections after back-to-back housing reform defeats in parliament. The man whose country banned all evictions until 2030 now needs a new mandate to govern.** [Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called snap elections](https://www.justsecurity.org/159662/early-edition-october-5-2026/) after recent defeats on legislation aimed at addressing Spain’s housing crisis, saying he needed a “broader progressive majority” that can “overcome the resistance of the elites.” This brief covered Spain’s housing protests on September 28, when the eviction of an 87-year-old woman brought tens of thousands into Madrid’s streets. It covered Spain banning all evictions until 2030 on September 30 as a direct policy response to those protests. Today the prime minister who issued that ban called snap elections because he cannot pass housing legislation through his current parliament. The sequence is specific: protests produced a policy response, the policy response failed to pass, and the failure of the legislative response is now producing an electoral response. Sánchez’s framing of the election as a battle against “the resistance of the elites” is the governing left’s language for a coalition government blocked by center and right opposition. The elections he has called will determine whether the housing policy that emerged from the protests survives contact with the voters who produced it. --- **A’ja Wilson just won her record fifth WNBA MVP. She is the first player in league history to win three consecutive years. She is also still playing.** [Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson won the WNBA’s Most Valuable Player award for the fifth time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current%5Fevents), becoming the first player in league history to win the award for three consecutive seasons. A’ja Wilson has been the best player in the WNBA for most of the past five years. Her fifth MVP is not a surprise to anyone who has watched her play. What makes the record specific is the consecutive achievement: winning a league MVP award for three straight years requires not just being excellent but being the best player in the league every single year while other exceptional players are improving around you. Wilson plays center at a time when the WNBA has grown significantly in talent depth. The league this brief covered on September 15, when Fox News ran 206 segments on it and Sabreena Merchant said the talent is the best it has ever been, is the league Wilson is dominating. She is 30 years old. The record she just set has never been set before. The league that gave her the award on Monday is not the league she entered in 2018\. Both grew in the same years. --- **A person died on the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia. Four others were injured. Six Flags closed nine other coasters immediately.** [One person was killed and four others were injured Monday after an accident on the Goliath roller coaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current%5Fevents) at Six Flags Over Georgia in Mableton, Georgia, outside Atlanta. Six Flags temporarily closed nine other roller coasters across the park as investigators arrived. A fatal accident at a major amusement park produces two simultaneous responses: an investigation into what failed mechanically or structurally, and an immediate precautionary closure of similar rides at the same park. Both happened Monday. The Goliath coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia opened in 2006 and is one of the park’s signature attractions, reaching speeds of roughly 70 miles per hour on a steel track. Fatal roller coaster accidents in the US average fewer than five per year across the entire industry, which operates hundreds of millions of rides annually. That rarity is what makes each incident significant: when something engineered to run safely at high speeds and forces fails, the investigation that follows reshapes safety standards for the entire industry. The investigation is active. The cause had not been established in Monday’s reporting. Eyewitnesses described attempting to help. The park’s response of closing nine other coasters is the practical meaning of taking safety seriously. --- **The thread underneath Monday** The Supreme Court opened its new term with the Suncor fossil fuel climate liability case, Justice Alito told CBS News he is considering retirement and that same-sex marriage is safe because people have organized their lives around Obergefell, and the term’s docket includes assault weapons, the Ten Commandments in schools, and third-country deportations. A California realtor was arrested at LAX for allegedly spying on the son of Taiwan’s president for China, the arrest sitting at the intersection of US-China relations, Taiwan security, and FBI counterintelligence recruitment patterns. The US pulled all bombers from RAF Fairford after new Iran-backed attack warnings, the first time the Iran war’s European logistics infrastructure has been disrupted enough to force relocation. India’s Cockroach Movement launched new protests demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, youth organizing around democratic accountability in the world’s largest democracy. Spain’s prime minister called snap elections after housing reform defeats, the ban on evictions until 2030 now requiring a new parliamentary mandate to survive. A’ja Wilson won her record fifth WNBA MVP, the first player in league history to win three consecutive years. A person died on the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia and the park closed nine other coasters. Sources told the New York Times that Trump directed budget chief Russell Vought to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising himself, a week after the government spent $316,000 on NFL game ads. Tennessee’s prison chief resigned following the botched Christa Pike execution. The FlyDubai copilot who attempted to crash the Israel-bound flight is believed by investigators to have been a lone actor. Brazil’s presidential runoff is set for October 25, with Bolsonaro at 47% and Lula at 45% after the first round. The government of Eswatini released a Laotian deportee who had been held in a maximum-security prison for over a year after the US sent him there with no connection to the country. Eight sections, 44 days until the midterms. SCOTUS has 30 cases. Alito may not be there for all of them. See you tomorrow. **What to watch tomorrow:** Watch whether Justice Alito’s CBS retirement comments produce any formal announcement or response, because the possibility of a Supreme Court vacancy in the final weeks before a midterm election that will determine Senate control is the highest-stakes judicial vacancy scenario the country has faced in years. Watch whether the California realtor’s arraignment produces any details about the scope of the alleged Chinese intelligence operation and how long it ran, because the arrest at LAX suggests she was identified while actively preparing to travel. Watch whether the Suncor oral argument produces any clear signal from the justices about which court system climate cases belong in, because the SCOTUSblog reporting on the argument will reveal how the court is thinking. And watch whether Spain’s snap election date produces any market or political reaction, because a governing coalition that could not pass housing reforms is now asking voters to give it a stronger mandate in a country that just banned evictions until 2030\. See you tomorrow. --- *Capital to Capitol publishes every evening, five days a week. Subscribe free below and today’s brief lands in your inbox by 11 PM.*