Your noon Briefing

Hello readers. Here’s the latest on how the day is playing out plus a long read for lunchtime.

Hello readers. In your noon digest, George Brandis heads to London, Adani ditches Downer and a long read on the search for Australia’s lost WWI submarine.

Attorney General Senator George Brandis speaking in the Senate Chamber, at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture Kym Smith

Brandis exits as Turnbull shuffles deck

Attorney-General George Brandis is leaving federal politics to become the next High Commissioner to the UK, Sky News is reporting. The move will follow months of speculation that Senator Brandis would take the diplomatic role, which has been filled by Howard government foreign minister Alexander Downer since June 2014. The news comes as Malcolm Turnbull prepares for a ministerial reshuffle, likely to be announced on Wednesday, following the departure of Nationals deputy leader Fiona Nash and Senate president Stephen Parry as a result of the citizenship fiasco.

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Protesters opposing the Adani coal mine in the Galilee Basin hold signs outside the Downer Rail workshop during a visit by Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in Maryborough, Monday, September 11, 2017. The Palaszczuk Government has today confirmed a $70 million pipeline of projects for Downer EDI's Maryborough workshop. (AAP Image/Dan Peled) NO ARCHIVING

Adani ditches Downer

India’s Adani group has cancelled all contracts awarded to a major contractor for its controversial Carmichael coal mine after deciding to develop the project on its own. Engineering group Downer EDI said it had mutually agreed with Adani to end all contracts awarded to it since 2014. The ASX-listed group (DOW) in 2014 received a $2 billion contract to provide technical services to Adani including drilling, blasting and coal and waste haulage for the mine, although the scope of work has since changed.

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L-R: Rory O'Donoghue as Thin Arthur and Grahame (sp ok) Bond as Aunty Jack in Aunty Jack.

There’s a scream as he plummets away

Back in 1966, as he prepared to perform in a Sydney University revue, Grahame Bond was introduced to a teenage musician called Rory O’Donoghue, writes Ashleigh Wilson. Despite his age, O’Donoghue was already something of a veteran of the stage. Bond knew at once that he had found a collaborator unlike any other. O’Donoghue, best known for his work with Bond on the Aunty Jack Show on the ABC, died in a Sydney hospital last Wednesday. He was 68.

“It was a magic that just happened. It’s something I’ll never experience again, the joy of being on stage with him. He was just such a consummate professional.”

Grahame Bond

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The pentagon and a video showing jets chasing a UFO.

Pentagon’s flying saucer search

The Pentagon has admitted secretly spending $22m on a shadowy program to study UFOs.

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SUBMARINE AE1 .. for Ian McPhedran story .. Submarine AE1 in port in Britain before her voyage to Australia in May 1914. Photo courtesy of Australian War Memorial

The long read: The hunt for AE1

The search is on for AE1, a submarine missing since the earliest days of World War I off the coast of Papua New Guinea, writes Ean Higgins. When, in early 1914, Able Seaman James Thomas of the Royal Navy got the chance to join the AE1 and help sail it from England to Australia, he thought he’d hit the jackpot. The submarine represented the leading edge of technology in a new and possibly decisive weapon of war. It had a just-developed gyroscopic inertial navigation system and could dive about 100 feet without being crushed by the pressure of the ocean. But on September 14, 1914, it did not return from a patrol hunting for Imperial German Navy warships in the waters of what was then German New Guinea.

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Comment of the day

“George Brandis must surely be the minister of this government who has disappointed traditional centre-right Liberal voters more than any other and that includes the Prime Minister.”

David, in response to ‘George Brandis to exit Senate amid reshuffle’.