Your noon Briefing

Welcome to your noon digest of what’s been making news and what to watch for.

Hello readers. Here is your noon round-up of today’s top stories so far and a long read for lunchtime.

Senator Katy Gallagher speaking in the Senate Chamber, at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture Kym Smith

Gallagher out

Labor senator Katy Gallagher has been thrown out of politics after the High Court found she was ineligible to sit in parliament. The full bench of the High Court has ruled the ACT senator breached section 44 of the Constitution for failing to rescind her British citizenship before the 2016 election. Keep up with all the latest from parliament in our live blog, PoliticsNow.

“It is not in dispute that on and after the date of her nomination for election as a senator, Senator Gallagher was a British citizen.”

High Court ruling

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DONALD TRUMP AND HASSAN ROUHANI

Iran bomb?

Iran could quickly ramp up its nuclear activities now that President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 international agreement designed to curtail them. But experts and former officials differ over how long Tehran would need to build a bomb. Some, pointing to Iran’s slow past progress and independent analyses, believe Iran would need several years to produce a nuclear weapon. Others think Tehran could build one in little over a year.

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Former Prime Minister of Australia Bob Hawke arrives to watch the Hon. Kim Beasley AC, (not pictured) be sworn into office as the new Governor of Western Australia at Government House in Perth, Tuesday, May 1, 2018. (AAP Image/Tony McDonough) NO ARCHIVING

Hawke fall

Former prime minister Bob Hawke is still in hospital and had minor tests after he had a fall and hit his head. Mr Hawke’s daughter, Sue Pieters-Hawke, told the Seven Network today that her 88-year-old father went by ambulance to hospital for tests, but was “fine”.

“He’s fine and anxious to get home and back to his cigar and crosswords.”

Family friend

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Cotton picking at Twynam Cobran Station, near Carrathool. Bales. Bale.

The long read: Sold down the river

Farmers are cottoning on to the need for a ceiling or planting limits to be put on Australia’s fast-growing irrigated cotton farms, as new varieties of faster-growing cotton allow its tentacles to spread south from its traditional home in northern NSW and southern Queensland deep into the Murray and Murrumbidgee river valleys of southern NSW and northern Victoria. Too much cotton is being grown and it is taking so much water in the Murray-Darling basin that other farmers, with less profitable businesses such as dairy farming and wine grape-growing, are being pushed out because they can no longer afford to buy water.

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Comment of the day

“My faith in the justice system has been restored. Shorten waffled and waffled ... and was it the ABC who ran the Gallagher sob story that had more holes in it than a crumpet?”

Forne, in response to ‘Labor senator Katy Gallagher found ineligible by High Court’.