Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at King's College London university, said the relationship was always "transactional" and therefore the break-up is "pretty logical".

"It's been a utilitarian relationship since 1973 and the emphasis was always on the economic dimension, not on the political one," said Pauline Schnapper, professor of contemporary British history at the Sorbonne University in Paris. "The sentimental dimension is near-inexistent," she said.

Neither side is likely to end up the happier after the divorce, said John Springford, director of research at the Centre for European Reform in London. "I am not convinced that Britain leaving the EU will help Britain or help the EU," he said.

Unlike criminal forfeiture, where property is taken after its owner has been found guilty in a court of law, with civil forfeiture, owners need not be charged with or convicted of a crime to lose homes, cars, cash or other property. Americans are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but civil forfeiture turns that principle on its head. With civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

Police in some jurisdictions have run forfeiture operations that would be difficult to distinguish from criminal shakedowns. Police can pull motorists over, find some amount of cash or other property of value, claim some vague connection to illegal drug activity and then present the motorists with a choice: If they hand over the property, they can be on their way.

Otherwise, they face arrest, seizure of property, a drug charge, a probable night in jail, the hassle of multiple return trips to the state or city where they were pulled over, and the cost of hiring a lawyer to fight both the seizure and the criminal charge. It isn’t hard to see why even an innocent motorist would opt to simply hand over the cash and move on.

Unsurprisingly, these asset forfeiture scams have become so profitable for the government that they have expanded their reach beyond the nation’s highways. According to USA Today, the US Department of Justice received $2.01 billion in forfeited items in 2013, and since 2008 local and state law enforcement nationwide has raked in some $3 billion in forfeitures through the federal “equitable sharing” program. So now it’s not just drivers who have to worry about getting the shakedown. Any American unwise enough to travel with significant amounts of cash is fair game for the government pickpockets.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that at least $20 billion appears to have been moved out of Russia during a four-year period between 2010 and 2014. The true figure could be $80 billion, detectives believe. One senior figure involved in the inquiry said the money from Russia was “obviously either stolen or with criminal origin”.

Investigators are still trying to identify some of the wealthy and politically influential Russians behind the operation, known as “the Global Laundromat”. They estimate a group of about 500 people were involved. These include oligarchs, Moscow bankers, and figures working for or connected to the FSB, the successor spy agency to the KGB.

A Downing Street spokesman said UK Ambassador to the EU Sir Tim Barrow had informed the President's office of Ms May's intention verbally. He added that Number 10 now wants negotiations to "start promptly" -  once the article is invoked it will be up to the EU to come back, with an early response expected within 48 hours.

Announcing the Article 50 date, the Downing Street spokesman said: "Earlier on this morning the UK’s permanent representative in the EU informed the office of Donald Tusk, that it’s the UK’s intention to trigger Article 50 on March 29."

The Prime Minister will deliver her letter triggering Article 50 to President Tusk on the Wednesday, and deliver a statement to the House of Commons to announce the move. There was no further detail about exactly what the letter would say at this point. Ms May’s spokesman went on: "After we trigger the 27 [members] will agree their guidelines for negotiations and the Commission will deliver their negotiating mandate."

Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):

“We are on the verge of a genuine constitutional crisis because of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opening the door for this Hawaii Obama-appointed judge to deny Trump’s travel ban the second time going, and I want to get into detail as to what this really means and what the left is really doing here.

It’s not a legal dispute. This is, as I said yesterday, is a silent coup that is taking place that I’m sure has been strategized since before Trump was inaugurated. But the profound, devastating possibilities that result from this in terms of a president losing all constitutional — do you realize with this judge’s ruling, I’ll tell you where this is going.

Let’s say that Donald Trump decides at any time in the near future that he needs to deploy troops, and so he does, and so a leftist activist goes to a court, shops and finds a judge, like the guy in Hawaii, and claims that Trump said during the campaign that he was gonna do X Y, or Z, whatever, and the deployment of troops is not really for the stated purpose, and the judge could shut it down!

This judge’s ruling has — if the guy’s not stopped, if the Supreme Court doesn’t overturn this, or if Trump doesn’t just ignore it like Andrew Jackson did, then we’re getting to the point where the president, because of the judiciary, will have totally lost constitutional authority to defend the country because of this little ruling in Hawaii that was made possible by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And it’s all about this idiotic notion that a presidential candidate on the campaign trial making statements is the equivalent of an inaugurated president stating policy.

But even at that the judge doesn’t have the right to do what he did! He doesn’t have the congressional right, he doesn’t have the statutory right to do what he did, because basically this judge shut Trump down because, in this judge’s opinion, Trump is a bigot. And anti-Muslim means bigot, and we are not going to allow our president to represent us this way is essentially what this judge was saying.”

The European Commission president went on to denounce Trump’s approach to relations with Europe as ridiculous. The fact that Trump welcomes Brexit and urges other states to follow suit shows that he has “an uncanny approach” towards relations with the EU, he said, adding, that this situation “requires intensive negotiations.”

Juncker also warned of a potential trade war between the US and the EU. Europe “must take the protectionist rhetoric of the Trump administration seriously and be prepared,” he told Bild am Sonntag. He particularly implied that the US could impose punitive tariffs on European products, thus provoking the EU to impose its own punitive tariffs on US goods and effectively igniting a trade war, the German media outlet reported. Junker warned that “a trade war would neither be in Europe’s nor the USA's interests.”

Earlier, Trump accused Japan of exploiting a weak yen to score an unfair trade advantage over the US. In a similar move, Peter Navarro, the head of the US new National Trade Council and Trump’s top trade adviser, told the Financial Times in late January that Germany is using the euro to exploit the US and its EU partners.

The minister's combative stance comes ahead of Merkel's first meeting with Trump in Washington and a gathering of G20 finance ministers in Baden-Baden, western Germany, set to be dominated by the US president's "America First" policy. Trump has targeted the German luxury carmaker BMW by name with threats of a 35 percent border levy if it goes ahead with construction of a plant in Mexico.

If a US border tax was found to breach World Trade Organization rules, "it wouldn't be the first time that Mr Trump has failed before the courts," Zypries said, in a jab at repeated rejections by US judges of executive orders banning immigration from majority-Muslim countries.

In 2016, the United States was Germany's biggest export customer, importing €107 billion of goods while selling back just €58 billion-worth.

The total stock of non-performing loans (NPL) in the EU is estimated at over €1 trillion, or 5.4% of total loans, a ratio three times higher than in other major regions of the world. On a country-by-country basis, things look even scarier. Currently 10 (out of 28) EU countries have an NPL ratio above 10% (orders of magnitude higher than what is generally considered safe).

And among Eurozone countries, where the ECB’s monetary policies have direct impact, there are these NPL stalwarts:

Ireland: 15.8%

Italy: 16.6%

Portugal: 19.2%

Slovenia: 19.7%

Greece: 46.6%

Cyprus: 49%

That bears repeating: in Greece and Cyprus, two of the Eurozone’s most bailed out economies, virtually half of all the bank loans are toxic. Then there’s Italy, whose €350 billion of NPLs account for roughly a third of Europe’s entire bad debt stock. Italy’s government and financial sector have spent the last year and a half failing spectacularly to come up with a solution to the problem.

Yonhap News reviews the evidence that such a North Korean nuclear test is forthcoming: On Thursday, 38 North, a website run by the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, said that satellite imagery of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in the northeast shows that substantial tunnel excavation is continuing at the North Portal, where the last four of the five underground nuclear tests by the North were conducted. The test, if made, will be 14 times more powerful than the previous test, it said.

Thae points out that such a powerful nuclear blast would be bad news for the people who live near the test site, and those folks already wake up every morning to the bad news that they live in North Korea: “All northward roads and railways pass by Punggye-ri. If a massive explosion pollutes the area, and subsequently Pyongyang loses its control over the border areas of North Hamkyong Province, a massive defection will take place there,” he said.

The environmental pollution resulting from a failure to control a nuclear explosion in a small country like North Korea will almost be an apocalypse, he said. The international community should be aware of the danger of the North’s large-scale nuclear test this time, he said.

Right now there is a desperate need for food in South Sudan, Somalia, northeast Nigeria, Eritrea and Kenya.  And Yemen, even though it is not technically part of Africa, is being affected by many of the same factors that are crippling nations all over eastern Africa. 

The United Nations says that more than 20 million people could die from starvation and disease if nothing is done.  When I write about economic collapse, this is the kind of thing that I am talking about, and we are starting to see alarming conditions spread across the globe.  Many believe that we could never possibly face this kind of food crisis in the western world, but unfortunately wishful thinking will only get you so far.

The United Nations was formed in 1945, and the UN has just announced that what we are facing this year is “the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the UN”.  CNN [released an] article entitled “20 million at risk of starvation in world’s largest crisis since 1945, UN say…”

She also said that abortion pills should be available online without the need to see a doctor or nurse. There has been growing concern in Britain that an increasing number of women are seeking abortions simply because they do not want girls, leading to some hospitals refusing to tell parents the sex of their babies.

However, Professor Savage told the Mail on Sunday: “Because of this sort of anxiety some places won’t tell the woman the sex of the foetus, which is outrageous. It’s her body and her foetus, so she should have that information… If a woman does not want to have a foetus who is one sex or the other, forcing her [to go through with the pregnancy] is not going to be good for the eventual child, and it’s not going to be good for [the mother’s] mental health.”

She previously caused outrage after signing a letter claiming sex-selective abortion is not “gender discrimination” because that only applies to “living people”. She then doubled down on those views, claiming the unborn child is not really a person.