BREXIT BREAKTHROUGH: The EU and Britain Have Agreed on Key Terms of Divorce.

The European Commission said enough progress had been made after the two sides worked through the night to end an impasse over the status of the Irish border that had scuppered an earlier attempt to clinch a deal on Monday.

The Commission gave its verdict in a statement after intense talks, which resulted in British Prime Minister Theresa May taking an early-morning flight to Brussels to announce the deal alongside Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Donald Tusk, the chairman of European Union leaders, welcomed the deal but said London still needed to provide more clarity on the new relationship after Brexit, and bemoaned the fact the first round of talks had taken so long.

“We all know that breaking up is hard, but breaking up and building a new relation is much harder,” he said. “So much time has been devoted to the easier task and now … we have de facto less than a year” left for talks before Britain is due to leave in March, 2019.

And not a moment too soon, if this next story has any weight to it: Martin Schulz wants ‘United States of Europe’ within eight years.

The leader of Germany’s Social Democratic party has sketched out red lines for talks to form another coalition government with Angela Merkel.

In a speech at the SPD’s party conference in Berlin that called for the creation of a “United States of Europe” by 2025, as well as a more robust social security net and a phasing out of coal power, Martin Schulz made the case for entering open-ended talks with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

He also tweeted that “Any state that won’t ratify this treaty will automatically leave the EU.”

Whether Schultz, who just led the SPD to its worst election result in the postwar era, has enough juice to make that happen remains to be seen.